Here’s the key to Trump’s foreign policy: What would McKinley do?

The magnitude of the global geopolitical earthquake unleashed by the second Donald Trump administration has been stunning, both to the dismay of the foreign policy establishment, and the cheers of Trump’s anti-establishment acolytes. Until recently, the U.S. boasted the most robust economic recovery from the COVID pandemic, anchoring global economic growth and stability. In two months under Trump, this nation has become the largest source of economic uncertainty and geopolitical instability. He has trashed America’s long-standing alliances with Canada and Europe to curry favor with indicted war criminal Vladimir Putin.

The whiplash of self-defeating, on-again, off-again trade wars, abandoning allies for foes and undermining the entire architecture of international politics and economics has left politicians, pundits and laypeople alike scrambling for a framework to make sense of it all. Some suggest that the return of Trumpism is merely a reversion to international-relations realism, in which states flex their own power even ahead of alliances, legal constraints or morality. Yet even realist apologists such as Andrew Byers and Randall Schweller expected that a multipolar world would constrain Trump’s “America First” policies, producing an “inclination for restraint” and a propensity for “avoiding military entanglements,” and reserving bombast, bluster and threats to extract concessions from countries “that the United States does not share many values with,” like Russia, China and Iran. Wrong.

While laying bare the hollowness of realism, Trump is loudly and unabashedly proclaiming a new era of American imperialism: rather than being constrained by relative power considerations, the U.S. will use all levers of power at its disposal to expand its dominance globally. Smashing the institutions of the post-World War II economic and political order are necessary to permit a return to an earlier — and far more dangerous — multipolar international order of the 19th century, in which great powers battled economically and militarily for geopolitical supremacy. If we want to better understand Trump’s neo-imperial foreign policy, we’d be best to place it in the context of the history of American overseas imperialism.

The U.S. has always had a Jekyll-and-Hyde relationship to empires and imperialism. American identity was forged in the anti-imperial freedom struggle of 13 colonies rebelling against British imperial domination. But then again, the entire territory of the United States was swindled and seized from its original Native American inhabitants, and its wealth built in part on the unpaid labor of African slaves; perhaps Trump’s neo-imperial ambitions are less a deviation and more a return to history.

Still, you needn’t take my word for it: Donald Trump has himself been clear in stating his aims. When it comes to “making America great again,” he has been remarkably consistent in citing the Gilded Age of “1870 to 1913” as the era of American greatness he’d most like to return us to. Not coincidentally, this was also the height of American imperialism.

“When we were a smart country, in the 1890s,” Trump claimed, “is when the country was relatively the richest it ever was. It had all tariffs. It didn’t have an income tax,” which was introduced with the ratification of the 16th Amendment in 1913.

This confirmation of Trump’s long-held fetish with tariffs and trade wars has manifested in a peculiar obsession with William McKinley and his own disastrous tariff policies.

At a recent White House event, Trump said:

McKinley — and I just — by the way, I just renamed Mount McKinley “Mount McKinley.” I hope you’re happy about that. [Applause.] But McKinley was a president. He was a tariff guy, and he believed that countries should not be allowed to come in and plunder. He would see — he had beautiful language on tariffs. Plunder our wealth, plunder our jobs, steal our companies, and take without paying a very fair price. … And we became very rich. He was assassinated. And, as you know, Roosevelt took over — Teddy. And he spent … a lot of the money that McKinley made.

I am not the first to point out Trump’s unusual obsession with Gilded-Age aristocracy. New York Times columnist David Brooks recently plumbed the depths of Trumpian psychology through his “11th grade history textbook.” Brooks describes Trump’s Gilded Age fixation as reflecting the growth of “a boisterous, arriviste nation … bursting with energy, bombast and new money.”  We were “materialistic, mechanical and voracious for growth,” and  the Wild West “braggadocio,” money seeking, jingoist ultra-nationalism and anti-establishment populism fits MAGA like a glove.

The problem — for Brooks, Trump and all of us — is that our historical knowledge of the Gilded Age is so shallow that we’re primed to believe any fictitious imagery or cherry-picked data points, simply because we don’t know any better.

The Gilded Age of American politics was marked by unparalleled political cronyism and corruption at home, and self-defeating tariffs, trade wars and wars of colonial domination abroad. Scratching the surface, the history of the Gilded Age reveals massacres, ethnic cleansing and inhumanity on an unthinkable scale. Consequently — as historian James A. Field Jr. wrote in the flagship American Historical Review in 1978 — the chapter on Gilded-Age American imperialism is “the worst chapter in almost any book,” presumedly including David Brooks’ from the 11th grade. 

Perhaps because the era clashes so completely with our collective self-image of what it means to be an American, we’ve long simply ignored the uncomfortable reality, which is that when America was “greatest” according to Trump, it was also at its cruelest. If Trump, Elon Musk and their Republican supporters are bent on building a new American empire in order to “make America great again,” we should be clear-eyed about the historical era we’re returning to.

Let’s start with Trump’s newfound idol — William McKinley — especially since the current administration seems less like Trump 2.0 and more eerily like McKinley 3.0.

As a Republican congressman from Ohio, McKinley was the architect of the 1890 Tariff Act that bears his name: Raising protective tariffs nearly 50 percent on a whole host of American-made goods, it created the highest barriers to imports in U.S. history. As tariffs (like Trump’s) generally do, the McKinley Tariff backfired in spectacular fashion, contributing to both the financial panic of 1890 and the larger panic of 1893. Correctly perceiving that the tariff was in effect a giveaway to wealthy industrialists, voters swept away the Republican majority in the midterm elections, including voting out McKinley himself.

After his humiliating defeat as an incumbent, McKinley (like Trump) orchestrated an amazing political comeback: winning the race for Ohio’s governor in 1891 and 1893, catapulting him to the presidency in 1896.

His first order of business was to call a special session of Congress to pass the even more protectionist Dingley Tariff of 1897, which raised the cost of living in the United States by 25 percent over the next decade. It again shielded wealthy industrialists and robber barons from free-market competition, expanding their wealth accordingly. That was another parallel to Trump’s tariff policies, in which politically well-connected billionaires are more likely to have their products and businesses exempted from tariff considerations.

President McKinley is probably best known for the Spanish-American War, which — in our historical memory — began with the 1898 explosion on the USS Maine in Havana Harbor, and ended with Teddy Roosevelt’s “Rough Riders” charging up San Juan Hill to defeat the Spanish Empire. The U.S. would occupy Cuba militarily off and on until the 1920s, and kept it squarely within America’s sphere of influence until Fidel Castro’s Cuban Revolution of 1959. McKinley also purchased the Spanish colony of the Philippines for $20 million, with Puerto Rico and Guam thrown in for free.

Here again, the historical framework of American imperialism makes better sense of Trump’s seemingly bizarre foreign policy moves than realism or other theoretical approaches. His repeated attempts to buy the island of Greenland from Denmark seem ridiculously anachronistic in 2025, but purchasing islands was common practice in the Gilded Age, including the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Guam. Some 40 percent of current American territory was purchased from other European powers, and most of the rest was nominally purchased with annuity payments in (oft-violated) treaties with Native American tribes.

That Trump’s Greenland proposal is so jarring to our modern sensibilities just underscores one of the most basic tenets of constructivist international relations: Norms change, and commonly accepted standards of what is right or wrong, appropriate or inappropriate, vary throughout history.

As part of the transatlantic slave trade, human beings were once considered to be a legitimate item of commerce; now they are not. Before the Nuremberg tribunals, genocide and crimes against humanity were just seen as normal — however lamentable — products of warfare. Now these are considered crimes of unimaginable severity. Likewise, purchasing territories (and the people on them!) was once a normal part of the standard diplomatic toolbox. It has been well over a century since the last time the U.S. purchased territory (the Virgin Islands from Denmark for $25 million in 1916), so it’s no wonder that norms have changed, and countries and peoples around the globe scoff at the idea of purchasing Greenland, which seems as ridiculous a suggestion as returning to chattel slavery or ethnic cleansing as government policy. (We’ll get to that.)

At any rate, with the purchase of Spain’s overseas islands, the McKinley administration suddenly had the trappings of an overseas empire dropped in its lap with no idea what to do with it. And with Puerto Rico’s continuing neither/nor situation — populated by U.S. citizens but lacking representation and statehood — it’s clear that we still have no idea what to do with it.

Naturally, the Gilded Age was also the heyday of American race and gender hierarchies, with white men reigning supreme. Women were disenfranchised, economically subordinate and politically powerless; Jim Crow laws segregated the South and even Native Americans weren’t even considered citizens. So the idea of annexing some 8 million Puerto Ricans and Filipinos — roughly equivalent to the entire African-American population of the U.S. — posed its own challenges for the white political establishment.

“I supposed we had n***ers enough in this country without buyin’ any more of ‘em,” responded Republican congressman Thomas Brackett Reed, “and here we are buyin’ 10 million of ‘em at two dollars a head, and yaller-bellied n****ers at that.”

It is worth underscoring that Reed was speaker of the House of Representatives — second in line to succeed the president — back when America was “greatest,” according to Trump.

Uncertain about how to confront this racial conundrum, McKinley prayed to “Almighty God for light and guidance.” Apparently God told him that, since they were “unfit for self-government,” the only option was to “take them all and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and Christianize them” in a colonial process called “benevolent assimilation.”

As with generations of Native Americans, the U.S. government reneged on agreements with Filipino revolutionaries that they would work together to overthrow the Spanish. Instead they simply replaced brutal Spanish colonial rule with an even more inhuman American colonial rule, introducing to the Philippines profit-driven saloons, brothels and opium dens, all with the explicit authorization of Uncle Sam.

While the U.S. controlled the capital of Manila, there was no way to subdue the other 7,000 islands of the Philippines. The army adopted the Spanish colonial practice of “reconcentration”: herding the “pacified” populations into camps to be monitored, and torching the crops and villages, and torturing and murdering the people who remained outside.

In response to a guerrilla attack on a U.S. outpost on Samar Island, Gen. “Hell Roaring Jake” Smith commanded his men: “The more you kill and burn the better it will please me. I want all persons killed who are capable of bearing arms in actual hostilities against the United States.” When his subordinates asked for clarification, he declared “kill everyone over 10 years old.” And so they did, gunning down every Filipino man or woman they could find. While Smith and his officers would face court martial, over the ensuing decade between 250,000 and one million civilians — one out of every eight Filipinos — died in the massacres, starvation and disease of McKinley’s “benevolent assimilation.” 

Of course, it’d be foolish to suggest that Donald Trump’s neocolonial ambitions with regards to Panama, Greenland, Canada or Ukraine would end with war crimes, mass atrocities and “civilizing” hundreds of thousands of brown-skinned folks off the face of the earth. In this context, however, Trump’s plan for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza seems less outlandish — though no less horrific — against the backdrop of America’s imperial history. One just has to go backward a century in order to find a time when the forced displacement and killing of an ethnic community was not considered one of the most heinous international crimes imaginable.

But the similarities don’t end there.

State control of information is another contextual similarity. Understanding that the American public would rightly be appalled by the crimes against humanity that were being done in their name, the U.S. military imposed strict censorship about the horrors of the Philippine campaign. By controlling information, distorting narratives and discrediting the news media, the McKinley administration ensured that even those few truthful reports of the scale of the brutality would be met with widespread skepticism, even scorn and derision, in a haunting parallel with our current “post-fact” social media landscape.

“The McKinley administration mastered the latest communication technology to shape the portrayal of the war by the media of the day,” writes historian Susan Brewer. He expanded the presidential staff from six to 80, largely to monitor public opinion on the war. To manipulate press coverage on his behalf, McKinley’s staff timed press releases so that reporters on deadline only had access to the administration’s version of events. “Through news management,” Brewer concluded, “the McKinley administration disseminated war propaganda based on facts, lies, ideas, patriotic symbols, and emotional appeals,” which reads like a direct antecedent to our current era of image-crafting and online political spin to distract from the horrific realities wrought by government policy. 

If that wasn’t enough, politically inconvenient truths had to then somehow overcome the air of ultranationalist public sentiment, in which the government’s most ardent supporters marinated. In Trump’s America, we’d refer to it as MAGA white nationalism, stoking drastic and even military solutions to America’s problems, both foreign and domestic. In McKinley’s time, it was known as “jingoism” — the same brand of ends-justify-the-means, America-can-do-no-wrong ultra-patriotism.

Indeed, the words of New York Police Commissioner Teddy Roosevelt in 1895 today sound downright Trumpian: “If by ‘jingoism’ they mean a policy in pursuance of which Americans will with resolution and common sense insist upon our rights being respected by foreign powers, then we are ‘jingoes.’”

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Then, as now, the administration’s foreign policy decisions are couched in terms of “respect” for American interests, without questioning the morality or legality of those actions, much less taking responsibility for them.

In the end, though, jingoistic patriotism won out over the horrific truths in the Philippines. McKinley easily won re-election in 1900, with the up-and-coming Teddy Roosevelt as his running mate. His triumph was not to last long.

Shortly after his inauguration, McKinley visited the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, where a dapper, 28-year-old anarchist named Leon Czolgosz — the Luigi Mangione of his day — shot the president twice in the abdomen, killing him. Seated in the electric chair, Czolgosz’s last words were: “I killed the president because he was the enemy of the good people — the good working people. I am not sorry for my crime.” Fellow anarchist (and supposed inspiration) Emma Goldman went further, suggesting that Czolgosz had killed the president because “he saw in McKinley the willing tool of Wall Street and the new American imperialism that flowered under his administration.” 

The assassination brought to power 42-year-old Teddy Roosevelt, who instituted his own kinder, gentler, “speak softly and carry a big stick” brand of American imperialism. Nevertheless, Roosevelt was moved by the assassination, ultimately backing more progressive, pro-labor and antitrust reforms — in part to tamp down the widespread poverty and hopelessness of the Gilded Age, which had fomented the anti-establishment upheaval and political violence in the first place.

In the end, one can only wonder whether the 2024 assassination attempt on Donald Trump brought him into greater affinity with  William McKinley, whose life was ended by an assassin’s bullet. It seems clear that if we want to better understand the motivations of foreign policy decisions in the second Trump administration, we only have to ask: What would McKinley do?