Why McKinley makes an alarming Trump presidential role model - WaPo Boot
When most presidents cite illustrious predecessors, they usually turn to all-time greats such as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln or Franklin D. Roosevelt or to more recent favorites such as John F. Kennedy or Ronald Reagan. But in yet another reminder of what an outlier he is, President Donald Trump keeps extolling William McKinley, who held the office from 1897 to 1901 and is generally considered to be average at best: In one recent survey of scholars, he was ranked No. 24 out of 45 presidents.
Yet Trump spent months talking up McKinley’s supposed virtues on the campaign trail, largely because he was (like most Republicans of the 1890s) an advocate of high tariffs. “In the 1890s, our country was probably the wealthiest it ever was because it was a system of tariffs,” Trump told one audience. In his second inaugural address, Trump even gave McKinley credit for the Panama Canal, which was not begun until nearly three years after his assassination.
Trump claimed that the deceased McKinley “gave Teddy Roosevelt the money for many of the great things he did, including the Panama Canal,” before going on to complain that President Jimmy Carter “foolishly” gave the canal to Panama. Trump claimed the United States “lost 38,000 lives in the building of the Panama Canal.” (In reality, around 5,600 laborers died, about 350 of them Americans.) And “We have been treated very badly.” (We haven’t.) And “China is operating the Panama Canal.” (It isn’t.)” Trump promised, “We’re taking it back,” without specifying how. (Earlier, he promised to measure his success by “the wars we never get into.”) This was part of a more sweeping pledge to turn America into a “growing nation” that once again “expands our territory.”
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William McKinley (January 29, 1843 – September 14, 1901) was the 25th president of the United States, serving from 1897 until his assassination in 1901.
In United States history, the Gilded Age is the period from about the late 1870s to the late 1890s, which occurred between the Reconstruction era and the Progressive Era. It was named by 1920s historians after Mark Twain's 1873 novel The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today. Historians saw late 19th-century economic expansion as a time of materialistic excesses marked by widespread political corruption.
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