William McKinley hasn’t had a starring role on the American political stage like this in 124 years.
There he was, lauded in President Trump’s inauguration speech on Monday, for making “our country very rich through tariffs and through talent,” and for paving America’s way to building the Panama Canal. “We’re taking it back,” Mr. Trump declared, after an ode to the Republican from Canton, Ohio.
A few hours later, he signed an executive order that praised how the 25th president “heroically led our nation to victory in the Spanish-American War” — not a conflict most modern presidents have wanted to dwell on — while vastly expanding America’s reach around the world. It was, of course, McKinley who seized the Philippines, Guam and Puerto Rico as the spoils of that war when it ended in 1898, back in the day when the United States called them “colonies” rather than “territories.” And it was McKinley who annexed Hawaii, making possible, a bit more than a century later, the Trump International Hotel in Waikiki.
For these accomplishments, one of Mr. Trump’s first acts was to restore the name Mount McKinley to the highest peak in North America, reversing President Barack Obama’s decision to call it “Denali,” its ancient name.
It is an unlikely restoration for an American president whose little-noted but highly consequential time in office was sandwiched between Grover Cleveland and the swashbuckling Theodore Roosevelt. But the new attention says much about Mr. Trump’s ambitions for his second term. His prescription for curing whatever ails America includes expanding its physical footprint — to Greenland, to Panama and even to the surface of Mars.
Naturally, that makes a hero of the last president to pull it off — even if McKinley did so reluctantly and had more than a few regrets before he was assassinated by an anarchist.