McKinley’s administration came at the dawn of corporate capitalism in the United States and was a product of corporate political mobilization as no previous presidency had been. In the early 1890s, the economy was hit with a depression whose scale was apocalyptic. Until the 1930s, it was known as the Great Depression. The economic devastation, greatly exacerbated by the austerity of the gold standard, proved fertile ground for radical movements, most notably the radical farmers’ movement known as the Populists and the still-fragile union movement in the cities. In 1896, these forces were able to seize control of the Democratic Party, nominating William Jennings Bryan to run for president on a platform of opposing the gold standard.
This development was witnessed with horror by the country’s economic elite. James Hill, a railroad owner who had been a Democrat, wrote to J. P. Morgan, the richest man of the era, that “there is an epidemic craze among the farmers and . . . those who receive wages or salaries,” and pledged to do whatever necessary to elect William McKinley. Welcoming such latter-day supporters with open arms, the Republicans campaigned as the party of conservative property and propriety, holding the line against Democratic radicalism. Teddy Roosevelt, McKinley’s vice-presidential candidate, accused the Democrats of seeking to supplant “the government of Washington and Lincoln [with] a red government of lawlessness and dishonesty as fantastic and vicious as the Paris Commune.”
Mark Hanna, who ran McKinley’s campaign, turned corporate anxiety into campaign cash. He developed a system of assessments by which industries large and small would be required to donate to the campaign. The robber baron interests of Morgan and John D. Rockefeller each contributed $250,000 to the campaign. From these two alone, Hanna raised more money than Bryan would spend in the entire campaign.
All told, the McKinley campaign raised between $4 and 7 million, a staggering sum for the time. Virtually all of American capital was united behind him.
In this respect, Trump’s situation could not be more different. Though Trump has various high-profile billionaire backers, like Elon Musk and Stephen Schwarzman, the majority of big capitalists have decisively rejected him. When Trump spoke at the Business Roundtable over the summer, CEOs came out of the meeting convinced that “Trump doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” His plans for a massive tariff regime have virtually no support among the American corporate elite.
Matthew Karp recently summarized how this has shaped campaign finance, finding that
donors in the internet industry have given . . . 82 percent of their political contributions to Democrats this year; in the software industry, the number is 72 percent. . . . Since 2020, venture-capital donors have made 75 percent of their contributions to Democrats, while hedge-fund donors have given 68 percent. Big Pharma leans blue, as does Big Law. In the same period, donors at the Big Three management-consulting firms — McKinsey, Bain, and Boston Consulting Group — have given 95 percent of their combined contributions to Democrats.
Trump still draws plenty of support from the car dealership owners and other petty capitalists that have long served as the backbone of the Republican Party. But among big capitalists, his support is incredibly thin.