When President Trump is asked which president inspires him, he mentions someone most of us are not too familiar with: William McKinley. I suspect his admiration for this dawn of the 20th century leader is not solely based on McKinley’s character. The 25th President, much like President Trump, had a complex and profound relationship with his era. He was a product of his time while also meaningfully altering his time as a result.

McKinley was a right man at the right time transformational leader who inherited what one could argue was a “near completed” America. A visionary like him,

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published The Communist Manifesto in 1848. The two city dwellers were appalled by the working conditions in factories and decided to fix them with an entirely new political and economic system they coined Communism. Their ideology would go on to become one of the most consequential schools of thought in the modern era, just not where they hoped it would. The ills of industrial capitalism they set out to fix in the West would be smoothed over in other ways than with communism. What Marx and Engels had underestimated was that, as inhumane as working

Can one ever truly become the primus inter pares among the entrenched elites? Richard Nixon wrestled with this question in his adolescence and throughout his entire career. His Promethean attempt to overcome it, though having had an unfortunate end, helped build the foundations of the modern Conservative movement. Nixon proved that there’s a place for a Conservative intellectual and operator from modest roots in the highest office. His Presidency however, would tragically uncover that a talented outsider like him would face near mythological levels of manipulation from the establishment. That he and other outsiders like him, would be seen