AILSA CHANG, HOST:
President Trump praises one former president a lot these days.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: President McKinley made our country very rich through tariffs and through talent. He was a natural businessman.
CHANG: NPR White House correspondent Asma Khalid reports on Trump's admiration for an unsung president.
ASMA KHALID, BYLINE: In the late 19th century, William McKinley was a congressman from Ohio.
DOUGLAS IRWIN: And he ushered through a tariff bill in 1890.
KHALID: That's Douglas Irwin. He's an economics professor at Dartmouth College.
IRWIN: And it raised tariffs - not a huge amount, but they were already pretty high.
KHALID: Keep in mind, at that time there was no income tax, so the main source of revenue was tariffs. And the rate at that time was over 40%. Trump talks about this period in history as a kind of golden era for the United States. Here he was at a rally in Phoenix in December, paying tribute to McKinley.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
TRUMP: He was a strong believer in tariffs, and we were actually probably wealthiest of any time, relatively speaking, at any point in the history of our country.
KHALID: But Irwin thinks Trump's depiction is not entirely accurate.
IRWIN: A lot of people, including President Trump, think that the strong manufacturing economy was due to the McKinley tariff, but actually, the 1890s was not a good decade for the U.S. economy. We had a major recession starting in 1893, and we had about four or five years of double-digit unemployment.
KHALID: The U.S. economy, as a whole, did grow in the late 1800s, but it's hard to know if that was exclusively because of tariffs. This time period was also an age of rapid industrialization and immigration. And once McKinley was elected president in 1896, his own opinions on trade evolved. Here's Irwin again.
IRWIN: I think President Trump tends to downplay or ignore McKinley's turn to reciprocity late in his presidency, and that we needed harmonious mutually beneficial trade agreements that would expand trade, not contract it.
KHALID: But Trump's admiration for the 25th president of the United States also seems deeper than just tariffs. McKinley realigned and consolidated the power of the Republican Party for decades. And on Trump's first day back in office, he signed an executive order renaming North America's highest peak Mount McKinley and praised the former president for expanding America's footprint around the globe. Robert Merry wrote a book about McKinley.
ROBERT MERRY: He made America an empire, for good or ill. He brought Hawaii into the fold as a result of annexation. He rescued Cuba from what was pretty terrible Spanish dominion. He pushed us into the Pacific with Guam and the Philippines.
KHALID: He also took Puerto Rico as a colony. Trump has expressed interest in acquiring Greenland and the Panama Canal. But Justin Jackson, who's writing a new book on this time period, does not think McKinley was searching for territory to conquer.
JUSTIN JACKSON: William McKinley, you could think of as an accidental imperialist.
KHALID: Jackson told me there are differences between McKinley and Trump's policies and temperament.
JACKSON: And so it's very odd that Trump has fixated on McKinley rather than Teddy Roosevelt, who is much more like Trump - full of braggadocio and hyper-masculinity and eagerness for selectively taking other territories and expanding American trade.
KHALID: Roosevelt became president when McKinley was assassinated in 1901, and he was the driving force behind the construction of the Panama Canal that Trump has threatened to reclaim. Asma Khalid, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF ERIC TUCKER SONG "FWM (FEAT. FRE$H)") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
