TARIFF MEN

President Trump’s McKinley fixation and the demise of liberal internationalism.

- BY DANIEL IMMERWAHR

Trump's zeal for protectionism and power politics is part of an effort to unravel the global order America built after 1945.

As a historical figure, Donald Trump is oddly hard to place in time. He was an icon of the nineteen-eighties, yet he’s also the defining figure of the post-Obama era. His politics oscillate between knuckle-dragging conservatism and manic accelerationism. He longs for a time when America was “great,” though when that was is unclear. His historical enthusiasms include the America First movement of the early nineteen-forties, Andrew Jackson, and Abraham Lincoln (“Most people don’t even know he was a Republican, right? Does anybody know?”).

“I am a Tariff Man,” Trump tweeted in 2018—another puzzling archaism. His adviser Peter Navarro explained it as “an homage to one of President Trump’s favorite Presidents, William McKinley” (who had, indeed, described himself as “a Tariff man, standing on a Tariff platform”). Trump's veneration for this Gilded Age Republican has only grown. On Day One of Trump's second Administration, he restored the name of the tallest mountain in North America to Mt. McKinley. “President McKinley made our country very rich through tariffs and through talent,” Trump explained in his second Inaugural Address. “He was a natural businessman.”