Former US President William McKinley. Photo: AP/file photo.
By Atilio Borón – Feb 10, 2025
By elevating the figure of William McKinley, President of the United States between March 4, 1897 and September 14, 1901, Donald Trump seeks to find a universally acclaimed precedent in the US political history for controversial policies.
McKinley was assassinated, while Trump miraculously escaped the same fate on July 13, 2024, in Pennsylvania. But unlike the New Yorker, McKinley was a man of the political class. Except for a brief two-year period (1869-1871) when he practiced law, his entire life revolved around politics.
At 33, McKinley entered the House of Representatives as a member of the Republican Party. In 1890, he proposed and successfully passed a law that increased tariffs on imports. Shortly after, he was elected governor of Ohio and, in 1897, President of the United States.
It was during his presidency that the US became a world power: he achieved the annexation of Hawaii by taking over the local government’s four million dollar debt, and the following year, he took advantage of the defeat that Cuban mambises (independence fighters) had inflicted on the Spanish army to involve the US in Cuba’s War of Independence and take over that island, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam.
The pretext was to “provide aid” to the Cuban patriots, even though they didn’t need it. However, to strip Spain of its territories in the Caribbean and the Pacific, Washington needed to enter the war.
Since the Cubans did not ask for their help, an incident had to be fabricated to enrage US public opinion and justify US intervention. The self-sabotage of the Battleship Maine, anchored in Havana Bay to evacuate US citizens, which mysteriously exploded on February 15, 1898, precipitated US entry into a war that had already been won by the Cubans but was snatched away by McKinley.
It was under his presidency that the United States transitioned from being a regional power in Central America and the Caribbean to taking its first steps toward building a global empire.
And it is this man, McKinley— a supporter of economic warfare through tariffs, direct military action (as in the case of the war against Spain), and the use of money to buy an island like Hawaii—who has been Trump, and not by coincidence. It was McKinley after all, after defeating the Spanish monarchy in the Philippines and Guam, ordered Pentagon cartographers to include those two distant Pacific islands on US maps.
This brief sketch helps decipher and contextualize some of Trump’s initiatives. For example, ordering the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. His blind faith in import tariffs has its most notable predecessor in McKinley, except that in today’s interconnected global economy, such a policy is doomed to fail— a failure Trump himself will pay dearly for.
As an unscrupulous businessman, he believes everything has a price, that anything can be bought or sold. Patriotism, honor, and dignity are meaningless words to the tycoon.
If McKinley acquired Hawaii, why not do the same with Greenland, especially when Denmark and the European governments display scandalous apathy toward Trump’s outbursts? Why not use economic blackmail to turn Canada into the 51st state of the United States?
And although there may be no need for a self-sabotage incident—the current version of the Maine— lies, fake news and the cowardice or passivity of many politicians could have the same effect.
If George W. Bush convinced the world that there were “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq, which was blatantly false, why wouldn’t the powerful media apparatus controlled by the US globally not be capable of deceiving half the world with a scandalous lie, such as presence of Chinese soldiers in the Panama Canal or the claim that China’s Communist Party secretly runs the US administration? Or convincing global public opinion that someone who enters the United States illegally is a criminal, as serial liar Marco Rubio claimed?
Beyond these parallels, the truth is that with his bluster and contradictions, Trump represents a danger to international coexistence and a return to the most brutal and shameless phase of imperialism. Those naive souls who thought that imperialism had disappeared, replaced by a benevolent globalization, are now retreating from the stage.
Imperialism exists, and will continue to spread pain and death everywhere, destroying the environment, provoking wars, and spreading poverty far and wide. Trump’s illusory attempt to resurrect American unipolarism, or “American superiority,” is a chapter sealed shut by the history of an international system whose current architecture has radically and irreversibly shifted in the direction of a multipolar power configuration, whose influence grows day by day.
Translation: Orinoco Tribune
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Atilio Borón
Atilio A. Borón is a Harvard Graduate professor of political theory at the University of Buenos Aires and was executive secretary of the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO). He has published widely in several languages a variety of books and articles on political theory and philosophy, social theory, and comparative studies on the capitalist development in the periphery. He is an international analyst, writer and journalist and profoundly Latinoamerican.
