This article compares President Trump's vision for a 'golden age' with the 'Gilded Age' of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Drawing on the expertise of Stanford history professor emeritus Richard White, the text explores similarities and differences between the two eras, focusing on topics like industrialization, tariffs, presidential preferences, and the role of wealth and government.
President Donald Trump , with his usual bombast, has declared that his second term will be a new “golden age” for the country. Some critics have argued the US actually seems to be in something like the Gilded Age, the period in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, after Reconstruction and before the Progressive era, when robber barons and industrialists built great fortunes but inequality grew.
During his first term, he was a big fan of Andrew Jackson, but now he’s a big fan of William McKinley, maybe the final president of the Gilded Age, depending on when you’re cutting it off. What do you see in William McKinley and his presidency that would excite Trump? McKinley always was pro-tariff, but he modified his stance on tariffs. McKinley learned from the disaster of the McKinley Tariff. The McKinley Tariff swept the Republicans out of power in the following election. And so McKinley, when he came back, certainly still Republicans were pro-tariff, but he had a much more modest set of tariffs than he had the first time around. So I would never say that McKinley turned against tariffs, but certainly he modified his views. Trump’s deep state vs.
The other thing that I think could be a tie-in to the Gilded Age could be that during Trump’s inauguration, the tech titans amassed behind him. There are obvious comparisons to robber barons or industrialists. To your mind, is there an antecedent for somebody like Elon Musk and his influence today?
He didn’t, but plenty of others before him — Carnegie was involved in politics. Tom Scott, who has one of the first great railroad fortunes, is very, very involved in politics. The Gilded Age barons owned newspapers like Jeff Bezos, they are people who are intimately involved with the lobby. They invent the modern lobby through corporations. So there might not be an exact parallel to Elon Musk, but remember, Elon Musk is a politician who’s a few months old.
TRUMP GILDED AGE ECONOMICS TARIFFS HISTORY
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