Trump loves the Gilded Age and its tariffs. It was a great time for the rich but not for the many

"We were at our richest from 1870 to 1913. That's when we were a tariff country. And then they went to an income tax concept," Trump said days after taking office. "It's fine. It's OK. But it would have been very much better."

The desire to re-create that era is fueled by Trump's fondness for tariffs and his admiration for the nation's 25th president, William McKinley, a Republican who was in office from 1897 until being assassinated in 1901.

Though Trump's early implementation of tariffs has been inconsistent — with him imposing them, then pulling many back — he has been steadfast in endorsing the idea of 21st century protectionism. There have even been suggestions that higher import tariffs on the country's foreign trading partners could eventually replace the federal income tax.

Experts on the era say Trump is idealizing a time rife with government and business corruption, social turmoil and inequality. They argue he's also dramatically overestimating the role tariffs played in stimulating an economy that grew mostly due to factors other than the U.S. raising taxes on imported goods.

And Gilded Age policies, they maintain, have virtually nothing to do with how trade works in a globalized, modern economy.

"The most astonishing thing for historians is that nobody in the Gilded Age economy — except for the very rich — wanted to live in the Gilded Age economy," said Richard White, a history professor emeritus at Stanford University.

Trump says high tariffs and low interest rates, like those the U.S. had after the Civil War, can hastily pay down today's federal debt and fatten government coffers while boosting domestic manufacturers and enticing foreign producers to move to the U.S.

It's not a new theme for him.

"I am a Tariff Man," Trump declared in a 2018 online post. Campaigning for a second term last fall, Trump said of the McKinley era, "We were a very wealthy country, and we're going to be doing that now." Today, he says "tariff" is his favorite word and represents "a very powerful weapon that politicians haven't used because they were either dishonest, stupid or paid off in some other form."

The White House has rushed to raise tariffs on imports from China and on aluminum and steel made abroad while promising that import levies will soon increase on the European Union, as well as new, foreign-made cars, microchips and pharmaceuticals. Trump also increased tariffs on Canada and Mexico, though he later delayed most of them.

He has similar plans for potentially every country the U.S. does business with, saying broad "reciprocal" import taxes are coming April 2nd and will be consistent with levies other countries charge U.S. manufacturers to export their goods.

Dartmouth College economics professor Douglas Irwin said Trump advocating for modern tariffs by pointing to the 1890s is flawed.

"We did grow rapidly in the late 19th century," he said. "But it's a stretch to attribute it to tariffs."

"The president is more accurate when he paints with a broader brush and says, 'Look, this entire period with fiscal surpluses we grew rapidly.' That's true of this 40-year period," added Irwin, author of "Clashing over Commerce: A History of U.S. Trade Policy."

"But, when you dig down to the details and say, 'We raised tariffs in this instance,' that's where things go awry. Or the story doesn't quite hold together as well," Irwin said.

Was America really at its wealthiest from 1870 to 1913?

The Gilded Age featured extraordinary wealth for a small class of people that largely obscured rampant poverty for many other Americans. The name comes from a 1873 novel, co-written by Mark Twain, which satirized the greed and deceit of the era's government and politicians.

Many contemporary leaders were openly influenced by the famed robber barons, builders of monopolies who stoked industrialization while shaping the way millions of other Americans lived and worked.

Rockefeller became the exemplar of the era when his Standard Oil empire made him the world's first billionaire. Morgan was an investment banker and legendary financier of industrial interests. Cornelius Vanderbilt amassed a breathtaking fortune through shipping and railroads, while steel magnate Andrew Carnegie was also a dedicated philanthropist who argued the rich had a moral responsibility to use their wealth to better a deeply unequal society.

Overall, the U.S. economy grew rapidly between 1870 and 1913, though there were dips and recessions, too.

Some historians call it the second industrial revolution because of major increases in manufacturing and factory output. New industries like steel, electricity and petrochemicals boomed, as did sectors including construction and machinery.

But White said those years were marked by erratic economic growth, and those upturns were mostly fueled by millions of immigrants joining the U.S. workforce. Indeed, the number of U.S. residents jumped from 38.5 million-plus in 1870 to more than 106 million by 1920.

Another factor was the seizing of land from Native Americans during U.S. expansion west. That meant exploiting natural resources along the way — including gold, silver, timber, grazing and farmland, as well as coal, copper and oil, especially after the discovery of the Spindletop geyser in Texas in 1901.

Average wages rose, but so did inequality, with almost no social safety net. Working conditions were often so abhorrent, meanwhile, that the labor movement began gaining strength, as did progressive politicians clamoring for breaking up monopolies.

"This is the height of antimonopoly, political turmoil, the rise of labor in the United States," said White, author of "The Republic for Which it Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896." "And the reason was, people did not regard this as a particularly healthy economy."

In fact, despite the growth, standards of living fell, including life expectancy and key health indicators, White said.

Could tariffs replace the federal income tax?

The modern federal income tax came into fruition with the ratification of 16th Amendment in 1913, ending the 43-year era when Trump says the country was wealthiest. He has not expressly detailed plans to end a national income tax since retaking the White House, and he can't do so without an act of Congress and upending the federal budget in almost incalculable ways.

In fiscal year 2024, the federal government collected about $4 trillion in individual income tax and tax withholdings, according to the Treasury Department, compared with customs duties accounting for around $76.4 billion.

But the president nonetheless signed a Day 1 executive order calling for the creation of the External Revenue Service to "collect tariffs, duties, and other foreign trade-related revenues." Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick suggested Trump's goal there was "to abolish the Internal Revenue Service and let all the outsiders pay."

Republican strategist Karl Rove, author of "The Triumph of William McKinley: Why the Election of 1896 Still Matters," has defended the notion of low, reciprocal tariffs on U.S. foreign trading partners.

But Rove also says that tariffs can't realistically replace a federal income tax. He noted in a February op-ed that from 1863 to 1913 tariffs brought in nearly half the U.S. government's revenue but last year they accounted for less than 2% of federal revenue.

Why does Trump so revere McKinley?

In his inaugural address, Trump called McKinley a "great president" and "natural business man," who he said "made our country very rich through tariffs and through talent." Hours later, he signed an executive order overturning an Obama administration directive and renaming America's tallest peak Mount McKinley.

But today's economy is immeasurably different than in McKinley's time.

Global communication is now virtually instantaneous. Back then, communication was cumbersome and products were often fully assembled before being exported. Shipping could take months. Today's goods often contain raw material components or parts that need to be assembled that are sourced all over the world and then built in places different from where they are ultimately sold.

The disruption of such carefully calibrated, multinational logistical systems by the coronavirus pandemic was a key reason why everything from leather couches to flooring to microchips for new cars suddenly became scarce. And that helped feed record inflation beginning in 2021 that continues to dog the U.S. economy today.

Robert W. Merry, author of "President McKinley: Architect of the American Century," said McKinley was the leading voice on tariffs at a time when they dominated policy discussions because they were the federal government's chief source of revenue, given that no income tax existed.

But Trump differs with McKinley in using tariffs as a "bludgeon to get other countries to do our bidding on efforts that have nothing to do with revenue, or economic matters or trade." The president has done that with Canada and Mexico, using tariff threats to try to force those countries to take harder lines against drug smuggling and illegal immigration.

"Nobody would have even considered such a thing in McKinley's day," Merry said.

McKinley champions the Tariff Act of 1890

McKinley hailed from Canton, in northeast Ohio and was son of an iron foundries owner who was especially sensitive to overseas competition. He won a seat in Congress representing a steel-producing district and so promoted tariffs that one humor magazine used a cartoon on its cover to unflatteringly dub him the "Napoleon of Protectionism."

As chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, McKinley championed the Tariff Act of 1890, which set the then-highest import tax in U.S. history, raising taxes to 49.5% on 1,500-plus items — everything from glass to tin plates to cayenne pepper. The results were quickly poor for the economy and for Republicans.

"It led to an increase in prices, a kind of inflation, even before the bill took effect," Merry said. "The argument was, it was carte blanche for retailers and industrialists who basically jacked up their prices unnecessarily."

Americans dealt Republicans landslide congressional defeats during the 1890 midterms, voting scores of incumbents out of office — including McKinley. The tariff fallout also helped Grover Cleveland win the White House for Democrats in 1892, after he lost his reelection the previous cycle.

McKinley rebounded, though. He was elected Ohio governor and eventually won the presidency in 1896 on a campaign slogan Trump has repeated: "I am a tariff man standing on a tariff platform." His campaign also got boosts from big donations by major industrialists like Rockefeller, who were strongly opposed to McKinley's populist Democratic opponent, William Jennings Bryan.

Just as in McKinley's time, today's business titans have worked to ingratiate themselves to Trump. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was among the technology leaders who traveled to Trump's Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, where Elon Musk, the world's richest man, was already a fixture, before Inauguration Day.

Meta, Google and Microsoft joined other major firms donating $1 million to Trump's inaugural committee, while Amazon Prime Video is set to distribute a documentary about first lady Melania Trump. Some business interests are hoping Trump will usher in a new era of antitrust, in which the government does less to block highly profitable corporate consolidation.

What was the 'great tariff commission?'

Ignoring some of the political problems tariffs created for Republicans in his favored era, Trump instead has focused on repeating how import taxes after the Civil War helped the U.S. pay off debts it incurred during the fighting — and eventually achieve government budget surpluses.

From 1866 to 1893, the U.S. ran nearly three straight decades of budget surpluses, fueled largely by tariffs and high domestic taxes on things like alcohol and tobacco, as well as the sale of federal lands. Paying down debt helped lower interest rates.

Trump has even begun trumpeting what he calls the "great tariff commission of 1887," which the president says was tasked with helping the government spend all those surpluses.

Irwin said there was a tariff commission, but it was actually convened five years earlier in 1882. It also recommended reducing tariffs, which Congress didn't do.

"It's hard to say it was a political success. It's hard to say it was an economic success," Irwin said. "Because we spent a lot of the 1890s with double digit unemployment."

That's because federal budget surpluses eventually began to effectively decrease the U.S. money supply and cause deflation. Meanwhile, higher tariffs increased the cost of living for many Americans, which, coupled with a financial crisis in Great Britain, helped trigger the Panic of 1893.

That resulted in railroad bankruptcies, a stock market crash and a crushing recession in which unemployment reached 25% nationally. Then-President Cleveland's lack of solutions was a key factor in voters turning on him and the Democrats and toward McKinley three years later.

McKinley also differed with Trump on key issues

Trump has used his opening weeks back in office to champion U.S. expansionism in ways unseen in the modern era.

He's refused to rule out U.S. military forces seizing back control of the Panama Canal and suggested buying Greenland from Denmark, making Canada the 51st state and even working with Israel to put American developers in charge of turning the Gaza Strip into a seaside "Riviera."

There are echoes of McKinley there, because, as president, he moved to expand the reach of the U.S. The Philippines, Guam and Puerto Rico became American territories as part of the treaty that ended the Spanish-American War in December 1898.

But the comparison is not so easy. McKinley was also skeptical of U.S. expansionism, even writing himself a note at the start of the war and carrying it as a reminder, Merry said.

"While we are conducting war, and until its conclusion, we must keep all we get," the note said. "When the war is over, we must keep what we want."

Shortly after winning reelection in 1900, meanwhile, McKinley began rethinking tariffs, as a stronger and still-growing U.S. manufacturing base made him more appreciative of foreign markets.

"McKinley began to see that, if we were going to be able to sell our goods overseas — as we were going to need to do because we would have more goods than we'd have a market for — we were going to have to accept goods as well," Merry said.

He said that McKinley gave a speech in Buffalo, New York, outlining "this concept of reciprocity, which was: I'm prepared to bring down tariffs. Even me. Even William McKinley."

"That was his first big initiative after being reelected," Merry said.

In that speech on Sept. 5, 1901, McKinley said, "A policy of goodwill and friendly trade relations will prevent reprisals. Reciprocity treaties are in harmony with the spirit of the times. Measures of retaliation are not."

Trump is now promising that similar, reciprocal tariffs will take effect next month. But actually successfully pulling that off will be another difference from McKinley, who never got the chance.

The day after his Buffalo speech, McKinley was shot by anarchist Leon Czolgosz. He died on Sept. 14, 1901.