Donald Trump’s inauguration speech was full of red meat for his supporters. There were vague but ominous references to a “horrible betrayal” of America in the recent past. He claimed that America’s education system teaches young people to “hate our country.” He lumped together the assassination attempt he survived in July with his years of legal problems, portraying all of it as the work of “[t]hose who wish to stop our cause.” And he promised to “send troops to the southern border to repel the disastrous invasion of our country.”
This is all pretty standard Trump stuff, infuriating to leftists like me but music to the ears of the MAGA faithful. About two-thirds of the way through the speech, though, he devoted two full paragraphs to talking about his admiration for the 25th President of the United States, William McKinley.
Trump took time in his speech to effusively praise the greatest enemy of the original ‘populists.’
It was a deeply revealing moment. Trump is constantly portrayed by both friends and enemies as a “populist.” Steve Bannon, for example, talks about Trumpism as a “nationalist, populist revolution.” Bannon thinks that’s a good thing. On the other end of the Republican spectrum we have Marc Short, former chief of staff for former Vice President Mike Pence, expressing horror at the prospect that Trump’s new administration will be marked by “a populist ideology more akin to that of Bernie Sanders than Ronald Reagan.” And yet Trump took time in his speech to effusively praise the greatest enemy of the original “populists.”
According to Thomas Frank’s excellent book “The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism,” the word “populism” was first coined on a train ride from Kansas City to Topeka in 1891. The group on the train was looking for a “catchy word” to describe the adherents of the political party they’d just founded.
During its brief moment in the sun, the People’s Party was one of the most effective third parties in American history. At its core, they were a movement of poor farmers being ground down by big banks and monopolistic businesses, although they also worked to build bridges with urban workers and they attracted the support of labor union leaders like Eugene V. Debs (who would go on to become America’s most prominent democratic socialist). According to Frank, the Kansans on that train in 1891 came up with the name “in conversation with a local Democrat who knew some Latin.” A “populist” was someone on the side of the “populus” (Latin for “the people”) against wealthy plutocrats.
These original populists wanted to ease the financial burdens of small farmers by moving the United States off the gold standard, but they weren’t a single-issue party. They advocated a whole raft of reforms ranging from a shorter workweek for the urban working class to public ownership of railroads to the direct election of senators. This was a broadly popular agenda. In the 1892 presidential election, the Populists nominated James Weaver, a brigadier general in the Union army in the Civil War, and he actually won four states (Colorado, Idaho, Kansas and North Dakota). It was the only time a third party had won even one state in decades, and it wouldn’t happen again until Teddy Roosevelt’s third-party “Bull Moose” run in 1912.
In 1896, the “pops” decided not to run a candidate of their own for two reasons. One is that the Democratic nominee, William Jennings Bryan, adopted important parts of the Populist platform. The other is that the Populists were terrified that, if they didn’t line up behind Bryan, they’d split the vote and throw the election to a man they deeply hated and regarded as an ultra-reactionary champion of big business and the big bankers who were crushing them — Republican nominee William McKinley.
McKinley presided over years of plutocrat-friendly policies at home and warmongering abroad until he was assassinated by an anarchist factory worker in 1901.
Bryan ended up running with the nominations of both the Democrats and the Populists. Wealthy interests mobilized behind McKinley. Frank writes that pro-McKinley newspapers routinely fearmongered about the Bryan campaign with comparisons to the French Revolution. Political cartoonists “loved to depict Populists as marching peasants wearing liberty caps” and the New York Sun called Bryan “William Jacobin Bryan.”
In the end, McKinley won handily, and the People’s Party collapsed. McKinley presided over years of plutocrat-friendly policies at home and warmongering abroad until he was assassinated by an anarchist factory worker in 1901. Trump loves McKinley, as he said in the inauguration speech, because McKinley “made our country very rich through tariffs” and Trump himself is enthusiastically pro-tariff. But this itself should give pause to anyone who thinks that tariffs are an innately “populist” tool of economic policy. The original Populists hated tariffs, which at the time were seen as very much in the interests of business magnates and very much not in the interests of poor farmers like them. Their primary purpose is to protect the profit margins of American corporations from foreign competition, which sometimes helps the working class by making jobs more stable but doesn’t do much to guarantee that they’ll capture any significant chunk of their bosses’ wealth — and meanwhile sticks them with higher prices at the grocery store. Meanwhile, Trump’s record from his first four years in office is like McKinley in that both were belligerently hostile to labor unions. McKinley sent federal troops to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho to crush striking mine workers. Trump filled the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) with hard-core union busters who made a series of decisions that made it harder for workers to organize unions, go on strike and win better contracts. And both were foreign-policy hawks. McKinley gave us the Spanish-American War. Trump tore up Obama’s diplomatic détente with Iran and doubled the rate of drone strikes. So he’s not wrong to identify with President McKinley. But the sight of Trump heaping praise on the greatest anti-populist of the 19th century at an inauguration where he surrounded himself with a phalanx of tech billionaires reveals the deep absurdity of calling this man a “populist.”
Ben Burgis
Ben Burgis is a political commentator and author. He has written articles for Jacobin and The Daily Beast. 
