McKinley via Wikipedia
Opinion: A few days ago, some article reminded me that Trump had named McKinley as his favorite president of all time. It had struck me as odd at the time. Even though I’m from Ohio, as was McKinley, he’s always drifted in the back of my mind, a sort of ho-hummer as presidents go.
Duly reminded, I took a minute to check the surface version in Wikipedia. Hmm. Not as bad as I thought. In fact, Wm. McKinley looked like a stand-up guy and pretty prescient president. Wow. Who’da thunk. Etc.
The entry was quite long, but full of engaging detail about his accomplishments. It was the stuff that keeps you reading on. Near the end came the ‘ah hah’ paragraph, with a couple of recent entries, one about Obama and one noting Mr Trump’s enamoration of Mr McKinley. Hmmm.
There’s a tab up near the top of Wikipedia pages that lets you see the ‘editing history.’ Things have settled down in recent years, but there was a time when Wikipedia was the dew-dripping grassy meadow where dueling ‘editors’ battled it out. Change, correction, recorrection, re-recorrection. But that faded as the platform filled. Who could keep up with it? The thing you wanted to be careful of would be a current candidate’s page, changing by the hour.
Oh.
Sure enough, Cntrl-h unlocked the rather busy month Mr Trump’s minions have had, crafting a new personna for Mr McKinley. The man was laudable, really. A paragon of a president.
And then, comes the headline in the Jan 26 Washington Post: “Why McKinley makes an alarming Trump presidential role model,” a deeper dive by Max Boot.
Now THAT’s more like it. I guess I had been paying attention in Ohio public schools, back when they were allowed to teach history. And there are several hardbound books on American history, late Industrial Revolution, pre WWI, on the increasingly decorative bookshelves just off to my right. I may dust them off this week, just to back up our opinions.
But for now, suffice a quote or two. Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, notes that McKinley held the office from 1897 to 1901 “and is generally considered to be average at best: In one recent survey of scholars, he was ranked No. 24 out of 45 presidents.”
Boot further surmises that Trump’s “affinity for McKinley would appear to run deeper than mere tariffs. McKinley is remembered, after all, primarily for his promotion of U.S. imperialism” wherein he started the Spanish-American War and “subsequently turned the Philippines into a U.S. colony, took possession of Guam and Puerto Rico, annexed Hawaii, and made Cuba into a protectorate.”
Rather than a stellar success, by the time of McKinley’s assassination, the US GDP in inflation adjusted dollars “was less than Kazakhstan’s today.”
That’s it in a nutshell, then. Territorial expansion. A borrowed idea that Trump thinks will seal his place in history. And as before, Americans will pay for his mistakes.
The best we can do is whatever it takes – writing to congresspeople, voting, blogging – to minimize the damage. And to remember that AI is editing Wikipedia now. It’s probably better to look further afield for fact-checks. -- KL
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