Churchill once implied that history would be kind to him because “I propose to write that history myself.” As we know from his paroxysms on Truth Social, Donald Trump is barely capable of writing a single coherent sentence. But he has speechwriters, so Monday’s inaugural address—which George Will accurately described as “worse than 59 others”—was intelligible enough to make clear that Trump won’t let facts or reality curb his ambitions this term. He’ll even rewrite history if that’s what it takes.
Thus, Trump said in his speech that President William McKinley, whose name he has ordered to be restored to Mount Denali, “was a natural businessman” who “made our country very rich through tariffs and through talent.” He credited that wealth in the eventual building of the Panama Canal, which he said cost 38,000 American lives. He added that “above all, China is operating the Panama Canal.”
Trump has failed fact-checks on some of these claims, and will further fail my own fact-check later in this piece. But setting the record straight—or mocking Trump’s ignorance of history, as some on the left have done—is insufficient, and perhaps misses the point entirely. Trump does not care whether his view of history is true. He only needs his supplicants in the media, Silicon Valley, and Washington to assert that he’s right, thus giving him the political capital and power to advance his patently authoritarian plans.
Rewriting history is a trademark of modern despots. Twentieth-century fascists “loved slogans that resonated like a new religion, and preferred creative myths to history or journalism,” Yale historian Tom Snyder notes in On Tyranny. “They used new media, which at the time was radio, to create a drumbeat of propaganda that aroused feelings before people had time to ascertain facts.”
Trump has his propaganda machine: Salem Media dominates the airwaves and perpetuates right-wing ditto-heads, and he has Fox News, Newsmax, One America News, and a slew of podcasters, YouTube bros, social media networks (especially Elon Musk’s X), and print “pundits” to do his bidding, plus little resistance and perhaps considerable support from outlets like The Washington Post and ABC News. After his loss in 2020, Trump used his media force to push his lies about a stolen election and to reframe January 6 as a “patriotic” protest that got out of hand rather than an attempt to overthrow the government. Now he’ll use it to sell imaginative narratives to promote his worst objectives.
Every autocrat has essentially done the same. Lenin oversaw a rewriting of history that demonized opponents of the Russian Revolution and made indoctrination campaigns a key part of Russian education. Trump will bring his particular ideology into the classroom as well: He said Monday that “we have an education system that teaches our children to be ashamed of themselves [and] hate our country,” promising, “All of this will change starting today and will change very quickly.”
The very next sentence he uttered demonstrates the type of “history” he expects children to learn: “Our recent election is a mandate to completely and totally reverse a horrible betrayal, and all of these many betrayals that have taken place, and to give the people back their faith, their wealth, their democracy, and indeed their freedom. From this moment on, America’s decline is over.” He declared January 20 to be “Liberation Day.”
In truth, there is no decline: Bidenomics produced low unemployment and tremendous growth, and Biden brought dignity, compassion, and competence back to the Oval Office. And the only liberation Trump is providing is for the coup mob that attacked the Capitol on January, nearly all of whom he quickly pardoned.
As other autocratic leaders throughout history have done, Trump is perpetuating a lie designed to justify his actions and anger the populace. Perhaps he’s learned from Vladimir Putin, who has whitewashed Russian history and portrayed the war in Ukraine as a continuation of the effort to oust the Nazis from Europe. Or from Xi Jinping, who is so intent on presenting his own version of Chinese history, he’s made it a crime to criticize those he promotes as heroes.
In a way, Trump’s limited understanding of history allows him to easily contort it. In his first term, he made Andrew Jackson into the president he most sought to emulate, despite Jackson being a slaveowner and perhaps the greatest genocidaire of Native Americans in U.S. history. Jackson, a strong believer in tariffs, practically single-handedly brought on the Panic of 1837 through the credit crisis he caused by refusing to recharter the Second Bank of the United States and requiring that federal land purchases only be done with gold or silver, greatly restricting the money supply.
Trump may bring us into an economic crisis through polar opposite means: his advocacy of a virtually unregulated crypto market, which he’s made clear through his appointment of David Sacks as “White House A.I. & Crypto Czar,” and through the get-richer-quicker schemes of himself and Melania, who launched their own meme coins just before the election.
Trump’s new icon is another tariff advocate, William McKinley, the Civil War hero and Gilded Age president who led us through the Spanish-American War and a period of imperialism that saw us occupy Cuba, officially annex Hawaii, and take Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. Trump, too, has been expressing expansionist desires of late, openly coveting Greenland, stating his desire to retake the Panama Canal, and refusing to rule out military force for either. He’s even mockingly suggested making Canada the “51st state.”
Ironically, while Jackson and Trump might just have gotten along splendidly, it’s doubtful McKinley—who was so compassionate as to plead for mercy for his own assassin—would’ve found Trump’s character fitting for the office of the presidency. McKinley suffered criticism without public complaint; Trump responds to critics with wee-hour Truth Social rants.
Nonetheless, Trump has brought McKinley back into the limelight, pointing to the Gilded Age as the apparent time of greatness that MAGA wants to return us to, a time when women and most minorities could not vote, there was staggering wealth inequality (well, that one we still have), LGBTQ+ people all had to remain in the closet forever, there were no income taxes, and the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act was still in effect.
“President McKinley made our country very rich through tariffs and through talent,” Trump said in his address. “He was a natural businessman and gave Teddy Roosevelt the money for many of the great things he did, including the Panama Canal, which has foolishly been given to the country of Panama after the United States … spent more money than ever spent on a project before and lost 38,000 lives.” Trump went on to say that Panama is allowing China to control the canal, a claim that has no basis in truth: 75 percent of shipping through the canal derives from the U.S.
Unsurprisingly, Trump has much of this history wrong. We could dismiss his misstatements as mere errors if it weren’t for the fact that they seem to suit his causes so well.
First off, McKinley wasn’t a businessman, he was a lawyer. He did support the building of an isthmian canal—that part is true. As Robert Merry explains in his biography, William McKinley: Architect of the American Century, “the president used his Annual Message of December 5, 1898, to declare an isthmian canal ‘indispensable’ to U.S. interests and argue that America’s new global standing ‘more imperatively than ever calls for [the canal’s] control by this Government.’” To make it possible, McKinley’s secretary of state, John Hay, successfully negotiated the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty with Britain (later tweaked under Roosevelt), overriding the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty of 1850 that had required mutual cooperation between the nations for such a canal. Yet Merry notes that there was a tide of politicians and military people pushing for the canal, and that they were considerably more aggressive than McKinley.
Nicaragua was considered the most plausible location, despite the previous French efforts in Panama, and McKinley went to his death presuming it would be there if anywhere. But Roosevelt seized upon the Panamanian revolt from Colombia that made the Panamanian canal possible. Hay, who had stayed on, negotiated a new treaty with the Panamanians: the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty, which allowed us to build the canal. We began operating the canal when it opened in 1914. Over 60 years later, the Carter administration negotiated new treaties with Panama that guaranteed the neutrality of the canal, permitted the U.S. to defend that neutrality, and gave the canal to Panama as of December 31, 1999.
Trump asserted that the United States “lost 38,000 lives in the building of the Panama Canal.” This is an egregious and purposeful misrepresentation. He is conflating numbers and expanding U.S. deaths in the same way other autocratic leaders have exaggerated their countries’ sacrifices to justify imperial actions. The French lost the most people: 20,000 workers. Deaths during the U.S. effort were likely between 5,600 and 6,000. But here’s the catch: Only a few hundred of those were U.S. citizens; the rest were all migrant workers imported from the West Indies, including from Jamaica and Barbados. The reason for these disparate numbers has to do with the protections we provided: White workers benefited from the advances made by the chief sanitary officer, William C. Gorgas, in curbing the mosquito threat, whereas the migrants received beds without nets and much fewer protections.
Equally false is Trump’s claim that McKinley’s tariffs created mountains of wealth. As Douglas A. Irwin explained for the Peterson Institute, McKinley was behind the Tariff Act of 1890 when he was a congressman, which sent prices soaring. As president, Irwin says, “McKinley was more forward-looking … [and] embraced trade reciprocity,” believing it was “time to move away from protective tariffs through trade agreements.” Tariffs remained high on a number of products, and it was the American consumer who was forced to pay. But the boon industrial times allowed us to succeed despite this, Merry says, not because of it. And had McKinley not eased his position, it’s likely the tariffs would’ve done considerably more damage.
Irwin notes another way McKinley diverged from Trump: “McKinley was also very careful about not demonizing immigrants,” whom he saw as providing high economic value.
Trump likes the idea of a Second Gilded Age, perhaps because he himself is gilded: showy on the outside, empty on the inside. Yet his rhetoric and his actions are much more in line with the Futurists, the movement that preceded fascism in Italy, which promoted the idea that speed and technology would be our salvation and asserted that we should burn down the libraries, museums, and institutions of the past. Or, you might say, “Move fast and break things,” as our new oligarchy promises to do.