TIt’s traditional The goal of the inaugural address is to transcend campaign politics and bring the country together. Donald Trump’s second inauguration It wasn’t that. But it stuck to tradition in other ways, it’s just that the tradition in question was much older.
The only person among his predecessors that President Trump spent any time discussing — other than criticizing the outgoing Joe Biden administration — was William McKinley, speaking of a “great president,” though he is not one many Americans would place in their pantheon. . The reference came in a clip about returning the name of the twenty-fifth president to Mount Denali, an idea that combines Trump’s two obsessions. America’s tallest mountain was officially given the Koyukon (Alaska Native) name in 2015, a rewriting of history out of respect for liberal sensibilities that is evidence of the awakened mind virus. The president who signed this change into law was Barack Obama, so reversing it undoes an accomplishment Obama also achieved. But Trump’s reverence for McKinley, a fellow Republican, did not end there.
McKinley, inaugurated in 1897, presided over the negotiations that led to the construction of the Panama Canal. He loved DefinitionsAs a means of financing the government and protecting local industry. He courted and courted the robber barons of the Gilded Age.
President Trump has a thing about the Panama Canal. He believes that the terms of the treaty that the host country was signed to have been violated, and that it is controlled by China (this is not the case, although the Chinese government has gained influence in Panama). The single most attention-grabbing sentence in the speech, at least for those accustomed to an American president who respects the sovereignty of other countries, was: “We take it back.”
The Panama Canal Waiver Treaty was drafted during the presidency of Jimmy Carter in 1977. Even then, conservatives opposed the treaty as unpatriotic betrayal by gullible liberals, a perennial theme with Trump (it’s not just his taste in music that he regularly ignores) to era of the villagers). For Panama, where the 82nd Airborne Division landed a decade later, when Trump was in his 40s, that line seems more threatening than many Americans realize.
The same applies to talk of regional expansion, a topic that no president has seriously pursued in more than a century. The last president to succeed in dramatically increasing America’s agricultural acreage was, as it happened, William McKinley. Territories including Cuba, Hawaii, and the Philippines were added to America during his first term, the latter the result of victory over Spain. “The truth is, I didn’t want the Philippines, and when they came to us as a gift from the gods, I didn’t know what to do with them,” McKinley said. America has faltered in fighting the insurgency there. For Trump, the point of territorial expansion is clear. (And extraterrestrial, too — he believes the country’s manifest destiny is to plant its flag on Mars.) America must become a “growing nation” again.
Looking back today, the greatest challenges facing American foreign policy are managing competition with China, conflict and instability in the Middle East, and the Russian occupation of Ukraine – not the fees American warships pay to sail through the canal. But Trump only mentioned China in the context of the channel. The Middle East appeared in a self-congratulatory segment about the hostages. He did not mention Ukraine at all, other than to point out that America provides “unlimited funding” to protect foreign borders while refusing to defend its own borders (claiming that “millions” of criminal immigrants are crossing into the country). Even what he means by restoring the canal is uncertain. Would he really accept lower transit fees? Trump has been president for four years, campaigned for the last four, and has a reputation for being straight-talking — and on the biggest questions, being vague.
The same is true of tariffs, where his worldview overlaps with McKinley’s. The 25th President signed the Dingley Act in 1897, which imposed tariffs of more than 50%. In his first inaugural address, McKinley said this was intended to preserve the domestic market for American manufacturers, among other things. In a speech to a joint session of Congress called to pass tariffs, he presented it as a wise measure to finance the government without raising taxes. Mr. Trump thinks the same way. He added: “We will impose customs duties and taxes on foreign countries to enrich our citizens.” “Enormous amounts of money will flow into our treasury, coming from foreign sources.” Here too, it is not yet clear what Trump will actually do.
After McKinley’s assassination by an anarchist, this approach to protecting manufacturing became associated with the Democratic Party. McKinley’s formula combined what is now seen as left-leaning politics with proximity to big business associated with the right. Trump, like McKinley, is gathering them back into his Republican Party. McKinley’s 1896 campaign received a donation of $250,000 from J.P. Morgan and the same amount from Standard Oil (nearly $10 million each in 2025 funds). Trump’s inauguration reserved prominent seats for Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg, all of whom gave money to the inaugural committee. The president declared the arrival of a new “golden age.” But regarding tariffs, territorial expansion, and fixation with Panama, what he seems to want is a return to the golden solution.■
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