Washington – During his first mandate, Donald Trump’s favorite president, other than him, was Andrew Jackson, the self -taught populist in the face of ax and who pleased Washington upside down.
Now he is partial in the price and without bankrupt William McKinley, champion of American expansionism as well as prices, Trump’s favorite policy.
The change of Trump, rather than just exchanging a craze for another, shows how his state of mind and his priorities have evolved.
The admiration of the Republican President for McKinley adapts to his current policy, which are different from the moment when Trump took office in 2017. A key political target for Trump at the time was the elites, which his predicted administration could collapse in the face of an uprising of Jackson’s working class.
In his second inaugural speech, Trump praised McKinley as a “natural businessman” who “made our country very rich through prices and by talent”.
Trump used an agenda 1 to restore the name of the highest summit in North America for Mount McKinley and he has repeatedly checked the 25th president more recently, while his heavy prices have left the world for the fact of the kind of trade war not seen since the time of the McKinley prices of 1890.
Jackson has hardly justified a mention.
“At the first mandate, well, McKinley was a big cat,” said Hw Brands, professor of history at the University of Texas and author of “Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times”. “So, if you are going to be a populist, you are not going to be McKinley.”
But Jackson, noted Brands, hated prices. “So, if the prices are your thing, Andrew Jackson is no longer your guy. You have to look around to find someone whose name is linked to a price.”
The White House says that the quarter of work is not a start of Trump’s objectives at the end at the end, but simply its stronger supporting on new tools – in this case, prices – to reach them.
“President Trump has never diverted from his commitment to put the Americans of the working class above particular interests, and his pipeline of the price agenda McKinley is indicative of the way he uses each lever for executive power to deliver to the American people,” said spokesman Kush Desai.
However, many of Trump’s best advisers are veterans in the financial sector wishing to help the president fold the economic system to his will, rather than remodel it from bottom to top.
This means that Trump focuses on political anger on foreign countries and the “globalists” who have adopted international free trade. He wants to impose a new economic order which puts American interests first, and settled on high import taxes so that American trade partners negotiate more favorable agreements – as well as the way to do the most effectively.
The president’s Jacksonian impulses are not all dormant. He imposed prices in the first term and now shakes Washington with his efforts to reduce the federal workforce and store bureaucracy with loyalists. He also has the priority of antagonists’ “elites” in the universities of Ivy League and the best law firms.
In his rhetoric, Trump also mythologized the power of prices, despite the story that tells a different story. The prices in the McKinley era, which lamely followed the gilded age, led to more income for the federal government, but also to a very laminated society in wealthy and no.
But just as Jackson allowed Trump in the first mandate – a tycoon who had little in common with many working class voters that he courts – to take the mantle of modern populist, McKinley gives Trump an intellectual justification and a historical precedent for his love of prices.
“It is a change of atmosphere for sure,” said Eric Rauchway, history professor at the University of California in Davis, and author of “Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt’s America”.
It is also an example of Trump taking political measures to move the country in a certain direction – or simply declaring what he wants to be true – then working behind to find an argument on the reasons why his instincts were correct.
“Trump’s relationship with history, and so many other things, is entirely transactional,” said Daniel Feller, professor emeritus at the University of Tennessee and former long -standing editor of “The Papers of Andrew Jackson”.
Jackson was the founder of the Democratic Party, although many of the left now reject him to be a slave who imposed the “trace of tears” on the Amerindians. Orphan at 14, Jackson taught the law and finally became rich.
However, he created a political figure around the defense of everyday Americans. Trump, during his first mandate, described Jackson as “president of the people”.
McKinley, who was murdered in 1901, six months after his second term, was born in Niles, Ohio, outside Youngstown. He fought with the army of the Union and preferred throughout his political career to be called “major”, the honorary title of the civil war he won.
As a member of the Congress, McKinley was known as the “Napoleon of Protection” to promote the prices law of 1890, which greatly increased import taxes on thousands of goods in order to protect American producers when there was no federal income tax. He finally increased prices at the national level, injured the American exporters and contributed to arouse the panic of 1893, the worst economic slowdown to the great depression.
McKinley also represents an explosion of American colonial expansion. He annexed Hawaii and supervised the United States by taking control of the Philippines. Its administration has also acquired new territories in Guam and Porto Rico, created a military government in Cuba and sent troops to China.
Today, Trump has spoken of the United States invading Panama and Greenland, making Canada the 51st state and transforming the Gaza Strip into “Riviera” of the Middle East.
In July, in comments on which of his predecessors obtained a first -rate wall space at the White House, Trump mentioned “the great Andrew Jackson”. But he congratulated McKinley, saying that the United States “were the richest” from 1870 to 1913, when it was “a whole price”.
“We had some very, very strong presidents,” Trump told his office. “McKinley, I suppose, more than anyone.”
On social networks last week, a Trump assistant published a photo of a new gold frame in the west wing with Trump alongside McKinley, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson and Henry Clay, on the title “The Tariff Men”. Lincoln used high prices to finance the civil war, Jefferson was a defender of free trade but supported certain rates to strengthen the national industries. Clay, as a lecturer of the Chamber, helped adopt a large pricing act in 1824.
What Trump does not mention is that McKinley’s prices helped cost the GOP his majority in 1890, with McKinley himself among the defeated. He returned to Ohio, was elected governor and, despite a bankruptcy on a bad investment in a tin plates company, won the White House in 1896.
After that, however, said Rauchway, McKinley has in fact not pushed the prices following his experience with them in the congress. Just before being killed, McKinley also talked about the need for international trade.
This did not prevent Trump, by announcing radical prices around the world in April, saying that the United States had been “looted, looted, raped and looted by close and far nations”.
Its tariff champion is not completely new. In his first mandate, Trump ordered higher import taxes on solar panels, washing machines and steel and aluminum imports. He also sometimes congratulated McKinley, as when he said in a 2019 speech that the 25th president “was very strong to protect our assets, protecting our country”.
But Trump conceded in this same speech, “I’m totally out of the script.”
This is no longer the case. Trump continuously promotes McKinley’s place in history.
“McKinley was a big president,” Trump said at the meeting of the cabinet last month. “Who has never obtained credit.”
