Not democracy’s end but the Gilded Age reborn. Trump’s McKinley obsession reveals imperial ambitions and endless corruption.
What if Donald Trump’s strange fixation on William McKinley isn’t just historical trivia, but the key to understanding what happens next?
On this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, long-time journalist and author Chris Lehmann argues we’re not necessarily headed for authoritarian collapse — we’re rewinding to the Gilded Age.
Lehmann challenges our understanding of “populism,” revealing a surprising historical twist that flips conventional wisdom about Trump on its head. The conversation uncovers striking parallels between our era and the 1890s: tech billionaires stepping into roles once occupied by railroad barons, with Elon Musk emerging as what Lehmann provocatively calls the modern equivalent of “appointing Rockefeller to the Supreme Court.”
How might McKinley’s transformation from economic nationalist to global imperialist more than a century ago foreshadow Trump’s second term? Lehmann explores the forces that shaped McKinley’s presidency and how similar dynamics are at play today, from the influence of wealthy backers to the quest for historical legacy.
Perhaps most intriguingly, Lehmann offers an unexpected conclusion about democracy’s resilience that runs counter to today’s doom-laden predictions. This historical lens provides both a warning and, surprisingly, a glimmer of hope.
As the conversation confirms, history may not repeat, but it certainly rhymes — and understanding these echoes might be our best guide to what’s coming next.
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(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)
Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. As Donald Trump continues his devastating march, our darkest fears center on the complete dismantling of American democracy. We worry about Project 2025, about the transformation of our constitutional system into an authoritarian regime, about the end of the American experiment as we know it. But what if there’s an alternative scenario, one that’s deeply troubling yet falls short of apocalyptic? What if Donald Trump’s second term turns out to be less about destroying democracy and more about something we’ve seen before in American history?
A presidency that mirrors William McKinley’s Gilded Age, where corruption and plutocratic excess reign supreme, where government becomes nothing more than a concierge service for the wealthy and the well-connected. What if Trump’s true ambition is simply to turn every presidential action into a personal business opportunity, from auctioning off regulatory favors to oil executives, to entertaining grandiose schemes like developing Gaza into a beachfront Riviera, to selling access to the highest foreign bidders?
And what if his imperial fantasies, annexing Canada, reclaiming the Panama Canal, renaming the Gulf of Mexico, are less about authoritarian control and more about the kind of imperial overreach that marked McKinley’s transformation of America from a territorial power to a global empire? My guest today, Chris Lehmann, the DC Bureau Chief for The Nation, makes the fascinating case in a recent article that Trump’s frequently expressed admiration for McKinley might ironically be the best we can hope for.
His ideas lead us to the idea that we may not be facing the end of democracy itself, but rather a replay of the Gilded Age, a time when the political fixer Mark Hanna did for McKinley what Elon Musk, with his unprecedented campaign contributions, seems poised to do for Trump. It’s a historical parallel that offers both a disturbing vision of what’s to come, and perhaps paradoxically, a glimmer of hope that we might survive it.
Chris Lehmann is the DC Bureau Chief for The Nation and a contributing editor at The Baffler. He was formerly editor at The Baffler and The New Republic and is the author most recently of The Money Cult: Capitalism, Christianity, and the Unmaking of the American Dream. It is my pleasure to welcome Chris Lehmann here to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. Chris, thanks so much for joining us.
Chris Lehmann: Thank you, Jeff. I very much appreciate the opportunity to discuss these issues at greater length just because the times we’re living in are so deranging and it’s hard to know how to begin to make sense of them.
Jeff: The story that you’ve recently written begins with this idea that Trump is somehow fascinated by McKinley and the McKinley presidency.
Chris: The McKinley fascination on Trump’s part goes back a ways. It’s more deeply rooted in the modern Republican Party as well. Karl Rove was a big Mark Hanna fan. He wrote his graduate thesis on Mark Hanna and overtly adopted him as a role model. So as ever with confronting the insanity of the Trump phenomenon, it’s important to understand that Donald Trump didn’t come out of nowhere. He came out of a deeply rooted set of conservative movement forces that built and built until the party was ripe for takeover by a kind of amoral plutocrat, and was also ripe both, as you noted in your introduction, for this great barbecue of donors dictating policy overtly.
That is also something that goes back in the party to things like the K Street Project, which was also a Bush-era congressional initiative to try to ensure that all lobbying interests in Washington followed the right-wing playbook. But I think the McKinley analogy, and it is an analogy – historical analogies aren’t in any way predictive, they don’t follow a clear, predetermined trajectory – but just as we are already living in an age of acute inequality and an unprecedented amassing of wealth on the part of these Silicon Valley billionaires like Musk or Mark Zuckerberg, we are all watching the inevitable colonization of the money power into our political process.
And in that respect, I think in my original post, I did liken Musk to Mark Hanna, but on reflection, having Elon Musk in the position of influence he now occupies is something that Mark Hanna never would have dared try. I think the more apt analogy would be like appointing John D. Rockefeller or J.P. Morgan to be chief justice of the Supreme Court. This is a quantum leap forward in terms of the moneyed influence on the inside of government, where Musk is quite overtly and daily steamrolling the Constitution [and] the rule of law on a grid of unbelievably stupid decisions informed, and I use that term loosely, by his hysterical scan it and meme it approach to all the data that the DOGE team is rifling through. It is an astounding quantum leap forward in the plutocratic stranglehold on our democracy.
Jeff: Talk a little bit about the context for McKinley, the Gilded Age that he brought in, and really the context of the times that he came to power.
Chris: The original populist drivel in American politics, and I’m using populism here not in the debased, quasi illiterate way that the punditocracy now uses the term, but in its actual historical meaning, which is to say it was an uprising chiefly of farmers, but also some urban workers toward the end of the 19th century who had been displaced in large part by the 1893 panic. They didn’t call them depressions back then, but it was a full-scale depression with massive unemployment and collapse of agricultural markets. And like everything else, it also had deeper structural roots as the 1893 panic had to do with the rise of this then unprecedented class of Gilded Age monopolists.
People like John D. Rockefeller in the oil industry and J.P. Morgan in finance and Leland Stanford, whose name now graces a famous university in Silicon Valley is another one. And these robber barons, as they were then known, basically put the screws on what was then a rapidly industrializing, rapidly expanding new market economy in the country. And so the Populists began out of a movement called the Grange movement, which a lot of the Grange technically still exists today, and it’s the model for a lot of agricultural cooperatives where farmers who produce a certain crop will band together to streamline access to markets, to negotiate prices, etc., etc.
And these farmers were reckoning with this new brand of rapacious global capitalism taking hold in America, they realized cooperatives aren’t going to do it. The railroads have control over when and how we can access markets, when we can bring our crops to different regions, and they will use that power to drive up prices and immiserate farmers. And farming, I should also stipulate – I come from Iowa, so I know this very well – is a debt-driven undertaking at all times. You’re basically investing in crops and fertilizers and livestock and tractors in the hope of a harvest that will cover your costs.
A related problem having to do with the depression of 1893 was that the United States was cleaving to the gold standard. It had gone off the gold standard during the Civil War to pay for the war. That’s when you first had paper money introduced. And there was an earlier party called the Greenback Party to keep paper money in circulation against the gold standard. And the reason this is important is that debtors can use depreciated currency to pay back their debts at a lower cost than they were originally contracted to, which is a way of basically breaking even, first of all, and also of making sure that you aren’t preyed upon by these bankers and capitalists who are enthralled to the gold standard.
Come 1896, the Populists had grown to the point [that], after the panic, they won a significant slate of seats in the House of Representatives and some Senate seats. And in 1896, they managed to capture the nomination for president in a movement to fuse with the Democratic Party. And so William Jennings Bryan, the great orator of the Gilded Age, at that point was in his early 30s and a relatively unknown congressman from Nebraska, gets nominated to run for president. And on the Republican side, William McKinley is the answer to all of that. He also comes from the Midwest, but he comes from a traditional business background. Basically, Mark Hanna is his boss.
Mark Hanna at the time was head of the Republican National Committee. There wasn’t a traditional campaign chairman structure back then. But Hanna basically handpicked McKinley to run, and got all of these robber barons I mentioned earlier to kick in enormous, at that time, unprecedented amounts of money to fund his campaign. And interestingly, Teddy Roosevelt was the vice presidential candidate. And he was the, as the tradition, the attack dog who went out on the stump to really go after the Populists with hammer and tongs.
And if you look up his speeches from that cycle, they’re nothing like the Teddy Roosevelt, who we know from his own term in the presidency, he is an ardent defender of Wall Street, of the banking industry, and is is unbelievably contemptuous of the Populist movement, the working class, anything that he could tar as out of control, radicalism, or communism, or what have you.
If we pan back to the Trump-McKinley fascination today, what’s incredibly striking, and this is why I desperately wish we had a national press that knew something about the country’s own history, because William McKinley was the standard bearer for beating down the Populist movement, and we now stupidly call Donald Trump a populist. It is hard to describe how completely wrong-headed that description is. Trump obviously has no interest in representing the economic concerns of average working Americans.
He did nothing in that vein during his first term. He will continue to not do anything in that vein during his second term. He only gets called a populist because there is this uninformed and ignorant caricature of populism that has been in American discourse basically since Richard Hofstadter’s revisionist effort to depict all Populists as bigots and imperialists, which is totally backwards, and puppets, small town reaction and “status anxiety” among an agricultural class that was being displaced by the impersonal forces of capitalism.
And they become in Hofstadter’s telling enthralled to conspiracy theories, to anti-immigrant sentiment, etc., etc. And you can obviously see why that dumbed-down account of populism is affixed to Trump, because he does have all of the bigotry and conspiracy thinking, resentment politics, etc. But the original Populist movement was a movement to remake our political economy at a very fundamental level. So it went beyond even getting rid of the gold standard and printing silver money, the radical populists who were at the front of the movement actually introduced the idea of a new form of currency that was based on people’s labor.
And it was called the sub-treasury system, and regional banks were ever since crops, these were agrarian after all, whereas in this vision of things, the main medium of exchange, different regions of the country would have enormous crop reserves and they would weigh the value of currency to that. And one of the weird ironies of history is this plan, which was then called the sub-treasury plan, would later become the model for the Federal Reserve in the Progressive Era. When the National Bank was chartered, it was modeled on the sub-treasury plan. Of course, what they forgot was to value labor at all, in the creation of the Federal Reserve. And it has become a regulator totally captive to the banking industry, but that’s a whole other story.
Jeff: Talk a little bit about the platform that McKinley ran on, the degree to which people had a sense of what he was ultimately going to do and how he disguised that when he ran.
Lehmann: That’s a really interesting good question. He ran chiefly, and this is another big superficial resemblance with Trump, as a champion of the tariff system, which at that point was very much in favor by among the robber baron class to create, as I was describing earlier, a national market that they could exert maximum control over and eliminate foreign competition.
But what’s interesting is that McKinley is elected in 1896 and two years later, the United States enters the Spanish-American War, which is the war that, as you mentioned in your introduction, is the watershed that transforms America from a territorial empire to a global one. And McKinley initially was true to his quasi-economic nationalist principles, and was reluctant to embark on these imperial errands, which eventually got America territorial control over the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Hawaiian Islands.
But this, again, is where Mark Hanna is the – I don’t know what the literary analogy would be – but he’s the real power behind the throne, let’s just say. And at that point, his coterie of robber barons and big bankers are looking at global commerce very differently. America is now launched as an industrial power, and the real challenge is to get access to global markets for the goods we produce, and also to get, obviously, cheap sources of raw materials that we can ship back to the United States to drive down the cost of production.
And so imperialism starts to look really attractive to these people. It also helps, of course, that the European continent is also racing for resources across the globe via imperial conquest. So there’s a kind of game afoot for capitalists across the world right now to hammer down control of key markets and raw materials. And this became known in the United States as the Open Door Policy. And like all imperial projects, it’s dressed up in a lot of, and frankly, offensive democratizing rhetoric: that this is the white man’s burden, we’re bringing [a] civilizing mission to these populations who are living in darkness and under the heel of other imperial powers.
And as the name suggests, the Spanish-American War involved territories that were under Spanish control. And so we also added this strain of new world democracy, that we’re going to create little Americas and free oppressed populations who are under the heel of the Spanish boot. And the history in pretty much all of these places is simply that America takes over the same role the Spaniards play, and uses their territorial control over these countries and territories to extract maximum economic value.
Jeff: Is there anything that we learned from the way the McKinley regime played out, the way tariffs played out, the way the Gilded Age played out, that can give us insight into dealing with Trump’s version of viewing McKinley?
Lehmann: It’s hard to say. As I was saying earlier, history doesn’t repeat itself, it rhymes. It’s in an analogy that’s perfect to our time. There are unintended consequences. Certainly, chief among them is McKinley is assassinated and shortly after he’s reelected in 1901, and Teddy Roosevelt becomes president. And against the T.R. that I was describing as when [he was] McKinley’s attack dog, he becomes a leading figure in the progressive movement and starts talking about the need to regulate these massive fortunes and these “malefactors of great wealth,” as he called them.
So you have the first antitrust act enforcement. The Sherman Antitrust Trust Act was passed before T.R. becomes president, but he is a person who puts real teeth into it. And unfortunately, as I think we all know, T.R. remained a very ardent and destructive and childish apostle of imperial conquest. So that certainly didn’t change. And I think when you look at the maybe simple terms that Donald Trump views the world on, it is the imperial conquest side of the McKinley project that he wants to pick up on. You mentioned all of the insane proposals. I think you left out Greenland though, which is another one.
I’m sure Trump takes it very seriously and thinks of it as his task in his second term is to create a legacy. And I’m sure he thinks if I could only do what Will McKinley did and add to the American Empire and make American commerce again the striding force of, I don’t know, jingoism. The one caution there is that Donald Trump in his first term was notoriously averse to the use of military force. He did not visit the airbase where dead soldiers were back to this country breaking precedent with all modern presidential administrations. He’s a draft dodger himself, military conflict doesn’t really sit well with him.
But then again, as I was saying earlier, McKinley was also a hesitant imperialist at the outset and the business class brought him along. Who knows? Especially since 2016, I am not prone to forecast or predict anything. History is just too wild and unpredictable. But it does, at a minimum, the McKinley parallel, I guess we can call it, shows how imperialism became so fundamental to the outlook of the American ruling class, and it hasn’t changed in my view since then.
We saw all the same civilizing mission BS when the George W. Bush administration invaded Iraq and proclaimed that there were– Michael Gerson wrote a famous speech at the time about how America was the beacon of democracy throughout the world and had to reclaim that historic role, which is always really dangerous talk. It’s self-deluding, it’s often racist, and never works out well for the subject populations.
Jeff: It’s interesting with the Trump sense of imperialism, it doesn’t even have that patina attached to it. It’s simply imperialism for imperialism’s sake.
Chris: And Trump has a very dark view of human nature and the world. I remember during the 2016 campaign, he said things like, the world’s just a bloody dangerous place, and we have to own up to the role we’re going to play. Which it’s a weird double-edged sword because at one level, that rhetoric cuts against the traditional American exceptionalism that, as I was saying earlier, is the condiment for the imperial project, but it also can readily descend into a Hobbesian war of all against all.
Jeff: Chris Lehman, I thank you so very much for spending time with us.
Chris: Thanks again, Jeff. I really appreciate you taking the time.
Jeff: And thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate.
