Former President Donald Trump on Thursday defended his plans to slap massive tariffs on all imported goods, and he attacked the notion that such a move would plunge the United States into an economic recession.
To bolster his case, Trump cited two historic examples of American tariff policy that he claimed showed success.
"The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act was passed AFTER the Great Depression had already started," Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform. "If you want to study tariffs, and how powerful they are, study the administration of President William McKinley. America had so much money they didn't know what to do with it!"
This caught the attention of former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum, who took to Twitter to school Trump for apparent historical illiteracy, especially when it comes to the McKinley tariffs.
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"Trump seems unaware that this tariff was the work of CONGRESSMAN William McKinley," he writes. "It was signed into law in 1890 by President Benjamin Harrison - and was followed by the severest depression in US history to that date, 1893-96. Fortunately for McKinley's political career, the depression aggravated by his 1890 tariff blighted the presidency of the Democratic president who took office in 1893, Grover Cleveland. The election of 1896 punished Cleveland for McKinley's policy."
Frum concluded his thread by noting that Americans' general lack of knowledge around economic history allows politicians such as Trump to get away with distorting the actual record.
"The tariff and banking history of the United States between the Civil War and the Great Depression used to be a mercifully obscure subject," he writes. "Unfortunately, that obscurity is enabling present-day policy-makers to repeat the worst errors of that no longer bygone era."
