Donald Trump has never been known for originality, but his latest act is his most dangerous yet—a desperate imitation of history’s most aggressive land-grabbers and strongmen. From James Polk’s expansionist conquest to William McKinley’s imperialist scheming to Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian crackdowns, Trump isn’t just following in their footsteps—he’s trying to outdo them all.
During his first term, Trump admired “Indian killer” Andrew Jackson, whose picture he hung in the Oval Office, but today’s speculation centers around three other national leaders: James Polk, William McKinley, and Vladimir Putin.
According to recent reporting in The Wall Street Journal, Trump got House Speaker Mike Johnson to give him the painting of President James Polk (1845–1849) to hang in the Oval Office. Polk basically doubled the size of the United States by acquiring Texas, Iowa, and Wisconsin, along with territories including what eventually became Arizona, New Mexico, California, and Oregon.
He took the southwestern territories by forcing a war against Mexico, a brutal conflict that’s romanticized in stories of the Alamo but was loudly and angrily opposed in Congress, where the leader of that opposition was Congressman Abraham Lincoln.
Polk was also a Democrat, back in the day when that was the party of slavery and segregation; he was a protégé of populist President Andrew Jackson and owned a plantation in Mississippi that was farmed by enslaved Africans he had purchased.
Then there’s William McKinley, the presidency after which Karl Rove often said he’d modeled the George W. Bush presidency. McKinley lied about an attack on the USS Maine to get us into the Spanish-American war in the Philippines and Cuba, leading to our seizure of both island nations, and tried to impose a massive tariff on the Canadian territory to force them to become an American state.
As Mark-William Palen writes for Time magazine:
Like Trump, Republicans in the late 19th century wanted to annex Canada—which was then still a British colony. The push to make Canada part of the U.S. reached a fever pitch following passage of the highly protectionist McKinley Tariff in 1890, which raised average tariff rates to around 50%.
To pressure Canada into joining the U.S., the McKinley tariff explicitly declined to make an exception for Canadian products. Republicans hoped that Canadians, who were becoming ever more reliant on the U.S. market, would be eager to become the 45th state to avoid the punishing tariffs.
The problem for McKinley was that the tariff threat backfired; instead of servility, it evoked widespread nationalist sentiment north of the border, pushing Canadians to strengthen their relationship to Mother England and eventually form a full-fledged nation.