The latest piece of art added to the White House walls portrays President Trump with four historic American politicians who championed tariffs during their tenures.
The new artwork, unveiled Thursday by White House staffer Harrison Fields, is titled “The Tariff Men.” The portrait includes former Presidents William McKinley, Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson and former Rep. Henry Clay around Trump.
McKinley, whom Trump has frequently discussed as a president he admires, led efforts to pass the Tariff Act of 1890. During Trump’s first day in office, he renamed Denali as Mount McKinley in his honor and called him the “tariff king.”
McKinley’s bill increased duties on imported goods to 50 percent during an era marked by a manufacturing boom. Experts generally consider the economic effects of this policy to be negative and to have contributed to political instability in the 1890s, according to the University of Birmingham.
Lincoln was also a proponent of tariffs. In 1861, the president-elect said, “The tariff is to the government what a meal is to the family.”
This was a divisive political issue during the Civil War era and marked the difference between the Northern and Southern economic models. Lincoln enacted tariff policies to protect domestic manufacturing, an activity primarily developed in the North.
Jefferson had a more nuanced view of tariffs. He relied on tariffs in the early days of his presidency as they were a large source of government revenue. However, later on, he raised constitutional concerns when it came to government intervention in trade and called tariffs contradictory to the idea of limited government.
Jefferson signed the Embargo Act of 1807 during the Napoleonic wars, which forbade trade with France and Britain so that both countries would be coerced into respecting American neutrality. He called it “peaceable coercion,” but it plummeted the American economy and did not have the intended effects in Europe, according to the University of Virginia.
Henry Clay, a former Kentucky senator and representative, was dubbed “the most influential member” of the Senate during his tenure, according to the Senate website. He created what was called the “American system” in the years following the War of 1912.
This plan, meant to boost manufacturing, included protectionist tariff policies accompanied by the creation of a national bank and government subsidies for roads, canals and other infrastructure.
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