In his second inaugural address, president Donald Trump rattled off a list of legislative initiatives that he claimed would “completely and totally reverse a horrible betrayal” that had been levied upon the American people. Among them were solutions to various hot-button issues which compelled voters to elect Trump to a second term, such as illegal immigration or a bloated bureaucracy. He promised not only to declare an emergency at the Southern Border and create Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, but also to plant an American flag on Mars and end the chronic disease epidemic. But one of his proposals was completely unrelated to the rest, and negligible in the grand scheme of his policy goals: Trump pledged to rename Denali, a mountain in Alaska, to Mount McKinley.
It is unsurprising that Trump wants to rename the mountain after William McKinley, an Ohio Republican who served as the 25th president from 1897 until his assassination in 1901. Besides being one of the two presidents Trump specifically name-dropped in his second inaugural address—the other being McKinley’s vice president and presidential successor, Theodore Roosevelt—everything about Trump’s first month in office signals that, for better or for worse, he aims to model his second presidency after McKinley’s politics: gunboat diplomacy and high protective tariffs.
Although he is seldom remembered in America’s cultural consciousness today, historians largely credit McKinley as America’s last imperial president who initiated and won the Spanish-American War. As such, he expanded the Union by gaining control of former Spanish subjects like Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines; the annexation of the Philippines was the most violent, culminating in the Philippine-American War and the deaths of two hundred thousand Filipino civilians. McKinley later absorbed more territory by bloodlessly annexing the Republic of Hawaii and giving the United States a geopolitically auspicious edge in the Pacific at the cost of Native Hawaiian sovereignty. While American ownership of Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and Guam ended up being advantageous in the long run, scholars consider the scourge of the Philippine-American War to be the most heinous blot on McKinley’s legacy.
Though Trump probably does not plan to expand the Union through warfare, it is troubling that he has revived McKinley’s gunboat diplomacy in his efforts to expand American influence abroad, most blatantly when he did not rule out military force to control Greenland and said he would claim “ownership” of Gaza. Trump is disturbingly much more open about his expansionist ideals than McKinley was. Although McKinley was against imperialism in principle and outright stated in his first inaugural address that “[The United States] must avoid the temptation of territorial aggression,” Trump has instead promised American ownership of Greenland and the Panama Canal in his own address. And unlike his 2016 promise to control Greenland, Trump seems much more serious about his current ambitions overseas.
In fact, Danish aides say that Trump’s phone call with the Danish prime minister—the leader of a NATO ally—degenerated into an “aggressive and confrontational” shouting match. His antagonistic demeanor to the leaders of American allies is perturbing, such as his taunts that Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau is the “governor of Canada” or renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America” on official government websites. Similarly, as a slight to Panama, Trump sent his Secretary of State Marco Rubio to Latin America to negotiate American ownership of the Panama Canal as his first diplomatic trip.
Much like McKinley, Trump also seeks to exercise confrontational economic diplomacy, displayed through his tariff threats to Mexico and Canada. While serving as a representative in Congress, McKinley pioneered the Tariff Act of 1890, also known as the McKinley Tariff, leading to a Democratic landslide in the 1890 Congressional midterm elections—in which McKinley himself lost his seat in the House—and later, the Panic of 1893. Like McKinley, Trump is willing to place tariffs on other countries, even at the expense of his own party’s welfare. Tariffs would raise production costs for American manufacturers, many of whom are located in states that voted for Trump in 2024.
It is deeply telling that Trump specifically praised McKinley in his second inaugural address and only briefly mentioned his more popular and more successful successor, Theodore Roosevelt. Perhaps it was Roosevelt’s ardent protection of the environment that Trump disagrees with, as demonstrated by his off-the-cuff promise that the United States will “drill, baby, drill.” Or maybe Trump disagrees with Roosevelt’s trust-busting that stifled the power of big corporations, as evidenced by Trump wooing tech leaders at his inauguration by giving them better seats than future members of his Cabinet.
It is also deeply telling that Trump has shed his first-term admiration for Andrew Jackson, the seventh U.S. president, whose policies ironically served as a framework for the modern-day Democratic Party. Jackson was elected to the presidency in the election of 1828 when voters wanted a candidate who represented the common man and would challenge the elites in Washington. This may have applied to Trump in his first term, but not necessarily his second, as evidenced by Trump’s close friendship with tech billionaires like Elon Musk, who Trump entrusted with communicating with top Iranian ambassadors.
McKinley’s presidency is considered to be above-average by historians, but it is incredibly unsettling that Trump seeks to revive the imperialistic ambitions of the nineteenth century that largely faded from world affairs after World War II. Time will tell whether these ambitions will manifest, but one thing is assured: for better or for worse, Americans should be ready to once again welcome President McKinley.
