Angry Poodle | Trump’s Imperial Plans Have Echoes from History
Rewriting the 14th Amendment and Renaming Mount McKinley
![](https://www.independent.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/McKinley_last_photo-Large.jpeg)
MORE OF THE SAME, ONLY MORE SO: For 15 points, quick — what’s the name of the dead president now adorning our $500 bills?
You don’t know? Neither did I. In some ways, it’s a trick question. That’s because the government stopped making $500 bills in 1969. But some stragglers still remain in circulation. And even with inflation, they can still buy a lot of eggs, the skyrocketing price of which — we are told — is the ostensible reason Donald Trump got reelected to the White House.
Either way, the right answer is William McKinley, the Ohio Republican who held office from 1897 until his assassination in 1901.
I mention McKinley because he’s further proof that history is way too interesting to be entrusted to mere historians. And yes, McKinley and his wife did, in fact, visit Santa Barbara; it was May 1901. There are photos of the First Couple driving around in a horse-drawn carriage swaddled in a billowing cocoon of roses. Four months later, he would be shot and killed in Buffalo, New York.
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I mention McKinley because, among the whirlwind of provocative actions — some merely illegal, others outright unconstitutional — by our current president, one directly involves McKinley.
Trump recently announced he was renaming Alaska’s famous mountain, now known as Denali — said to be the highest in the United States and, from base to summit, perhaps even in the world — back to Mount McKinley.
Among Alaska’s native peoples, the mountain has long been called Denali. But during the presidential election of 1900, a supporter of the McKinley candidacy began calling it that, and ever since, there has been a battle over the mountain’s name. McKinley, for the record, never set foot on this mountain, nor is there any evidence he cared a whit about it.
When I was a kid, the mountain was then known as Mount McKinley. And at my house, that mountain was, in fact, a very big deal. There were lots of wolves on this mountain, and my mother — a lover of wolves — had a record of these wolves howling their hearts out. At night after dinner, she would play this record so loud it shredded the speakers’ woofers and tweeters. I suppose, with nine kids, you are entitled to let off some steam.
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In 2015, President Barack Obama, at the behest of Alaska’s senators, its native populations, and pretty much anyone except for Ohio’s congressional delegation, changed the name from Mount McKinley back to Denali. The Ohio delegation had long felt honor-bound to stick up for McKinley, a native son of the Buckeye State.
When Trump was elected, he, as always, was eager to poke anything remotely woke, DEI, socially engineered, green, gender-related, Marxist, etc., in the eye, and he wasted no time changing it back.
![](https://www.independent.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Wonder_Lake_and_Denali.jpg?w=1024&resize=2824%2C2176)
But there’s more to it than that.
McKinley was a fierce trade protectionist who wielded a mean cudgel when it came to hitting other countries with tariffs. Trump is singing from the same songbook. Under McKinley’s warm paterfamilias imperial watch, the United States waged war against Spain to take Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam. He also annexed Hawai‘i. He also initiated the process of building the Panama Canal.
We told ourselves at the time that we were freeing subjected brown-skinned peoples from the yokes of their colonial tyranny. One wonders.
In the three-year war over the Philippines, 4,200 American troops and 22,000 Philippine soldiers were killed. But so too were 250,000 Philippine civilians, caught in the “kinder, gentler” crossfire.
This marked a major turning point in the annals of American history. We went from republic to empire. And it was William McKinley — always on the lookout for new markets to absorb the glut of American manufactured goods — who took us there.
When you listen to Trump’s claptrap about grabbing Greenland — Denmark is now appealing to its European allies for protection from the United States — the Panama Canal, and even Canada, you hear William McKinley talking.
McKinley, the last president to have fought with the Union Army during the Civil War, and a Republican, had naturally been regarded as a “friend” by American Black people. But after Congress passed the 14th Amendment in 1868, which decreed that anyone born in the United States — including former slaves and their descendants — was a citizen of the United States and entitled to equal treatment under all its law, white people began killing Black people at an even more alarming rate.
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In 1898, in the city of Wilmington, North Carolina, then governed by a multiracial town council of “Fusionist” Republicans, 2,000 white supremacists threatened to “choke the Cape Fear [River] with carcasses.” They burned down a Black-owned newspaper, chased the Fusionist elected officials out of town, and killed as many as 300 people. The Wilmington Fusionists reached out to President McKinley for help. McKinley — more focused then on currying favor with the white Southern vote — turned a deaf ear to such pleas.
I don’t mean to beat a dead horse here, but does that sound familiar?
One of Trump’s proposals? To rewrite the Constitution by erasing the 14th Amendment, which bestows the rights of citizenship on anyone born in this country. Do you know why that amendment was written and ratified by Congress? Because in 1857, four years before the Civil War began, the Supreme Court issued a ruling decreeing that no person of African descent — whether slave or freed or any of their progeny over the ensuing generations — could ever be a citizen of the United States, no matter where they were born.
Ever.
You can call them “the wolves of Mt. McKinley” or “the wolves of Denali.” Either way, I can still hear them howling. And the hairs on the back of my neck are standing straight up.
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