From “Letters from an American“:
William McKinley is having a moment (which I confess is a sentence I never expected to write).Â
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is elevating McKinley, representative from Ohio from 1877 to 1891 and president from 1897 to 1901, to justify his plan to impose new high tariffs.Â
Trump’s call for tariffs is not an economic plan; it is a worldview. Trump claims that foreign countries pay tariff duties and thus putting new tariffs of 20% on all imports, and as much as 60% on Chinese imports, will bring enough foreign money into the country to fund things like childcare, end federal budget deficits, and pay for the tax cuts he wants to give to the wealthy and corporations.
This is a deliberate lie. Tariffs are essentially taxes on imported products, and they are paid not by foreign countries but by American consumers. Economists warn that Trump’s tariff plan would cost a typical family an average of more than $2,600 a year, with poorer families hardest hit; spike inflation as high as 20%; result in 50,000 to 70,000 fewer jobs created each month; slow economic growth; and add about $5.8 trillion in deficits over ten years. It would tank an economy that under the Biden administration, which has used tariffs selectively to protect new industries and stop unfair trade practices, has boomed.
Read the rest here.
McKinley also had a “moment” in the early 2000s when George W. Bush advisor Karl Rove got obsessed with McKinley political advisor Mark Hanna.