U.S. President William McKinley is having his biggest moment since 1928, when his face was printed on the $500 bill. For the last few decades, only a smattering of quirky historians and cult devotees have paid much attention to him. But in repeated comments over the last several years, including in his second inaugural address, President Donald Trump has brought McKinley back into the spotlight. McKinley was “a natural businessman,” Trump remarked, who “made our country very rich through tariffs and through talent.”
Tariffs are at the core of Trump’s veneration of McKinley. This economic policy defined McKinley’s political career. His final act as a congressman was spearheading the McKinley Tariff Act of 1890, which set the average tariff on dutiable imports at around 50 percent. For most of his professional life, McKinley conceptualized American power and security as functions of the country’s domestic economic well-being, not the size of its military. This was not unusual. Two protective oceans, new industrial wealth, legal limits on the military, and few foreign threats led even the U.S. Navy in the Gilded Age to often see its primary peacetime role as protecting commerce.
Today, across the U.S. national security establishment, economics is once again a central concern. For Trump, U.S. alliances and relationships, Washington’s reputation, and even foreign threats often boil down to a single—if misleading—statistic, such as a trade deficit. McKinley’s tariff policy thus offers Trump an elegantly simple solution to the United States’ many, varied challenges. One policy to solve them all.
The problem for Trump is not a lack of precedent; his policies’ connection to American history is clear. The problem is that McKinley’s tariff approach does not suit today’s world. What is more, whereas McKinley used tariffs primarily to accomplish a domestic goal—to expand U.S. industry, Trump’s primary goal is external. He wants to change the behavior of other countries, relying on the threat of blanket tariffs to bring them to the negotiating table and extract concessions in areas of disagreement far beyond trade. Trump will judge his success not by measuring the tariffs’ effect on U.S. economic health but by whether allies and adversaries cave to his demands. In essence, Trump has McKinley’s model backward.
PEACE THROUGH TARIFFS
When McKinley became president in 1897, he had little interest in foreign policy. He was mostly concerned with domestic economic health, especially on the heels of the Panic of 1893, which caused a multi-year depression. He believed that broad-based tariffs, applied to thousands of goods, would help U.S. industries grow and protect the American worker.
For most of his career, McKinley was not a foreign trade expansionist eager to exploit markets abroad, unlike such jingoes as Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and the next president, Theodore Roosevelt. McKinley was skeptical of international trade. He thought it was fickle and unreliable. “Why need we vex ourselves about foreign commerce?” he asked on the House floor in 1890. In 1896, he told a group of Midwestern farmers: “The home market is the best friend of the farmer. It is his best market. It is his only reliable market. It is his own natural market.” McKinley said this over and over in that year’s presidential campaign.
McKinley was a dyed-in-the-wool protectionist. Tariffs were a “big government” policy designed to shape consumer demand. By taxing imported goods, McKinley wanted to guide consumers toward domestic suppliers. Doing so would not only support infant American industries that could not compete globally but would also ensure stable and predictable domestic demand. McKinley’s belief in the home market’s reliability thus became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
At times, McKinley’s rhetoric seemed to suggest a flexible tariff philosophy. In a 1901 speech in Buffalo, New York, shortly before he was assassinated, he extolled the virtues of reciprocity, a modified protectionism that selectively lowered tariffs in noncompetitive industries to allow for mutually beneficial bilateral trade. On the campaign trail five years earlier, he repeatedly lauded this approach, calling protection and reciprocity the “twin measures of a true American policy.” In practice, however, McKinley did not give reciprocity high priority, spending little political capital on reciprocity treaties with other countries during his presidency.
McKinley’s tariff approach does not suit today’s world.
The protectionist tariff was McKinley’s policy of choice. He spent more time studying it and more effort promoting it over the length of his career than any other policy. He saw it less as a tool of economic coercion than as a guarantor of U.S. prosperity. In a way, he also saw the tariff as central to national security. “Economic security” and “national security” were not widely used terms in McKinley’s era. Nevertheless, his comments about war, peace, safety, power, law, order, and the military provide a sense of how he conceptualized the security of the country and its people as freedom from uncertainty, depression, instability, and chaos.
McKinley believed the tariff promoted self-sufficiency and offered a defense against economic struggle. “A population whose labor is insufficiently remunerated . . . must in the end fall through hideous misery and degradation to utter ruin,” McKinley said in 1891, quoting the biologist Thomas Huxley while campaigning for governor. McKinley lived at a time when economic recessions were not uncommon and anarchism was on the rise. Philosophically, he connected a protectionist economic policy not just to prosperity but also to an absence of fear.
Before he became president, McKinley conceptualized security in a nonmilitary way. A physical attack on the United States by a foreign adversary seemed a distant prospect. He was far more concerned about a breakdown of law, order, institutions, and civilization resulting from economic hardship. He subtly indicated this way of thinking to a group of Pennsylvanians in the 1896 campaign, promising that Republican economic policy and the tariff would ensure “peace and tranquility in the United States.”
McKinley believed that economic health, not the size or activities of the military, determined American strength. That the United States’ wealth exceeded that of its European competitors by the late 1880s proved to him that it was the most powerful country in the world. The country’s military, its projection of force, its foreign trade, and the spread of democracy were secondary factors, if that. In fact, on a few occasions, McKinley derided U.S. force projection and celebrated low military spending.
THE RETURN OF ECONOMIC SECURITY
The connection between economics and national security did not last. As the historian Peter Roady has elegantly argued, a more militarized and international conception of national security dominated establishment thinking in Washington after World War II. But now, the pendulum is swinging back. Over the last decade, as China emerged as an economic powerhouse and a security competitor to the United States, as the erosion of U.S. manufacturing challenged the wisdom of unfettered globalization and free trade, and as varied crises disrupted global supply chains, economics has reentered U.S. national security policy. It is not merely that American leaders are increasingly using economic tools to address traditional security threats. It is that security means more than freedom from attack.
At the heart of the current debate is an old question: What relationship should the government have with trade and industry? The Democratic Party generally emphasizes direct assistance to domestic U.S. industry through measures such as the CHIPS and Science Act over universal tariffs, Trump’s preference. But Trump and the Democrats largely agree that economics belongs in the national security equation and that laissez-faire capitalism is not the solution. Where deep disagreement does exist is primarily within the Republican Party itself, where free traders are increasingly sidelined.
By abusing tariffs as a policy tool, Trump invites the world to do the same.
The revival of old ways of thinking about power and security is the most profound link between today’s policy discussions and those of McKinley’s era. On a tactical level, Trump also clearly shares McKinley’s love of the tariff. His public admiration of McKinley dates back at least to 2017, when he linked his brand of economic protectionism to the Republican policy of the 1890s. Trump’s Republican Party, with its relentless focus on protectionism, recovered a forgotten Republican legacy after decades of free-trade orthodoxy.
Some critics have argued that Trump’s historical comparison overlooks the failure of McKinley’s policies. At first glance, that interpretation makes sense: McKinley’s eponymous 1890 tariff preceded a Democratic wave in the 1890 midterm elections—McKinley himself was voted out of office—and was eventually replaced by a federal income tax. But this is misleading history; it is a case of “explanation bias,” wherein hindsight knowledge of the tariff’s death in the early twentieth century has led many experts to distort the retelling of its life. In 1890, McKinley did not lose his seat in Congress because the electorate rejected his policies. He was, instead, gerrymandered out of office. And if there was any doubt of his popularity, within months of that loss, he turned around and won the first of two statewide elections as governor of Ohio.
Republican economic policies were strikingly popular, too. Although Democrats posted victories in the 1890 and 1892 elections, Republicans swept the 1894 midterm elections, retaking the Senate and the House—the latter with a record gain of 130 seats, largely due to a long economic depression pinned on the Democrats. The 1896 presidential election, which McKinley won, centered on the tariff, his number one issue. It featured in nearly every campaign speech he gave. Republicans went on to dominate U.S. politics for the next generation, drawing support not just from Wall Street and wealthy industrialists but also from immigrants, factory workers, laborers, and racial and religious minorities.
THE DIFFERENCE A CENTURY MAKES
Of course, popularity is not the same as wisdom. Trump argues that tariffs produced American wealth in the industrial age, and McKinley believed the same. Experts have long been skeptical of that claim. The economic historian Douglas Irwin contends that Gilded Age tariffs had a neutral effect, on balance neither significantly helping nor significantly harming the overall U.S. economy. That history, however, is unlikely to repeat itself. Implementing the tariffs Trump has suggested in today’s world, with today’s economy, would eventually harm the United States.
Trump might well achieve some short-term goals. In January, his threat of tariffs against Colombia if it did not accept deportation flights led Bogotá to blink. Trump is now using the same tactic against Mexico, Canada, and China, the United States’ three largest trading partners, to extract concessions on border and drug-related issues. Its success so far has been underwhelming. This week, as a consequence of his tariff policy, the U.S. stock market tumbled, and Trump tacitly acknowledged the United States could enter a recession.
Meanwhile, other countries get a vote in what happens next. If they do not retaliate immediately with a tariff of their own or some other escalatory response, they will in time. The more the United States threatens, the more other countries will see the United States as a threat, and the more they will balance against it. The system of alliances and institutions the United States has built up since World War II will erode. If Washington antagonizes its partners willy-nilly, they will start seeking alternatives. Multilateral coordination on sanctions and export controls, trade agreements, and even intelligence sharing and support for U.S. military campaigns could all begin to fall apart.
Trump cannot escape basic principles of international relations and economics.
Another reason Trump’s tariffs are likely to bring harm today is that the world is meaningfully different than it was in the late nineteenth century. At that time, tariffs were a normal part of politics. During the Gilded Age, McKinley and other Republicans were not the only American politicians who wanted high tariffs; Democrats, the “free traders” of the 1890s, voted for tariffs, too, when they were in power, just at lower rates. U.S. politicians generally did not consider using universal tariffs as a coercive or punitive policy, either. Coercion was an exception, not the rule.
Today, systematic tariff threats do not resurrect the U.S. tariff policy of the 1890s because they cannot resurrect the world of the 1890s. Instead, they distort an out-of-date practice. The policy sows confusion, disrupts markets, and unravels norms of economic interaction. By abusing tariffs as a policy tool, Trump invites the world to do the same.
The U.S. economy of today is also markedly different, in makeup and in size, from what it was when McKinley was elected president. Not only does foreign trade claim a larger share of U.S. GDP—the percentage today is easily twice that of 1897—it also rose to the dizzying height of $7.3 trillion in 2024. In a globally integrated economy, U.S. markets are much more exposed. A tariff is a duty or tax on imports, and the added cost is usually passed on to consumers. A high universal tariff would make U.S. consumer costs rise considerably. In the short term, such a tariff might bring money into the U.S. Treasury or shield some U.S. industries from global competition, but the public would pay the price. So would U.S. producers that depend on foreign inputs; these firms could be forced to fire more workers than protected industries can hire, resulting in a net job loss. Moreover, if other countries impose retaliatory tariffs, foreign demand for U.S. goods could drop sharply. To threaten high universal tariffs is to play a game of chicken with the United States’ $3.2 trillion export market. McKinley’s policy, by contrast, was designed to protect the U.S. economy—not gamble with it.
Few experts believe Trump’s universal tariffs are wise. Those who do make simplistic assumptions. For instance, one scholar has argued that tariffs would merely shift excess consumer demand to the home market, boosting production, increasing wages, and strengthening labor. But drawing such an optimistic conclusion requires holding all other facts of the world constant as if running a controlled lab experiment. What happens if foreign countries respond with either tariffs or some other punitive measure? What happens if consumers instead spend more on foreign products? What about the effect of inflation? What about the market disruption caused by unpredictable threats and pauses of tariffs? Any experiment run 1,000 times may yield an unusual result once. But policymakers should bet on the 999 that point the other way.
A CAUTIONARY TALE
Universal tariffs, or even just the threat of them, will ultimately undermine U.S. national security by inviting retaliation, alienating partners and allies, throwing the marketplace into uncertainty, and hiking costs for U.S. consumers and producers. If Trump must have tariffs, a less damaging approach would be to revisit the policy of his first term and apply targeted tariffs rather than universal ones. Doing so would protect industries that are vital for national security and limit the broader effect on the U.S. economy. Even better would be to pursue policy goals by using the many other economic tools the United States has at its disposal, including multilateral and bilateral trade deals, voluntary agreements, industry and research assistance, export and import restrictions, export promotion, investment screening, sanctions, intellectual property protection, asset freezing, and standards development.
Whatever path Trump chooses, he cannot escape basic principles of international relations and economics. Foreign policy is a game of infinite stages; other countries always get to respond. Furthermore, time matters in economic policy: some economic tools may be fast-acting, but the most powerful ones take years to take full effect. Both can be useful, but reaching for the quick solution may undermine long-term results. Additionally, as this week’s stock market slump revealed, haphazard threats do not happen in a vacuum. The market reacts poorly to uncertainty and disorder. Lastly, a policy as broad as universal tariffs is bound to have unintended consequences for overall economic health. The more surgical a corrective policy change, the less likely it will be to cause collateral damage. Policies that ignore any of these realities will subvert U.S. economic security, not protect it.
McKinley offers a final cautionary tale for Trump. Over the course of his presidency, McKinley’s initial theory of U.S. security fell apart. A growing fear of instability in nearby Cuba (mixed with humanitarian concerns for Cubans suffering from Spanish oppression) led him to declare war on Spain in 1898. After defeating Spain in just a few months, the United States acquired former Spanish colonies as far away as the Philippines—where, facing a rebellion, McKinley then waged his own colonial war. Just a year later, the United States joined an eight-country alliance to quell the Boxer Rebellion in China. McKinley lost sight of his domestic economic vision, and as he got more and more involved in conflicts abroad, he became so invested—and fearful of instability thousands of miles away—that he could not let go. Greater military and territorial power bred a greater feeling of alarm.
This cycle of insecurity is something that the war-averse Trump should desperately want to avoid. He may regret his provocative threats to take territory in Canada**,** Gaza, Greenland, and Panama if his bluffs are called and he feels compelled to follow through. Trump, of course, has long been skeptical of U.S. intervention abroad. But then again, so was McKinley.