William McKinley hasn’t had a starring role on the American political stage like this in 124 years.
There he was, lauded in President Trump’s inauguration speech on Monday, for making “our country very rich through tariffs and through talent,” and for paving America’s way to building the Panama Canal. “We’re taking it back,” Mr. Trump declared, after an ode to the Republican from Canton, Ohio.
A few hours later, he signed an executive order that praised how the 25th president “heroically led our nation to victory in the Spanish-American War” — not a conflict most modern presidents have wanted to dwell on — while vastly expanding America’s reach around the world. It was, of course, McKinley who seized the Philippines, Guam and Puerto Rico as the spoils of that war when it ended in 1898, back in the day when the United States called them “colonies” rather than “territories.” And it was McKinley who annexed Hawaii, making possible, a bit more than a century later, the Trump International Hotel in Waikiki.
For these accomplishments, one of Mr. Trump’s first acts was to restore the name Mount McKinley to the highest peak in North America, reversing President Barack Obama’s decision to call it “Denali,” its ancient name.
It is an unlikely restoration for an American president whose little-noted but highly consequential time in office was sandwiched between Grover Cleveland and the swashbuckling Theodore Roosevelt. But the new attention says much about Mr. Trump’s ambitions for his second term. His prescription for curing whatever ails America includes expanding its physical footprint — to Greenland, to Panama and even to the surface of Mars.
Naturally, that makes a hero of the last president to pull it off — even if McKinley did so reluctantly and had more than a few regrets before he was assassinated by an anarchist.
“McKinley hasn’t had a moment in the sun like this in a long time,” Justin F. Jackson, an associate professor at Bard College and the author of “The Work of Empire,” a history of McKinley’s time, which is being published this spring. And while Professor Jackson has his doubts about how much Mr. Trump actually knows about McKinley — other than that he loved tariffs and had a good eye for waterfront property — “he is not wrong on what he accomplished, or how he consolidated the power of the Republican Party at the end of the 19th century.”
One thing that is already clear in the new Trump White House is that Mr. Trump is dead serious about gaining control over Greenland and the Panama Canal. (And less interested in Mars than Elon Musk.)
Yet his ultimate goal is not clear. Does the former real estate developer really want to own them? Or is he using a threat of gunboat diplomacy to get some more bases in Greenland and lower fees to transit the Canal Zone? No one around him will say.
In the case of Greenland, Mr. Trump has talked openly about buying it. At a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate in early January, he repeatedly said he would not rule out the use of economic or military coercion to fulfill his territorial ambitions. “I’m not going to commit to that,” he said, a remarkable comment considering that Greenland is an autonomous territory of Denmark, a NATO member, which provides for the vast island’s defense and represents its diplomatic interests.
His argument for buying, or seizing, Greenland has varied. He has noted — correctly — that Chinese and Russian ships and submarines are cruising the Arctic near Greenland’s territory, as ice fields are shrinking. He has talked about America’s need for Greenland’s vast stores of minerals and gas, and its strategic importance to the U.S. military. (There is a major air base — now under the command of U.S. Space Force — on the island. But only a few hundred troops are there; during the Cold War there were thousands.)
The Panama Canal, truly an outgrowth of McKinley’s initiatives, is a different and more complex case. Mr. Trump has repeatedly claimed that the 51-mile-long link connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans has fallen into Chinese hands, which is simply false. It is run by the Panama Canal Authority. China has maintained ports and terminals on both sides of the canal for nearly 30 years and accounts for about a fifth of all the cargo that uses the waterway. The only country that uses it more is the United States.
Still, for reasons that are still unclear, Mr. Trump began his campaign to take back the canal around Christmas, when he wrote on Truth Social that the “wonderful soldiers of China” were “lovingly, but illegally, operating the Panama Canal.” During his Inaugural Address, he said, “China is operating the Panama Canal and we didn’t give it to China. We gave it to Panama and we’re taking it back.”
All this has echoes of the McKinley era, the last time that the United States seized considerable territory. But Mr. Trump’s eagerness to grab the lands contrasts with McKinley’s second thoughts about the burden of maintaining all that real estate after he vanquished the Spanish.
“If old Dewey had just sailed away when he smashed the Spanish fleet, what a lot of trouble he would have saved us,” McKinley was later quoted as saying in one history of the era, referring to Adm. George Dewey, who led the attack on Manila Bay and became an instant American hero. (He nearly ran against McKinley in 1900, but ended up pulling out of the race and endorsing him for re-election.)
McKinley confessed he could not have found the Philippines on a map “within 2,000 miles.” It was either false modesty or an effort to escape responsibility for ordering Admiral Dewey to take Manila. But it turned out to be an expensive acquisition: the subsequent Philippine-American War across the vast archipelago lasted years, at phenomenal human cost.
It is unclear how far Mr. Trump will press his McKinley analogies. In the Oval Office, he has rehung a portrait of Andrew Jackson, the man who took Florida, but the man from Canton, Ohio, killed 123 years ago, is nowhere to be seen.
Professor Jackson thinks that Mr. Trump “may be channeling the wrong Republican president.”
“The one he wants is Teddy Roosevelt,’’ he said. “He is more like Trump, long on threats and but probably, in the end, less militaristic than McKinley.”
But, he added, “McKinley loved his tariffs.”
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