William McKinley and the Dawn of Corporate Capitalism

Trump’s comparison of himself with McKinley makes sense in a number of ways. Trump has put new, far-reaching tariffs at the center of his economic policy, and McKinley was one of the most vigorous champions of tariffs in American history. Like Trump, McKinley presided over a Republican Party that was venomously anti-immigrant (though McKinley himself was somewhat softer on the question). McKinley also ran the White House as a corporate services provider, in much the way Trump promises to. Indeed, as an anti-immigrant billionaire whose main policy agenda is tax cuts for the rich, Trump would hardly have stood out as exceptional in McKinley’s GOP.

Here, however, is precisely the irony of Trump claiming McKinley. The administration of George W. Bush, whose Republicanism Trump largely defined himself in opposition to, also cast itself as McKinley’s successor. Karl Rove, Bush’s consigliere, openly aspired to be a twenty-first century version of McKinley’s advisor Mark Hanna. Just as McKinley’s election in 1896 inaugurated a three-decade period in which Republicans only lost two presidential elections, the GOP of the Bush years saw itself as building a “permanent Republican majority.’’

Trump’s claim on McKinley thus represents the continuity of historical imagination in the Republican Party. For all his boasting of how he has broken the mold of Republican politics, his McKinley obsession forms common ground with his nemesis Rove.

In another respect, however, the claim of both Bush and Trump on McKinley’s legacy reveals how Republican politics have changed. While Bush was a dedicated free-trader who tried to steer the GOP in a more pro-immigrant direction, there was one area in which he was decidedly more McKinley-like than Trump: his backing from the American corporate elite.

McKinley’s administration came at the dawn of corporate capitalism in the United States and was a product of corporate political mobilization as no previous presidency had been. In the early 1890s, the economy was hit with a depression whose scale was apocalyptic. Until the 1930s, it was known as the Great Depression. The economic devastation, greatly exacerbated by the austerity of the gold standard, proved fertile ground for radical movements, most notably the radical farmers’ movement known as the Populists and the still-fragile union movement in the cities. In 1896, these forces were able to seize control of the Democratic Party, nominating William Jennings Bryan to run for president on a platform of opposing the gold standard.

This development was witnessed with horror by the country’s economic elite. James Hill, a railroad owner who had been a Democrat, wrote to J. P. Morgan, the richest man of the era, that “there is an epidemic craze among the farmers and . . . those who receive wages or salaries,” and pledged to do whatever necessary to elect William McKinley. Welcoming such latter-day supporters with open arms, the Republicans campaigned as the party of conservative property and propriety, holding the line against Democratic radicalism. Teddy Roosevelt, McKinley’s vice-presidential candidate, accused the Democrats of seeking to supplant “the government of Washington and Lincoln [with] a red government of lawlessness and dishonesty as fantastic and vicious as the Paris Commune.”

Mark Hanna, who ran McKinley’s campaign, turned corporate anxiety into campaign cash. He developed a system of assessments by which industries large and small would be required to donate to the campaign. The robber baron interests of Morgan and John D. Rockefeller each contributed $250,000 to the campaign. From these two alone, Hanna raised more money than Bryan would spend in the entire campaign.

All told, the McKinley campaign raised between $4 and 7 million, a staggering sum for the time. Virtually all of American capital was united behind him.

In this respect, Trump’s situation could not be more different. Though Trump has various high-profile billionaire backers, like Elon Musk and Stephen Schwarzman, the majority of big capitalists have decisively rejected him. When Trump spoke at the Business Roundtable over the summer, CEOs came out of the meeting convinced that “Trump doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” His plans for a massive tariff regime have virtually no support among the American corporate elite.

Matthew Karp recently summarized how this has shaped campaign finance, finding that

donors in the internet industry have given . . . 82 percent of their political contributions to Democrats this year; in the software industry, the number is 72 percent. . . . Since 2020, venture-capital donors have made 75 percent of their contributions to Democrats, while hedge-fund donors have given 68 percent. Big Pharma leans blue, as does Big Law. In the same period, donors at the Big Three management-consulting firms — McKinsey, Bain, and Boston Consulting Group — have given 95 percent of their combined contributions to Democrats.

Trump still draws plenty of support from the car dealership owners and other petty capitalists that have long served as the backbone of the Republican Party. But among big capitalists, his support is incredibly thin.

Chaos and Paralysis

Political scientists describe the thirty-year period following McKinley’s election as “the system of 1896.” During these years, Republicans largely dominated the North, while the Democrats were reduced to a rump in the former Confederacy. Only the splitting of the Republican Party, between Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft in 1912, allowed Woodrow Wilson to break the GOP’s hold on the presidency.

Bereft of the unified business support that sustained the party in the system of 1896, Trump will accomplish no such realignment in the event that he wins the election. Indeed, he will almost certainly fail to win the popular vote, and his prospects depend entirely on the undemocratic workings of the Electoral College. Should Trump win, his victory will rest on the thinnest of electoral mandates, and he will lack the support from capital that allowed the GOP of McKinley’s era to so thoroughly hegemonize American politics.

Instead, a second Trump presidency is likely to replicate the dynamics of chaos and paralysis that characterized his first administration. Many commentators fear that this will not be the case, pointing to the Trump team’s efforts at identifying staff who will carry out his orders without qualms and arguing that a second Trump administration will lack the guardrails that restrained the first. But this perspective tends to overlook that what Trump gains in loyalty by appointing staffers from Trumpworld, he tends to lose in bureaucratic competency and experience. The ship of state is difficult to steer, and even the most toxic combination of ideological fervor and toadyism is a poor substitute for administrative competence.

First as Tragedy, Then as Farce

In 1901, William McKinley was assassinated by the Polish American anarchist Leon Czolgosz. His death was part of the historic high point of anarchist propaganda of the deed, that era from roughly the last third of the nineteenth century through the first third of the twentieth, when presidents, prime ministers, tsars, and kings were all felled by assassins flying the black flag.

In July 2024, Donald Trump was fired on by an assassin with no discernibly coherent political beliefs whatsoever. His shooter instead seems to be an instance of a more recent social type: the motiveless mass shooter. Lacking any grand ideological project, or even personal grievance, he issued instead from what Philip Roth once called “the indigenous American berserk.”

The distance between the two assassins mirrors the distance between Trump himself and McKinley. With all his talk of McKinley, Trump is gesturing toward a time when the Republican Party sat atop a hegemonic bloc of American capital, and from that position reshaped American government and society into a form appropriate to the new age of corporate capital. Trump’s own position is rather less exalted. Lacking support from capital, he will be utterly reliant on his control over the state, and successful use of its powers, to achieve his aims. The likely result is an even weaker administration than the original. First as tragedy, then as farce.