In President Donald Trump’s idealized framing, the United States was at its zenith in the 1890s, when top hats and shirtwaists were fashionable and typhoid fever often killed more soldiers than combat.

It was the Gilded Age, a time of rapid population growth and transformation from an agricultural economy toward a sprawling industrial system, when poverty was widespread while barons of phenomenal wealth, like John D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan, held tremendous sway over politicians who often helped boost their financial empires.

“We were at our richest from 1870 to 1913. That’s when we were a tariff country. And then they went to an income tax concept,” Trump said days after taking office. “It’s fine. It’s OK. But it would have been very much better.”

The desire to re-create that era is fueled by Trump’s fondness for tariffs and his admiration for the nation’s 25th president, William McKinley, a Republican who was in office from 1897 until being assassinated in 1901.

Trump’s early implementation of tariffs has been inconsistent — with him imposing them, then pulling many back — but he has been steadfast in endorsing the idea of 21st-century protectionism. There have even been suggestions that higher import tariffs on the country’s foreign trading partners could eventually replace the federal income tax.

Experts on the era say Trump is idealizing a time rife with government and business corruption, social turmoil and inequality. They argue that he’s also dramatically overestimating the role tariffs played in stimulating an economy that grew mostly because of factors other than the U.S. raising taxes on imported goods.

And Gilded Age policies, they say, have virtually nothing to do with how trade works in a globalized, modern economy.

“The most astonishing thing for historians is that nobody in the Gilded Age economy — except for the very rich — wanted to live in the Gilded Age economy,” said Richard White, a history professor emeritus at Stanford University.

Trump says high tariffs and low interest rates, like those the U.S. had after the Civil War, can hastily pay down today’s federal debt and fatten government coffers while boosting domestic manufacturers and enticing foreign producers to move to the U.S.

It’s not a new theme for him.

“I am a Tariff Man,” Trump declared in a 2018 online post. Campaigning for a second term last fall, Trump said of the McKinley era: “We were a very wealthy country, and we’re going to be doing that now.” Today, he says “tariff” is his favorite word and represents “a very powerful weapon that politicians haven’t used because they were either dishonest, stupid or paid off in some other form.”

Dartmouth College economics professor Douglas Irwin, author of “Clashing Over Commerce: A History of U.S. Trade Policy,” said Trump advocating for modern tariffs by pointing to the 1890s is flawed.

“We did grow rapidly in the late 19th century,” he said. “But it’s a stretch to attribute it to tariffs.”

“The president is more accurate when he paints with a broader brush and says ‘Look, this entire period with fiscal surpluses we grew rapidly.’ That’s true of this 40-year period.

“But, when you dig down to the details and say ‘We raised tariffs in this instance,’ that’s where things go awry. Or the story doesn’t quite hold together as well.”

Was America really at its wealthiest then?

The Gilded Age featured extraordinary wealth for a small class of people that largely obscured rampant the poverty of many other Americans. The name comes from a 1873 novel, co-written by Mark Twain, which satirized the greed and deceit of the era’s government and politicians.

Many contemporary leaders were openly influenced by the famed robber barons, builders of monopolies who stoked industrialization while shaping the way millions of other Americans lived and worked.

Rockefeller became the exemplar of the era when his Standard Oil empire made him the world’s first billionaire. Morgan was an investment banker and legendary financier of industrial interests. Cornelius Vanderbilt amassed a breathtaking fortune through shipping and railroads, while steel magnate Andrew Carnegie was also a dedicated philanthropist who argued that the rich had a moral responsibility to use their wealth to better a deeply unequal society.

Overall, the U.S. economy grew rapidly between 1870 and 1913, although there were dips and recessions too.

Some historians call it the second industrial revolution because of major increases in manufacturing and factory output. New industries like steel, electricity and petrochemicals boomed, as did sectors including construction and machinery.

But White said those years were marked by erratic economic growth, and those upturns were mostly fueled by millions of immigrants joining the U.S. workforce. Indeed, the number of U.S. residents jumped from 38.5 million-plus in 1870 to more than 106 million by 1920.

Average wages rose, but so did inequality, with almost no social safety net. Working conditions were often so abhorrent, meanwhile, that the labor movement began gaining strength, as did progressive politicians clamoring for breaking up monopolies.

“This is the height of antimonopoly, political turmoil, the rise of labor in the United States,” said White, author of “The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896.” “And the reason was, people did not regard this as a particularly healthy economy.”

In fact, despite the growth, standards of living fell, including life expectancy and key health indicators, White said.

The modern federal income tax came into fruition with the ratification of 16th Amendment in 1913, ending the 43-year era when Trump says the country was wealthiest. He has not expressly detailed plans to end a national income tax since retaking the White House, and he can’t do so without an act of Congress and upending the federal budget in almost incalculable ways.

In fiscal year 2024, the federal government collected about $4 trillion in individual income tax and tax withholdings, according to the Treasury Department, compared with customs duties accounting for around $76.4 billion.

Republican strategist Karl Rove, author of “The Triumph of William McKinley: Why the Election of 1896 Still Matters,” has defended the notion of low, reciprocal tariffs on U.S. foreign trading partners.

But Rove also says tariffs can’t realistically replace a federal income tax. He wrote in a February op-ed that from 1863 to 1913 tariffs brought in nearly half the U.S. government’s revenue, but last year they accounted for less than 2% of federal revenue.

Robert W. Merry, author of “President McKinley: Architect of the American Century,” said McKinley was the leading voice on tariffs at a time when they dominated policy discussions because they were the federal government’s chief source of revenue, given that no income tax existed.

McKinley champions the Tariff Act of 1890

McKinley hailed from Canton, in northeast Ohio, and was son of an iron foundries owner who was especially sensitive to overseas competition. He won a seat in Congress representing a steel-producing district and so promoted tariffs that one humor magazine used a cartoon on its cover to unflatteringly dub him the “Napoleon of Protectionism.”

As chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, McKinley championed the Tariff Act of 1890, which set the then-highest import tax in U.S. history, raising taxes to 49.5% on 1,500-plus items — everything from glass to tin plates to cayenne pepper. The results were quickly poor for the economy and for Republicans.

“It led to an increase in prices, a kind of inflation, even before the bill took effect,” Merry said. “The argument was, it was carte blanche for retailers and industrialists who basically jacked up their prices unnecessarily.”

Americans dealt Republicans landslide congressional defeats during the 1890 midterms, voting scores of incumbents out of office — including McKinley. The tariff fallout also helped Grover Cleveland win the White House for Democrats in 1892, after he lost his reelection the previous cycle.

McKinley rebounded, though. He was elected Ohio governor and eventually won the presidency in 1896 on a campaign slogan Trump has repeated: “I am a tariff man standing on a tariff platform.”

His campaign also got boosts from big donations by major industrialists like Rockefeller, who were strongly opposed to McKinley’s populist Democratic opponent, William Jennings Bryan.

Ignoring some of the political problems tariffs created for Republicans in his favored era, Trump instead has focused on repeating how import taxes after the Civil War helped the U.S. pay off debts it incurred during the fighting — and eventually achieve government budget surpluses.

From 1866 to 1893, the U.S. ran nearly three straight decades of budget surpluses, fueled largely by tariffs and high domestic taxes on things like alcohol and tobacco, as well as the sale of federal lands. Paying down debt helped lower interest rates.

“It’s hard to say it was a political success. It’s hard to say it was an economic success,” Irwin said. “Because we spent a lot of the 1890s with double-digit unemployment.”

That’s because federal budget surpluses eventually began to effectively decrease the U.S. money supply and cause deflation. Meanwhile, higher tariffs increased the cost of living for many Americans, which, coupled with a financial crisis in Great Britain, helped trigger the Panic of 1893.

That resulted in railroad bankruptcies, a stock market crash and a crushing recession in which unemployment reached 25% nationally. Then-President Cleveland’s lack of solutions was a key factor in voters turning on him and the Democrats and toward McKinley three years later.

Shortly after winning reelection in 1900, meanwhile, McKinley began rethinking tariffs, as a stronger and still-growing U.S. manufacturing base made him more appreciative of foreign markets.

“McKinley began to see that, if we were going to be able to sell our goods overseas — as we were going to need to do because we would have more goods than we’d have a market for — we were going to have to accept goods as well,” Merry said.

He said McKinley gave a speech in Buffalo, New York, outlining “this concept of reciprocity, which was: I’m prepared to bring down tariffs. Even me. Even William McKinley.”

“That was his first big initiative after being reelected,” Merry said.

In that speech on Sept. 5, 1901, McKinley said: “A policy of goodwill and friendly trade relations will prevent reprisals. Reciprocity treaties are in harmony with the spirit of the times. Measures of retaliation are not.”

Trump is now promising that similar, reciprocal tariffs will take effect next month. But actually successfully pulling that off will be another difference from McKinley, who never got the chance.

The day after his Buffalo speech, McKinley was shot by anarchist Leon Czolgosz. He died on Sept. 14, 1901.