How Trump Can Follow in McKinley's Footsteps to Save America, Pt. 2

McKinley Redux, Pt. 2 of 3

Note: This is the second article in a three-part series. If you haven’t already, check out part one here. Thanks for reading, and please let me know if you like these shorter articles! If you do like it, please tap the heart at the top or bottom of the page to like this article, so Substack knows to promote it, something that really helps us out at no cost to you. Thanks again.

America has much going for it. Immense reserves of human capital, a nearly unfathomable degree of financial capital, and vast natural resource reserves mean that, if America wanted to become autarkic, it could. Sadly, however, that promising situation has been obviated by bad policy and feckless, corrupt elites.

For decades we have been “led” by the same sort of free trade ideologues who destroyed England around the turn of the last century.¹ So, our advantages have counted for naught as we’ve been pillaged by the world, whether agricultural interests in France,² factories in Mexico, or Chinese steel companies.

Thus, much like McKinley faced a somewhat bleak economic situation when he became president, thanks in large part to the free(er) trade policies of his predecessors, and turned it into a period of unimaginable prosperity with tariffs,³ President Trump faces an America ravaged by the consequences of free trade.⁴

NAFTA, of course, did exactly what its enemies warned and created a “giant sucking sound” in which immense swathes of the American industrial base were pulled from America into Mexico so that the owners could avoid the high taxes, wages, and regulation of America.⁵ When paired with globalization and the industrial buildout in East Asia at the expense of America’s manufacturing heartland, the result is the Rust Belt written about by JD Vance in Hillbilly Elegy. Poverty, economic dislocation, and a general dearth of good manufacturing jobs have wrecked a region that was once relatively prosperous and wealthy.⁶

Now, America is dependent on her enemies for everything from toys to pharmaceuticals, and even the defense industry couldn’t survive without manufactured exports from the People’s Republic of China,⁷ Mexico, and similar country-scale sweatshops. American workers, when the cost of labor protections, environmental regulations, and income taxes are factored in, simply can’t compete.

That’s a massive problem: now our workers are competing with serfs abroad, much to their detriment, and our decimated industrial sector has trouble producing the sort of much-needed but lower-technology goods that the workhouses of the world thrive in producing. From car parts to washing machines, key consumer goods that used to be built well in America are now designed with obsolescence in mind and built abroad. That hurts American workers, as it means their wages are cut severely if their jobs survive at all, and is a massive vulnerability our enemies won’t be slow in exploiting.

In short, much like the America of William McKinley before his tariffs, our national prosperity has been sapped away by policies that appease liberal politicians but often negatively impact national prosperity. That’s the industrial and economic situation Trump faces.

Of course, he also faces the problem of reaction to economic betrayal.

The reaction to that betrayal of the country has been as severe and venomous as might be expected, and it has even turned into mid-Gilded Age-style popular unrest. While we haven’t had a Homestead Riot-style orgy of violence between capital and labor, we have seen increasing public detestation for the wealth elite. The CEO of United Healthcare was shot and killed, and his killer was widely applauded rather than derided. A grassroots campaign organized by amateur speculators bid up Gamestop and AMC stock not to make money, but so the large hedge funds and their owners would suffer.⁸ The Floyd Riots and January 6th Electoral Justice Protest saw public anger with government authorities boil over. In each case, justified or not, there’s a great degree of anger and inter-class resentment stemming in no small degree from the long-term economic pain that followed the short-term high of globalization.

This situation has not only occurred before, but has been fixed reasonably quickly and with great success before. That success came, as I wrote about in part one of this series, at the hands of President William McKinley. As a congressman, governor, and president, he used tariffs and a reasonable approach to labor dispute resolution to lessen public disquietude and push America away from decay and into a new era of prosperity.

Listen to the audio version of this article here:

AUDIO: Trump Could Save America with Tariffs, Pt. 2

Fixing America

Fortunately, however, Trump is, like McKinley, the man who could fix the disaster caused by free trade.

Tariffs

For one, Trump has shown an inclination toward longer-term tariffs meant to bolster American industry by protecting it as it forms and establishes itself. This was originally an idea promoted by early 19th-century protection evangelist Freidrich List.⁹ List understood protection as being a necessary step to achieving industrialization, as otherwise established industrial economies or those using state subsidies will undercut your nascent industries. America adopted this idea with the American System,¹⁰ and Prussia eventually followed a similar path.

Now, of course, America is not a developing economy but rather a preeminent First-World country. However, it shed its industry with NAFTA, globalization, and chasing companies away via regulation. That means it must work to rebuild its industrial sector, a problem not all that different from building it in the first place, the problem addressed by List.

McKinley’s Approach

The way to do that is to do what McKinley did: raise tariffs high enough to make foreign-produced goods uncompetitive and, in the process, pressure industrialists to build here and treat their workers well.

For McKinley, this consisted of an 1890 tariff that raised the tariff on imported goods to nearly 50%, giving America’s employers breathing room to create new jobs and raise wages, rather than cutting jobs and wages, while still earning a good profit.

Meanwhile, he, as shown by the coal strike when governor, pressured both capital and labor into treating each other with respect; he neither immediately sent in the National Guard to shoot down strikers, as had previously been done, nor tolerated the attempts of the coal miners’ leader to grandstand and turn strikers into radicals. By applying that same mindset and general suite of policies, he largely ended the strikes and massacres, getting America back on track.

How Trump Can Follow in McKinley’s Tariff Footsteps

For Trump, it will likely consist of tariffs of varying amounts, based on the goods at hand and our degree of connection to or alliance with the party at hand. But one thing is clear, and is certain: dialing tariffs down to near-zero, broadly and across sectors, has been a disaster, particularly when paired with our punitive income tax and regulatory framework.

Unfortunately, the current framework has cost America its industrial capacity and vastly knowledgeable workforce, particularly for goods like t-shirts or washing machines that require lower-skilled labor but are dramatically more expensive here, with our labor laws and regulatory framework, than abroad. So, instead of the thriving industrial economy of the later McKinley years, we have American workers trying to compete with serfs in Mexico and near-slave labor in China, which is, of course, unsuccessful despite pay cuts, and those jobs are shipped abroad.

Tariffs, as was the case in 1890 and is the case now, are the cure to that economic ailment because they preclude such a situation when properly implemented. Instead of competing against the slave labor of the third world, companies, and their workers are defended by large economic ramparts…but still compete with each other, preserving competition and limiting the tendency toward scleroticism to which opponents of tariffs claim they lead.

The American firearms industry is a great example of this. Various import restrictions mean that it is generally domestically produced firearms that are bought and sold on the American market.¹¹ The result is anything but sclerotic. Whereas industries like steelmaking that have been decimated by foreign competition are indeed sclerotic, with US Steel being a byword for better days gone rather than American ingenuity, the firearms industry is one of the last sectors in which America is dominant.

Relatedly, though the defense industry is known for expensive boondoggles, much of that stems from bureaucratic messes rather than incompetence. When it comes to somewhat lesser regulated aspects of the industry, from body armor to night vision, Palmer Lucky’s loitering munitions to top-tier jet engines, America’s defense companies and technology are first rate. Notably, a few jet and ship programs aside, those companies (and especially their thousands of subcontractors) are competing with each other and do an excellent job of producing top-tier products.

That’s not to say tariffs solve everything. Far from it. But while not a silver bullet, they are a useful tool in that they give companies breathing room by providing them with the profit opportunities they need to hire and retain top-tier talent by paying it well.

Building on Tariffs

So, if tariffs aren’t a silver bullet, what builds on them to create the golden future of a New Gilded Age? Two things: rapprochement and investment.

Rapprochement Between Owners and Workers

The rapprochement issue must be tackled first, and Trump is the perfect man for the job.

Before anything else can be fixed, a serious problem that must be rectified is the growing conflict, as shown by the Tiberius Gracchus-like way in which Trump and his movement can be viewed,¹² between capital and labor. Much like McKinley, the two groups are often at each other’s throats, if in a somewhat less deadly fashion than before. But occasionally it is deadly, as shown by Brian Thompson’s slaying.

Both sides have their defenses.

On labor’s side, decades of seeing jobs shipped to foreigners while wages fall, costs of everything from food to healthcare rise, and the public figures backed by capital spit upon them were infuriating. Now, there is a call for vengeance, that is well justified, something made only more true by the predations of abominable bandits like the Sachlers.

On the side of capital, it wasn’t a desire to screw over their countrymen so much as a need to move to avoid the punitive tax and regulatory regime foisted on them by the FDR Era and its successors that caused offshoring. Were it not for high taxes, impossible to comply with regulations, and foreign companies using state subsidies to undercut American producers, the jobs would have remained here.

So, rare exceptions aside (as in McKinley’s day), it’s not that either side is evil or unreasonable. Rather, it’s that conditions have been awful for both sides, and if those were rectified, rapprochement could occur. Trump is known for his close relationships with the wealth elite — men as varied as Elon Musk and Erik Prince — and the working Americans that largely composed MAGA, from the boat paraders to the garbage men.¹³ Like McKinley, he has the unique ability to work with both sides toward something better, an America that works for capital and labor.

We will see if that happens. But his signaling on everything from cutting the income tax to ending DEI indicates that he does indeed care about the various classes that compose America, perhaps excluding the horrid bureaucratic class, and wants to work toward policy that makes them all better off. Further, he and only he has the credibility with both groups to pull it off, much like McKinley.

Infrastructure

Toward what end should the savings and income be put? That, if America achieves the sure-to-be difficult reshoring transition, is the question.

McKinley would have one answer: infrastructure. In his day, that was clearing the canals, building the railroads, raising the telegraph lines, and so on. The immense amount of money poured into steel tracks and sky-high wires turned the disconnected American continent into a thriving, connected empire in which goods could be sold at near the speed of light via telegraphs and transported across the country in mere days, a journey that once took months at the shortest. Much as the tariffs enabled breathing room on profit margins, the infrastructure built enabled a continent’s resources to be exploited and turned into vast improvements in the standard of living and similarly vast fortunes.¹⁴ McKinley didn’t start that process, one that began long before with the tariff and internal improvement (infrastructure building) American System. But he did lean heavily into it, much to the benefit of America.

Trump, similarly, must direct the revenue from tariffs and earnings toward infrastructure. The space economy is burgeoning and in desperate need of the sort of dollars once seen with the railroads; economic concessions, real estate grants, and temporary loans turned America into a continental empire. There’s no reason the same ideas applied to space couldn’t create nation-benefitting East India Companies of the Skies.¹⁵ Rockets are the railroads of the skies, and the infrastructure around them, from settling claims in space to aiding in everything from research to bases, is critical.¹⁶

While that is the bleeding edge of needed investment, more mundane investment is also needed. For example, our schools are terrible, and Trump’s voucher idea is a clever way of helping the human capital that wants to improve do so.¹⁷ Similarly, everything from bridges to canals are in desperate need of repair, and Biden’s supposed infrastructure bill did nothing to help, focused as it was on race communism and green energy scams.¹⁸

If we are to become an economy with the internal, virtuous cycle of spending and investment in the domestic economy that was seen in McKinley’s day, we need the proper rails on which to do it. Today, that means more than just railroads. It means schools teaching the skills necessary for high-tech manufacturing jobs, bridges that can support the weight of immense industrial machinery and the goods created by it, and architecture that inspires rather than depresses. Such was built by McKinley and the great men of his day. Such should be built by Trump and our great men as well.

A Golden Dawn

Things have been unpleasant lately. In fact, they’ve been getting worse since HW Bush opened America to globalization, if not when FDR demolished the system McKinley built.

But that decline isn’t inexorable. If Bukele can rescue El Salvador from the vicious gangs that ruled it,¹⁹ America can recover from decades of terrible industrial and trade policy. It will be difficult, but it will also be possible, and if achieved, the payoff will be immense.

That is a situation McKinley faced, and a problem he overcame with pragmatic, pro-American policies well in line with what the Founders envisioned. Even the Federalist Papers described tariffs as the expected and just revenue source for the government, for example, and internal improvements were a critical ingredient of the American System that lasted for decades. Trump now has the opportunity to follow in those footsteps, and it’s what he should do.

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1. https://x.com/Will_Tanner_1/status/1886500060583628910

2. https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/chart-detail?chartId=78589

3.

4. Read more on the consequences of free trade here:

5. https://theconversation.com/the-giant-sucking-sound-of-nafta-ross-perot-was-ridiculed-as-alarmist-in-1992-but-his-warning-turned-out-to-be-prescient-120258

6. A shockingly good piece by Oren Cass in the NYT on this: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/23/opinion/what-economists-could-learn-from-george-costanza.html; and a good piece on it:

Has International Trade Caused Rust Belt Collapse?

7. https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/america-must-untangle-its-defense-industrial-base-from-china/

8. For those who don’t know, an ok summary: https://www.vox.com/money/2023/9/15/23873474/dumb-money-gamestop-stock-keith-gill-melvin-capital-review

9.

10. https://americansystemnow.com/friedrich-list/?print=print

11. The ATF rules: https://www.atf.gov/firearms/firearms-guides-importation-verification-firearms-ammunition-and-implements-war-import

12.

13. This is a good point made well here:

When Did U.S. Decline Begin?

14. Some of this is discussed here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2025/01/27/trump-mckinley-tariffs-history/

15.

16. Some details on Trump’s space policy here: https://spaceinsider.tech/2025/01/24/the-trump-administrations-early-impact-on-space-tech-shifting-priorities-and-new-directions/

17. https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/01/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-expands-educational-opportunities-for-american-families/

18. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/fighting-fraud-waste-and-abuse-the-infrastructure-bill-and-lessons-for-the-future/

19.