Trump Is Actually Warren Harding
The administration is reversing the New Deal and sending us back to… the 1920s.
I’m confused. There was to be a major trade war with Mexico and Canada. Then the next day there wasn’t. The United States was to put “America First” and stay out of the world—except for maybe conquering Greenland... or the Canal Zone... or turning Gaza into the Riviera.
There’s not much point in looking for logic here because there is none. Trump is doing whatever seems politically opportune at the moment, or maybe just amusing himself, and ideological consistency is a long way from his world view. But like a Substacker pretending to be a political scientist pretending to be a soothsayer reading ideologies in the bones of chickens, I can peer into the illegible scrawl of Donald Trump’s actions and what I see staring back at me is not so much Andrew Jackson or any of the usual suspects but… Warren G. Harding.
As I come out of my trance I try to explain myself. First, I notice the bread crumbs that Trump has left leading us into the nerdier thickets of American history. For someone who appears to be, let’s say, not the world’s most avid reader, Trump has gotten awfully interested in William McKinley. McKinley is the “tariff king,” McKinley booted the Athabascan traditional name off the tall mountain in Alaska. And “America First” is a clear return to the prevailing isolationist sentiment between the world wars—before America got entangled in its complex web of alliances, before “isolationism” itself became a dirty word.
The more I look at the entrail pattern spread out before me—the gist of Trump’s actions, his odd historical obsessions—the more convinced I am that I’m looking at the policies of the Harding/Coolidge/Hoover interregnum (a period of history that’s been largely mothballed and its three presidents deemed failures).
Consider: the Harding administration, in 1921, introduced immigration quotas which were followed by sweeping restrictions in 1924 that included a wholesale ban on Asian immigrants; in 1922, the Harding administration raised tariffs attempting to protect farmers, part of a sequence of tariffs culminating in the massive restrictions of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930; all three administrations pursued proudly isolationist policies, rejecting the League of Nations, avoiding foreign alliances, and, as one of Hoover’s biographers put it, seeing “no conspicuous need to pay attention to the rest of the world”; and all three pursued a strictly business-first view of the state, as in Coolidge’s characteristically unadorned line that “the chief business of the American people is business.”
Does any of this sound familiar?
I do not necessarily mean what I’m saying as an indictment. Like all faux-political scientists who are also faux-soothsayers, I am writing not in judgment but as a diagnostician. At any moment, some presidential historian might pop out of the woodwork to announce that Harding was one of the very worst presidents while his predecessor Woodrow Wilson is somewhere in the foothills of Mount Rushmore. But, actually, that’s not how it was seen at the time.
Recently, I was doing some random research into this period and came across a couple of factoids that, insofar as my world is 1920s U.S. domestic politics, rocked my world. One factoid was that Harding was actually a very popular president and was deeply mourned on his death. The other factoid was that the United States’ entry into World War I was, from the perspective of the ‘20s, deeply unpopular and viewed as a mistake (by 1938, a full 70% of Americans would be retroactively anti-war).
Those two bits of information catapulted me into a very different political sensibility—into an era in which the Depression and Hitler hadn’t yet happened, in which it was very possible to look at Wilsonian and progressive policies and see in them a stark deviation from the founding principles of the republic. And this was, let’s not forget, the consensus position for a dozen years—the GOP won three elections in landslides and seemed well on their way to creating a permanent Republican majority. It was the era of Babbitt, of a kind of boosterish cynicism in politics—what mattered was business and wealth; if the little people suffered at the hands of (as my grandmother used to sing) “the plutocrats in their Cadillacs,” well, that was just the way of things; and, as far as foreign policy went, the rest of the world was very welcome to take care of itself.
All of this was popular, consensus, and it worked until it didn’t. What’s interesting in thinking about the politics of this period is how entirely it has been framed by what came after—history is written by the winners, and the Republicans of this era weren’t, ultimately, the winners. In the Roosevelt history that I grew up with—a reflection of the consensus that emerged by the World War II era—tariffs had been a terrible blunder, effectively shutting down trade at the peak of the Great Depression and making its impacts incalculably worse. Isolationism was the dirtiest word of all; it was the U.S. equivalent of “appeasement.” From a hard-headed, militaristic standpoint it meant allowing enemies like Hitler and Imperial Japan to get a jump on us; from a humanitarian point of view, it meant turning our back on the rest of the world and allowing the mechanisms of, for instance, the Holocaust to be set into motion.
The tough borders policy, and rollback on immigration, came to seem almost criminal with refugee ships turned away at American ports and the refugees returned to Europe just in time for World War II; and, meanwhile, it had irrevocably alienated Japan and, as scholars would later determine, negatively affected the economy. And then the dark side of the business-first approach, which had been so popular in the early ‘20s, gradually emerged: in retrospect, the Harding administration had been suffused with scandal (the worst scandals reached public notice only after his death). Harding really had been kind of a front man while the fat cats (in their Cadillacs) pulled the strings. The laissez-faire economics of Harding and Coolidge resulted in a loosening of any kind of state economic controls just in time for the Wall Street crash, and, when the Depression hit, the Republican administration was doctrinally incapable of helping anyone. If Trump personality-wise seems a poor match for Warren Harding, it may be better to think of him as the Harding administration inside-out. Instead of Harding and his Senatorial chin acting as the frontman for the fat cats, the fat cats are administering directly.
The point I want to make here is that, as the great political commentator Ecclesiastes put it, “there is nothing new under the sun.” As unprecedented as Trump is in so many ways—and it’s hard to find historical analogues for this wholesale budget-cutting and privatization of government that he currently seems to be engaged in—it is possible to detect the underlying dynamics of what he’s up to elsewhere in American history. I believe that the clearest precedent is the early ‘20s—there’s a certain rhyme incidentally between the last year of Woodrow Wilson’s administration, with Edith Galt acting as the mouthpiece if not grey cardinal for the bedridden Wilson, and the elaborate courtier kabuki surrounding the mentally declining Joe Biden—and with a pugnacious conservative ideology sweeping into power, focused on isolation, border control, and the removal of governmental interference in the economy. It was a viable political philosophy, it was popular for a while, but it had some real design flaws, and history (certainly the history written by the Rooseveltians) has not been kind to it.
The New Deal—by its very name—is usually interpreted as having wiped out the philosophy of the Harding/Coolidge/Hoover administrations and consigning it to the ideological trash heap. What we have been living with since then is, in large part, the result of Roosevelt’s 100 Days—which Walter Lippmann, the leading journalist of the era, called “wholly improvised.” Those reforms gave us the administrative state as we know it and a certain philosophy of government interventionism. That has all become so ingrained in our politics that we almost don’t even think about it—which masks what a real departure it was from what had come before. As the great philosopher Yogi Berra—one of very few philosophers to also supply power from the left side of the plate—put it, “It’s déjà vu all over again.” And, taking the long view, what we might consider the Trump administration as is a wholesale repudiation of the New Deal, plunging us right back into the ideology of the 1920s.
Sam Kahn is associate editor at Persuasion and writes the Substack Castalia.
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I feel I must come to the defense of "Silent Cal." Early in your essay, you describe "Coolidge’s characteristically unadorned line that 'the chief business of the American people is business.'" This line was actually, perhaps uncharacteristically, adorned with context that is lost when that line, and it's misquote variations, are shared.
The remark came during an address to newspaper editors about freedom of the press. He noted the in a free society, the newspapers have both journalistic and business concerns, and he thought that the press would generally do better with such an arrangement because they'd be in tune with the similar concerns of virtually everyone in that society.
“After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world. I am strongly of the opinion that the great majority of people will always find these the moving impulses of our life.”
He went on, though, to clarify that he was not encouraging a Gordon Gecko style greed-is-good philosophy.
“Of course, the accumulation of wealth cannot be justified as the chief end of existence,” he said. “But we are compelled to recognize it as a means to well-nigh every desirable achievement. So long as wealth is made the means and not the end, we need not greatly fear it…But it calls for additional effort to avoid even the appearance of the evil of selfishness. In every worthy profession, of course, there will always be a minority who will appeal to the baser instinct. There always have been, probably always will be, some who will feel that their own temporary interest may be furthered by betraying the interest of others.”
You also suggest that Coolidge, along with Harding and Hoover, was considered a failure. Not so fast! The C-Span poll of historians to rank the presidents had Coolidge solidly in the middle of the pack, and his reputation has risen with each poll. See https://www.c-span.org/presidentsurvey2021/?personid=39815
Just trying to be fair to the guy!
"Trump is the democracy wrecking evil titan Hitler but wait he's also banal and boring."
-Today's explication of the miraculous flexibility of Trump as seen by people who still don't understand or accept what has happened and is continuing despite their best dismissive witticisms.