The New Yorker:

President William McKinley was a steadfast protectionist—until a depression and a G.O.P. wipeout.

By John Cassidy

The other morning, as Donald Trump was writing on social media that the “Entire World is RIPPING US OFF!!!” and threatening to impose tariffs of two hundred per cent on wine and champagne from the European Union, and as investors were fretting about the possibility of his actions plunging the economy into a recession, I happened to be reading a biography of another tariff-raising Republican whom Trump has adopted as a role model: the Ohioan William McKinley, who served as President from March, 1897, until his assassination, in September, 1901, at the hands of an anarchist. Last year, Trump said that McKinley “made this country rich.” On Trump’s first day back in office, in January, he reinstated Mt. McKinley as the name of an Alaskan mountain that is the highest peak in North America.

In “President McKinley: Architect of the American Century,” which was published in 2017, the journalist and author Robert W. Merry recounts how McKinley started out as a “steadfast protectionist” who believed that high tariff walls were a prerequisite for the rapid growth of the U.S. economy in the decades following the Civil War. In 1890, when McKinley was serving as the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, he sponsored a tariff bill that raised the duties on many imported goods to nearly fifty per cent on average. Sounding like a modern-day Trumpian economic nationalist, he declared on the House floor, “This bill is an American bill. It is made for the American people and American interests.” Seven years later, when McKinley was in the Oval Office, he signed into law a piece of legislation, the Dingley Act, that raised some tariffs even further.

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