Tariffs

America Was Not Founded by 'Tariff Men,' Contrary to This Painting in Trump's White House

Free trade is "a direct affront to our Founding Fathers," President Donald Trump said during his first presidential campaign.

Phillip W. Magness | From the July 2026 issue

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In a special America 250 issue, Reason takes a look back at our country's founding people and ideas. Read more here.

Last year, President Donald Trump unveiled a gold-framed painting that features himself in the center, flanked by figures who shared some degree of his enthusiasm for taxing imports: Alexander Hamilton, Henry Clay, Abraham Lincoln, and William McKinley. Below their faces are the words The Tariff Men.

Tariffs have long occupied a central place in Trump's idiosyncratic understanding of America's origin story. In his first presidential campaign, a decade ago, Trump declared that free trade is "a direct affront to our Founding Fathers," who "understood trade" and believed tariffs were needed to ensure the new nation's economic independence. "Two hundred forty years after the Revolution," the candidate lamented, "we have turned things completely upside-down." With tariffs, he concluded, "it's time to declare our economic independence once again."

Trump and his appointees have kept hitting that theme since then. Earlier this year, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer used his stage time at Davos to lecture everyone about the "Hamiltonian economic system" of the Founding, which "American leaders slowly forgot" as they abandoned tariffs and industrial policy for free markets. Vice President J.D. Vance has been telling a similar story. "I believe America's wealth was built by an American system" of trade protectionism and industrial subsidies, he said in 2021. "I…don't believe it was built by what folks often call neoliberalism, or classic liberalism." Trump's lawyers sprinkled their arguments in the recent Supreme Court tariff case with appeals to the Founders, especially Hamilton.

Following the progression of Trump's "tariff men" painting, they tell a story of an America that emerged from the Revolution in a state of economic precarity. With political independence won on the battlefield, they say, Hamilton turned his attention to economic independence from British trade, using the tools of tariffs and industrial policy to solidify the Revolution. Next Clay, while serving in the House and later as secretary of state, formalized these policies as the "American System" in the 1820s—a tripartite program of tariffs, central banking, and internal improvement subsidies to preserve and cultivate American wealth. Lincoln and McKinley picked up the mantle in the 19th century, culminating in a period of sustained tariff protectionism after the Civil War and into the early 20th century.

An element of conspiracism enters the story at this point, with anti-protectionist interlopers derailing the American System from its historic place as the engine of American wealth. A hollowing out of the American economy allegedly followed, until Trump arrived to right the ship and bring us back to our tariff-centric Founding.

This is essentially the tale told by Oren Cass, whom Vance has dubbed "one of the smartest thinkers about political economy in the country." In Cass' account, "the........

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