Chainsaw History - Short Rant: Trump Doesn't Know Jack About McKinley

Episode Date: April 4, 2025

It's our first "Short Rant," where we'll relate current events to history! These are videos posted on our YouTube and TIkTok accounts and the audio will be available here within a day.President Trump announced "Liberation Day" on April 2, 2025 with broad and sweeping tariffs that are causing stock market panic and layoffs even in the earliest days. His case for high tariffs are good policy are based on his admiration for the 25th President, William McKinley. But Trump is either ignorant of or lying about the truth about American tariff policies in the late 19th century. If history is any predictor of future events, bad things are in store both for the economy and to Republicans' future electoral chances.

While the world is reeling from the impact of Liberation Day where the United States announced sweeping tariffs that have negatively affected everyone everywhere, a lot of people are wondering just where Trump is getting a lot of these ideas and what is his guiding star. Well, there's at least one theory. It sure seems like sometime in the last four years, Trump has really fallen in love with the legend and legacy of the 25th President of the United States, William McKinley. So much so that one of his very first orders as President was to re-rename Mount Denali

in Alaska back to Mount McKinley. And we will restore the name of a great president, William McKinley to Mount McKinley, where it should be and where it belongs. Speaking at the Economic Club of New York last year, the president had this to say. In the words of a great but highly underrated president, William McKinley, highly underrated, the protective tariff policy of the Republicans has been made and made the lives of our countrymen sweeter and brighter. It's the best for our citizenship and our civilization, and it opens up a higher and better destiny for our people. We have to take care of our own nation and her industries first.

In other words, take care of our country first. This is when we had our greatest wealth. He was assassinated and he left his group of people that followed him, Teddy Roosevelt, became a great president spending the money that was made by McKinley. So McKinley got a bad deal on that one. He built tremendous wealth. They had the Tariff Act of 1887 and they had a committee that studied,

what are we gonna do? They had a big problem studied what are we going to do? They had a big problem, a problem like I hope to have with this country someday. So much money was coming in from foreign countries that they didn't know how to spend it. They had no idea. So they set up a committee. We'll set one up with the people in this room. How do we distribute the wealth that we have? And Roosevelt built dams and built railroads and did national parks.

But he did it with the money that was made with tariffs from McKinley. So you have to remember that very highly underrated, a very underrated president. In the 1800s, America had this whole civil war that had to be paid for, and they increased tariffs in order to make up those losses. But by the time we got to the 1880s, the United States actually had a budget surplus. So both the Democrats and the Republicans had tariff policies proposed, both of which the idea was to reduce the budget surplus. The Democrats plan was to lower tariffs, therefore lower revenue, whereas the Republicans thought by an extreme raise of tariffs it would discourage imports and accomplish the same goal. So yes, even the strategy back then was to reduce a budget surplus

through the use of tariffs. So Congress passed the Tariff Act of 1890, about 1887 Donald, and that was when McKinley was Speaker of the House. Now the economic impact was so negative and so widespread that later that year the Republicans had absolutely destroyed in the midterm elections losing almost half their seats in the House of Representatives. And then two years later, there was a major victory for Democrat Grover Cleveland, again running against the bad economy caused by the tariffs. Oops. And while there are other factors at play, the McKinley tariffs were in full effect during the panic of 1893. That was an economic depression,

I mean it was absolutely devastating, that lasted four years with ripple effects going on the better part of a decade. And it effectively ended the Gilded Ages, banks closed and railroads went bankrupt. Unemployment shot up to about 20 percent and there was a mass wave of homelessness and hunger in the United States. So the McKinley tariffs that President Trump admires so much only lasted four years before they were scaled back by the Wilson-Gorman Tariff Act of 1894. There is a pretty clear track record in this country of what happens when you try to apply simple economic solutions to complex economic problems. And Trump very clearly has a child's understanding of both history and the economy of the United States in the late 19th century.

He also doesn't seem to remember that McKinley was so despised as a symbol of the business class and economic injustice that he was shot dead by an anarchist less than a year after his second term of president began. So if history teaches us anything, tariffs are not going to do good things for the American economy and the Republicans are going to be destroyed electorally as a direct consequence. But in the meantime, lots of people are going to suffer as the president of the United States takes a sledgehammer to the global economy.