For nearly 10 years Donald Trump has promised to Make America Great Again, and for nearly 10 years the former and soon-to-be president has declined to specify when, exactly, America was great.
Was America great during his youth in the 1950s and ’60s? Was it great when he was a bona fide celebrity in the 1980s and ’90s? Or does Make America Great Again refer to some other time in the American past — some elusive moment of national greatness?
Trump has given various indications, but there is no reason to wait for a direct answer. The point of the slogan is to evoke a vague sense of past prosperity — of contented nostalgia. For every Trump voter, and every red hat, there is a different idea of what it means for the United States to be “great again.”
And, yet, Trump does have a sense of when America was great. You can see it in the substance of his second-term agenda. What does he want to do with another four years? Trump seems to imagine an American autarky: a closed nation, self-sufficient and indifferent to the rest of the world.
To that end, he wants to impose tariffs on pretty much everyone — including the nation’s largest trading partners — as part of a larger scheme to revive a quasi-mercantilist economy. He wants to close the United States to all but a select group of immigrants in a nativist effort to preserve a narrow vision of the American nation. He hopes to lead a concerted attack on birthright citizenship, the constitutional guarantee of citizenship to virtually every person born on American soil.
Trump also seems eager to expand the actual territory of the United States through force and coercion — for weeks, he has been focused on making Canada the 51st state, whether or not Canadians have any desire to join the American union. He has put the acquisition of Greenland back on his agenda, and he has threatened to seize the Panama Canal Zone from Panama. And this is on top of his recent threats to invade Mexico in pursuit of “the drug cartels.”
Imposing tariffs, expanding territory, a new Mexican War and a traditional vision of the American people — these are what the nation needs, Trump says, to be “great again.” In which case, MAGA cannot possibly refer to anything in the 20th century, when the United States essentially built the modern international order, as much as it must refer to some time in the 19th century, when the United States was a more closed and insular society: a second-rate nation whose economy was many magnitudes smaller and less prosperous than our own.
Each part of his vision seems drawn from a different part of the 1800s. In the absence of a direct income tax — authorized by the 16th Amendment in 1913 — tariffs on imported goods were one of the primary ways the federal government raised revenue for itself, especially as the 19th century came to a close. Not coincidentally, the federal state was much smaller and less able to control or even regulate the vast fortunes of Gilded Age industrial moguls.
Those decades also saw the successful effort to exclude large numbers of “undesirable” immigrant laborers from the country — through the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, for example — using arguments that would not have been out of place in a Trump speech in 2025. The 19th century also saw the rise of so-called manifest destiny and the rapacious territorial ambitions of American settlers and statesmen. There was, in fact, a Mexican War — prosecuted by President James K. Polk in 1846 — and even an attempt to expand the United States into parts of modern-day Canada (“54°40’ or fight!”). And Trump clearly pines for the days before birthright citizenship, which Americans ratified as part of the 14th Amendment in 1868.
It is not for nothing that Trump appears almost obsessed with President William McKinley, who occupied the White House from 1897 until his assassination in 1901. “In the words of a great but highly underrated president, William McKinley, highly underrated, the protective tariff policy of the Republicans has been made — and made — the lives of our countrymen sweeter and brighter,” he said in September at the Economic Club of New York.
Although it is impossible to say with any confidence that Trump believes one thing or another, it does seem that he views McKinley as a model president, a standard-bearer for the high-water mark of American power. “Tariff is the most beautiful word in the dictionary,” Trump said in December. “It‘ll make our country rich. You go back and look at the 1890s, 1880s, McKinley and you take a look at tariffs. That was when we were at our proportionately the richest.”
Trump’s McKinley obsession makes a certain amount of sense. In a way, it is almost self-aware. Like his ill-fated precursor, Trump is the favored candidate of oligarchs; he may even owe his second term, in fact, to the largess of the 21st century equivalent of a robber baron. And McKinley and Trump share a kind of political vision, one of untrammeled power for hoarders of wealth and owners of capital — an America by business, of business and for business, whose main export is imperialistic greed.
Indeed, as a billionaire himself, Trump has every reason to look back to the late 19th century as a golden age, a time when wealth was an even more direct path to political power than it is now. A time when the American political system sputtered and struggled under the weight of endemic corruption. When with enough cash on hand, a railroad magnate or a steel baron could buy a set of politicians for himself, to do with as he pleased. It was a time when public power was too weak and limited in scope to stand as an effective counterweight to private fortunes, and where the laboring classes were under the heel of powerful corporations, whose allies in government were often ready and willing to use force to stifle discontent.
If what Trump idolizes is some part of the 19th century, then to “make America great again” is to make the United States a poorer, more isolated place, whose economy and government is little more than an engine of upward redistribution for a handful of the wealthiest people on the planet.
In fairness to the incoming president, there is no reason to think that he has any of these precedents in his head. What he has, instead, is a deeply rooted sense that the world is a fundamentally zero-sum place, and that American greatness means that others must be diminished. His zero-sum, social Darwinistic intuitions are echoes of an earlier age of reactionary aggression and shameless avarice. There is no such thing, for Trump, as a positive exchange or a mutually beneficial relationship. There is only winning and losing, the dominant and the dominated.
It is an ugly and repugnant vision, but it is a vision nonetheless. It speaks to the ambition of some Americans and the ennui and frustration of others. If nothing else, it gives the appearance of action rather than stagnation. And for many Americans, that is enough.
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