‘The Golden Age of America begins right now,’ Donald Trump declared in the inaugural address of his second presidency. Critics on the left argue that Trump’s Golden Age resembles the ‘Gilded Age’, the period between the 1880s and the Progressive Era of the 1900s. The era was dominated by President William McKinley and other Republican advocates of high tariffs, of the kind that Trump seeks to restore. Trump’s stated desire to restore US control of the Panama Canal and to obtain Greenland from Denmark evokes the administrations of McKinley and his successor, Theodore Roosevelt, during which the Panama Canal was built and the conquered Spanish colonies of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines were added to America’s maritime empire. For many observers, Trump’s closeness to Elon Musk and new-found friendliness with tech moguls such as Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos brings to mind the close alliance of a century ago between such titans of industry and finance as J.P. Morgan and Republican politicians. Trump has even ordered that Mount Denali in Alaska be restored as Mount McKinley.

It is certainly less insulting for Trump and his allies to be compared to McKinley and Gilded Age Republicans than to Hitler, as the progressive press is wont to do. Nonetheless, the Gilded Age comparison is a cutting one. After all, the phrase comes from the novel, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, a satire of political and social corruption by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, published in 1873 .

In popular usage, promoted since the Second World War by influential Democrats among America’s academic historians, the Gilded Age often means the entire period of Republican political domination between the 1870s and the era of New Deal Democratic domination for half a century after 1932. During that time, generations of Americans have been taught that Republican politicians were the puppets of bloated capitalists wearing vests and pocket-watches who tyrannised farmers and factory workers. The only good Republicans, in the dominant Democratic interpretation of history, were Abraham Lincoln and the progressive Theodore Roosevelt.

As familiar as it is, this is a cartoon version of US history. It is true that many Republican corporate executives and owners oppressed northern workers – but the southern oligarchs who ruled the post-Civil War South through the Democratic party and the Ku Klux Klan were far more tyrannical towards poor black and white people in their region. The limited support that there was for Civil Rights in the so-called Gilded Age came from northern Republicans and was opposed by Democrats. The vice-presidents of the National Civic Federation, founded in 1900, were Samuel Gompers, founder of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), and McKinley’s backer, Senator Mark Hanna of Ohio. Herbert Hoover, far from being a reactionary, was a progressive technocrat who both parties sought as their standard-bearer after his service in international humanitarian relief during the First World War. Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal included many individuals and policies from the progressive wing of the Republican Party, to which FDR himself had belonged as an undergraduate at Harvard.

The claim that Trump represents a resurgence of the ruthless capitalism that was overthrown by the New Deal, then, is propaganda, not history. Even so, there are some ways in which Trump is returning to older Republican traditions – not only those of 19th-century Republicans but also 20th-century Republicans, such as Eisenhower and Nixon.

Trump’s economic nationalism is one example of such a return. The Republican party of Lincoln and his successors drew on the earlier Federalist and Whig parties to support a strong federal government that would protect and promote American industry and invest in infrastructure to create a continental market. These Republican industrial and infrastructure policies tended to be opposed by southern plantation owners and family farmers in the Midwest. Facing no international competition, American agrarians generally favoured free trade, and the southern ruling class feared a strong federal government, which could abolish slavery and segregation.

During most of the 19th century, Federalists, Whigs, and Republicans favoured a protective tariff in order to shield America’s ‘infant industries’ from foreign – mostly British – competition. By 1900, however, US industries such as steel had caught up with or surpassed those of Britain. Earlier champions of high infant-industry tariffs such as McKinley altered the rationale for tariffs to the protection of American workers from unfair low-wage competition in Europe and the use of tariffs as bargaining chips in reciprocal trade treaties, which opened up foreign markets to American exports.

The Reciprocal Trade Act of 1934, signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, transferred the power to set tariffs from Congress to the president. But its purpose was not to abolish America’s tariffs. Rather, it was to allow the president to use tariffs on a case-by-case basis in trade diplomacy.

The complete abolition of tariffs in the US and worldwide was the goal of free trade enthusiasts, most of whom were found among the Democrats of the agricultural South or northeastern bankers. FDR’s Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, was a proponent of global free trade whose vision was realised in the postwar General Agreement on Trade and Tarifffs (GATT), which required all countries to lower tariffs in successive rounds of tariff negotiations. American industrial firms, previously the champions of protection, mostly supported global trade liberalisation, because they faced little import competition owing to the fact that the economies of other industrial nations had been damaged during the Second World War.

The American consensus in favour of free trade began to break down when Japanese, South Korean, and German cars and other manufactured goods flooded the US market from the beginning of the 1970s – and broke down completely in the 2010s, thanks to the rise of mercantilist, state-capitalist China, viewed as a military and commercial threat by Obama and Biden as well as Trump. In preferring a more transactional approach to trade, Trump is in the tradition of Republican practitioners of realpolitik such as Richard Nixon, rather than Democrats, who from Woodrow Wilson and FDR to Obama and Biden have been more supportive of international institutions.

In domestic policy, Trump has a great deal in common with the mid-century ‘Modern Republicans’, Eisenhower and Nixon. Both favoured a strong military but sought to avoid direct conflict if necessary and to negotiate with foreign adversaries. Both supported a Cold War industrial policy, which was predominantly sponsored by the Department of Defense, giving us the transistor, the internet, and the computer mouse, among other technologies.

Similarly, Trump in his first term presided over massive government funding of COVID-19 vaccines – ‘Operation Warp Speed’ – and in his second presidency has orchestrated private funding for a major AI research initiative. And, like Eisenhower and Nixon, Trump has repudiated those on the right who seek to abolish or radically cut popular New Deal-style programmes such as social security and Medicare.

In hindsight, far from being an aberration, Trump marks a return to the mainstream of Republican trade, military, and domestic policy. The exceptions were the ex-Democrat Reagan and the two Bushes, whose administrations reflected the enthusiasm for free trade and military intervention of the old conservative Democrats of Texas and the South rather than the economic nationalism and foreign policy realism of northern Republicans. Whether Trump’s Golden Age has arrived remains to be seen, but one thing is clear – the age of Reagan, identified with free trade, mass immigration, and ‘wars of choice’ like the Iraq War, is over.