[On July 31, 1875, Andrew Johnson died. Johnson is one of our worst presidents, which means he also reminds me a lot of our current and very worst one. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy echoes of some of our worst presidents in Trump 2.0!]
On how
tariffs reflect multiple layers of bad presidents, past and present.
Once
again, I’ll ask you to start this post by checking out a prior one: this November
2015 post on William McKinley’s badnesses. Take a look if you would, and
then come on back.
Welcome
back! As I traced in that post, much of the worst of McKinley’s presidency can
be connected to his full embrace of imperialism, whether in the
Philippines (and everywhere else the Spanish-American
War was fought) or in Hawaii.
Such global imperial goals were relatively new for the US in the era, at least
as official federal foreign policy, and it’s impossible to separate them from
another central emphasis of McKinley’s administration: tariffs.
McKinley had been a champion of that restrictive type of trade and economic
measure since his authorship of the McKinley
Tariff Act of 1890 while serving in the House of Representatives, and he brought
that perspective with him to the White House in 1897, dubbing
himself “a tariff man, standing on a tariff platform.”
As that
last hyperlinked article notes, that phrase could easily have been uttered by
our current president about his own, even more extreme reliance on tariffs here
in the opening months of his second term (a perspective Trump overtly linked to
McKinley in his second
inaugural address). Which is particularly ironic and telling given that in
the past Trump has criticized imperialist ventures like the 2nd Iraq
War and made the case for less U.S. involvement in the world beyond our
borders. This time around, from noises about annexing Canada and Greenland to
plans to retake the Panama Canal, Trump has revealed himself to be a
full-throated imperialist, and his extremist tariff policies have to be
seen as part of that larger project, just as they were for William McKinley 125
years ago. Shortly before his assassination, however, McKinley dramatically changed
his tune on tariffs. Hard to imagine this even worse president doing the same.
Next
baddie tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think?
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