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MAKE AMERICA 1897 AGAIN  
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Jamelle Bouie and Aaron Retica Produced by Derek Arthur
January 28, 2025
New York Times
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_ Trump, Musk, Zuckerberg and MAGA’s new Gilded Age. _

, Illustration by The New York Times; photograph via Library of
Congress

 

 
donald trump
 

And we will restore the name of a great president, William McKinley,
to Mount McKinley, where it should be and where it belongs.

 

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While
it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors.
Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript
and email [email protected] with any questions.

speaker

This is “The Opinions,” a show that brings you a mix of voices
from “New York Times Opinion.” You’ve heard the news. Here’s
what to make of it.

aaron retica

I’m Aaron Retica. I am an editor at large for the Opinion section of
“The New York Times.” I’m joined today by one of our columnists,
Jamelle Bouie, who writes about politics, often putting it in
historical context.

He’s been doing this for a long time, since he got here, but it
feels particularly relevant in this moment as we see Donald Trump, of
all people, turning to the past in a new and really a little bit
surprising way. Instead of talking about what’s great about America,
making America great, he’s not talking about the 1950s when he grew
up, but he’s talking about the late 1890s. Jamelle, welcome.

jamelle bouie

Well, hello. Thank you for having me.

aaron retica

I want to start with Donald Trump’s newfound love of William
McKinley, the 25th president of the United States. He name checked him
in his inaugural address.

aaron retica

He wants to rename Denali, the mountain in Alaska, Mount McKinley,
which, was not changed by some kind of woke fiats. Jamelle, what is
going on? Like, why are we talking about McKinley?

jamelle bouie

I think, to start, I don’t think Donald Trump has any broad vision
that he is trying to invoke when he mentions William McKinley. I think
it strains credulity to think that Donald Trump has thought seriously
about William McKinley in a systematic way.

I think what’s mostly happening here is that he is, for a variety of
reasons, familiar with the name William McKinley, sees McKinley as
maybe an important and prominent Republican president, and wants to
associate himself with McKinley. There are also substantive things
that McKinley did that I think Trump is attracted to, like for
example, tariffs. But I think this is less citing McKinley as an
example in the way that you might be trying to emulate and more citing
McKinley as a totem to state your aspirations for the kind of
influence you think you want to have.

I think for us as political observers, the late 19th century is just
an interesting period in general, because it bears more than a few
similarities to our own moment. It is a time of just rapid cultural
and economic and political change in the United States. It’s a time
of mass immigration and the emergence of a substantial backlash to
that immigration.

It is a time where there are new, huge concentrations of wealth in
industries that did not exist 20 or 30 years prior. And the owners of
those industries, of those companies, the possessors of that wealth,
had large amounts of close to unchecked political influence. So
there’s a lot there that is not the same, but relevant to us.

aaron retica

The idea that the Gilded Age is something we should be aiming at is
something that I found kind of amazing, right. And somehow we have
gotten to a place where the idea that it’s a new Gilded Age is
almost a positive. So what is it about McKinley for Trump? Like, what
is he seeing here?

jamelle bouie

So in addition to McKinley’s use of tariffs — and I do think 90
percent of it is just that. Trump is sort of monomaniacally obsessed
with tariffs. But the other thing is that the McKinley era marks the
real beginnings of, blossoming of, you could say, that’s — it’s
not positive, but you know what I’m saying — of American
imperialism. It’s the point at which the United States is — we
fight the Spanish-American War and occupy Cuba. It’s when we begin
our occupation in the Philippines. We are making interventions into
Haiti,

aaron retica

Puerto Rico, too, right?

jamelle bouie

Puerto Rico.

aaron retica

Guam.

jamelle bouie

Right, the extended American territories that most people are familiar
with these days, we come into possession of them during this period.
And it’s primarily an effort to open up new markets, obtain new raw
materials for American domestic industry.

aaron retica

So it’s not a key feature of Trumpism to be super subtle, right. So
there were, up right in front at the inauguration, there’s Elon
Musk. There is Jeff Bezos. There’s the guy from Google, just Mark
Zuckerberg, an amazing array of — we’ll call them tech
capitalists.

And he is explicit. Trump is explicit in his joy and triumph over
them, well, as everyone always says, bending the knee. What did he —
he said the other day that when he came around the first time, no one
was his friend. And now everyone wants to be his friend.

So I want to get into some of the theories that are animating all of
this that you’ve been writing about. But what is happening here?
What are they all doing there? What is he doing with them? Like, how
ominous is this development? Help us.

jamelle bouie

Trump’s sort of like, “they didn’t want me back then, but now
they want me” just reminds me of the lyric from “Still
Tippin’” by Mike Jones, the song when I was popular, when I was a
teen. The line is, back then —

[mike jones, "still tippin'"]

Hoes didn’t want me Now I’m hot, hoes all on me

Back then hoes didn’t want me

Now I’m hot, hoes all on me

Back then —

I think this is very funny. And it’s basically the dynamic that
we’re describing. OK, real answer now.

aaron retica

Although that was a good one.

jamelle bouie

I think — I think, first of all, I think it’s worth factoring into
all of this, it’s just the fact that Trump didn’t win the popular
vote last time. And so by not winning the popular vote, by entering
office is sort of a minority president, you could say, first, this
stimulated a lot of opposition against him, and I think it created the
sense that he is an aberration. This is a weird thing that happened.
It’ll pass, and we’ll get back to normalcy. We’ll get back to
business.

But while he’s there, there’s no need to pretend like he’s
anything other than an aberration. So we can align ourselves with the
opposition. We can align ourselves with the resistance, as it were,
even if it’s a nominal alignment, even if it’s purely symbolic,
and it’s not going to harm us whatsoever.

But now he’s won. He won with the popular vote. He made a comeback,
despite everything. And I think this has created the sense that, oh,
maybe this is just where the country is and we have to get with the
program. We have to get with the picture.

In addition, there are real kind of material concerns for the tech
industry as well. Over the last, what, decade, we’ve seen — first
it was blockchain, then it was NFTs. Now we’re at AI. And it’s
clear — it’s clear to me, at least, that they’re looking for
ways to profit.

They’re not making as much money as they want to. They’re
deploying all kinds of new things in hopes that those will be the
thing that unlock a new amount of value, and it’s not clear that
that’s what’s going to happen. And with Trump, you have an
opportunity to tilt the regulatory environment in their favor. You
have an opportunity to engage in the time-honored tradition of just
going to the government coffers to make up for the fact that your
business isn’t making money.

So I think that’s a part of it too, right. Like, Elon Musk has major
government contracts. Jeff Bezos is looking for major government
contracts. Mark Zuckerberg and other Silicon Valley types wants the
government to stay out of the way of AI development, which they hope
will be the next big money maker.

Sam Altman just announced that he’s willing to play ball with Trump
as well, and hope to get new investments into AI. There’s, again, a
very material concern happening. But I do think there’s also an
ideological aspect happening here, and that is, going back to 2020,
there you saw in Silicon Valley, in the tech industry, tech workers
behaving like workers. And what I mean is behaving like people whose
interests are not necessarily aligned with those of the owners of the
firms at which they work, and they’re beginning to make demands.

Our colleague, Ross Douthat, did an interview with Marc Andreessen,
where Andreessen essentially says that he feared that there are mobs
forming in the workplaces. That’s fear of workers making claims, of
exerting pressure, of making demands on the basis of the fact that
because they are workers, they can bring the work of the firm to a
halt, I think radicalized a lot of Silicon Valley CEOs. And to some
extent, this feels like rich owners of businesses opposed to worker
militancy, news at 11:00, dog bites man.

But I think this is a real dynamic of it. And Trump is nothing if not
virulently anti-labor. He loves to talk of the workers as a kind of
cultural class, but when it comes to the actual interest of the
working class, he is as anti-labor as they come.

aaron retica

Right. So let’s talk about the gilded in the Gilded Age was in part
just this overlay of gold. And the Trump Tower, the Trump aesthetic
has always been proto regal in some way. And lurking behind all this,
there is a — I was going to say theorist. I don’t know if that’s
the right word, but lurking behind all this is a blogger, who you just
wrote about.

He’s not a front and center person. He’s someone who, as you put
it, influences the people who influence Trump, and that is Curtis
Yarvin. I want to talk a little bit about how his ideas fit into all
this. Could you just talk a little bit about who he is and why he
matters?

jamelle bouie

Sure. I mean, he basically was a blogger who built a following with
this argument that the United States was sort of under an oppressive
liberal totalitarianism, that this had captured all the institutions
of society, that this was a threat to progress, progress meaning
technological progress of some sort, that the push for equality or
egalitarianism was undermining our technological future.

And that the only way to arrest this and to put America back on the
path to greatness was to both run directly at that liberal
totalitarianism and transition the United States away from democracy,
however flawed it might be, to something more like a monarchy or an
autocracy led by the tech elite.

And to my mind, just describing what he thinks explains why he became
influential. Like, you’re telling wealthy Silicon Valley guys that
they deserve to be the rulers. It’s like, yeah, if I were a wealthy
Silicon Valley guy, I’d be like, I think this guy has some good
ideas, and I think he has some good thoughts.

And I do think that’s much of it. His writing style is filled with
esoteric references. He kind of writes as if he has access to secret
knowledge, and that kind of thing also is very appealing to people. He
is an effective rhetorician, in that he is able to capture the
attention of the people whose attention he wants, and then if not
persuade them, then bring them along with his train of thought.

aaron retica

And where would his train of thought go? I mean, he can’t — you
talked about the material appeal, but what is the philosophical appeal
of the rejection of democracy and a return to this kind of monarchy,
this sort of tech monarchy? Like, what have they done that would make
you think, oh, yes, let’s put them in charge of everything?

jamelle bouie

I think it’s just the mythology of Silicon Valley that obviously
many of the participants in that world have sort of taken on as being
true and not simply marketing, the mythology of Silicon Valley as a
singular place of genius, of technological advancements, singular
wills pushing society forward. So I think just wholesale adoption of
that mythology as true might make this appealing.

Part of Yarvin’s work is sometimes winking at and often outright
endorsing notions of racial hierarchy, all this idea that certain
people are at the top, certain people are at the bottom, and this is
the natural state of things. And I have no doubt that is also
appealing for some set of people who see themselves as part of a
natural elite. When it comes to how much one could operationalize
this, the path to making the United States a monarchy is a very
difficult one.

But giving undue influence to wealthy oligarchs, that’s the thing
you can do. Unraveling the kinds of regulations, laws, standards,
constitutional settlements that have at least grounded the United
States for the last half century as a more egalitarian country is
something you can do. So if you think of it less as can you make the
US a monarchy and more can you make the US much less democratic and
much more stratified across social and economic and political lines,
then yeah, you can do that. That’s where we were 100 years ago.
That’s where we were in the late 19th century.

aaron retica

Right. So it comes back to that. So let’s end on coming back to
Trump. So I mean, it’s a sucker’s game, right, to talk about what
Trump’s political ideology is, like what’s going on in his mind.
We talked a lot about McKinley. We talked about Yarvin. It’s not
like Trump is sitting around reading all this, thinking about it.

And yet he is pushing hard to do exactly what you’re talking about,
that it’s understood by everyone that everything’s never going to
be perfectly egalitarian. And yet the goal was to make it more
egalitarian. And now if the goal is to make it less egalitarian, that
part about Trump, we can understand.

But you mentioned earlier that in response to the concentration of
capital and interests and the convergence in the late 19th century, an
enormous number of important movements that changed the way the 20th
century was shaped emerged. You had labor unions most of all, but also
the feminist movement that led to women voting.

But do you think there’s any chance that this push in the direction
of elites and elitism under the mask of populism — and famously,
Hamilton said that those who sought tyranny would first pay obsequious
court to the poor. Is there hope that this will actually lead to some
sort of American renewal, as people realize they don’t want to live
like this?

jamelle bouie

So I’m always wary of saying that anything must axiomatically lead
to anything. There’s no guarantee that there is a kind of
egalitarian backlash that might put the United States back on what I
would think is the right track. But I think it is true that however
much our political system may become undemocratic, we remain a country
with a very vibrant and democratic culture, where political dissent
and resistance, lowercase R, are just a part of American cultural
life.

So as this agenda moves forward, I would expect it to seed perhaps
movements that are responding directly to it, that are attempting to
make good on an egalitarian promise, and I would expect those
movements to make some traction. The thing, I think, to remember is
that the time from making traction to finding any meaningful success
can be quite long. So you’re about to list through some of the
groups that emerged from this period.

The NAACP emerges in this period. And, of course, it’s a half
century between the emergence of the NAACP and “Brown v Board.” So
this is all to say that politics doesn’t end. History doesn’t stop
moving.

Things continue going. Human activity continues. Human agency is real.
And so the people in power now will overreach. The people in power
always do, and people out of power will respond to that overreach.

And it remains to be seen what those responses look like, how they
organize themselves, what they mean for us politically and culturally.
But I think at the same time, it’s important to remember that,
although nothing is forever, things can last a pretty long time.

aaron retica

OK, well, that seems like a perfect place for us to end. Jamelle,
thank you very, very much for taking the time to talk to us and for
providing your incredible insight to help us see where we’re going.

jamelle bouie

Oh, it’s my pleasure.

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speaker

If you like this show, follow it on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you
get your podcasts. This show is produced by Derek Arthur, Sophia
Alvarez Boyd, Vishakha Darbha, Phoebe Lett, Kristina Samulewski, and
Jillian Weinberger. It’s edited by Kaari Pitkin, Alison Bruzek, and
Annie-Rose Strasser. Engineering, mixing, and original music by Isaac
Jones, Sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker, Carole Sabouraud, and Efim
Shapiro. Additional music by Aman Sahota.

The fact check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, and Michelle
Harris. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta, Kristina Samulewski, and
Adrian Rivera. The executive producer of “Times Opinion Audio” is
Annie-Rose Strasser.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

* Donald Trump
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* William McKinley
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