Historians talk about the long 19th century ending in 1914. Precisely when the 20th century ended is, in this sense, debatable. But it is over. Mr Trump is still constrained by some of America’s oldest institutions, including federalism and the courts. But he has thrown off many of the recent ones. The governance reforms after Watergate no longer apply. The consensus that America should be a benign superpower, born out of the ashes after 1945, has gone, too. And Mr Trump wants more: to see America unleashed, freed from norms, from political correctness, from the bureaucracy and, in some cases, even from the law. What’s left is something old and new, an ideology from the railroad era mixed with the ambition to plant the flag on Mars.
Out of the 19th century comes the idea that the frontier should always be expanding, including by seizing other countries’ territory. “We’re taking it back,” Mr Trump growled of the Panama Canal, in his inaugural speech. America must be “a growing nation”, he added, one that “increases our wealth, expands our territory.” Although this might reflect a passing enthusiasm, presidents have not talked like that for a century. The only one of his predecessors Mr Trump spent any time on in the speech was that “great president” William McKinley, whose term began in 1897. Mr Trump is not a reader of presidential biographies. He is not about to make bimetallism the issue of the day (though both he and the first lady do now have their own competing currencies). But it was a revealing choice.
McKinley was an imperialist, who added Hawaii, Guam, the Philippines and Puerto Rico to American territory. McKinley also loved tariffs, at least at first. Before he was president, he pressed Congress to pass a bill to raise them to 50%, a level exceeding even Mr Trump’s (admittedly hazy) plans. He was also backed by the commercial titans of the time: J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller both donated about $8m in today’s money to his campaign.
The new “golden age” Mr Trump envisions thus resembles the Gilded Age, at least superficially. Mr Trump wants to be as unencumbered by 20th-century norms as McKinley was. But the 21st-century presidency is much more powerful. Project 1897 is combined with Project 2025.
McKinley governed when the federal government had 150,000 employees, many fewer than the new Department of Government Efficiency could ever dream of. By contrast Mr Trump’s executive branch directly employs 4.3m people, including 1.3m men and women in uniform. The president has at his disposal the mightiest military force ever assembled. As a share of GDP, the federal government spends nine times more than it did in the 1890s. In order to fight two world wars and end racial segregation in the 20th century, the executive branch accumulated more and more power. Writing about this in the 1970s, Arthur Schlesinger described this presidency as “imperial.” It was meant as a slur: the modern America didn’t do empire. Yet now it has an imperial president who spies enemies to conquer not only abroad, but at home, too.
