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So, what’s behind all this tariff business? Even Donald Trump’s closest aides are giving conflicting answers. Does he want to eliminate other nations’ tariffs on American goods? Revive American manufacturing? Impose punitive tariffs and keep them in place?

When Trump met on Monday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he displayed what poker players call a "tell": some instinctive behavioral revelation (at a poker table, it could be a blink, a smirk, something like that) that reveals what’s in the other player’s hand. In this case, Bibi had prepared for the meeting by announcing one day earlier that Israel, suddenly confronted with a 17 percent tariff on any of its goods sent to the U.S., would drop all its tariffs on the American exports it received. When Netanyahu and Trump met with the press in the Oval Office, Trump praised the PM for "starting this conversation today saying he’s going to cut all tariffs." Not just that, Bibi piped up, vowing that Israel will "eliminate the trade deficit with the United States; we intend to do that very quickly." Bibi didn’t explain how a nation of ten million could produce exports or purchase imports as much as a nation of 340 million, but he was determined to make clear that he’d do whatever Trump desired.

Then came the tell. A reporter asked Trump if he’d respond to the PM’s new commitment by reducing the 17 percent tariff he’d just levied on Israel. Trump answered, "Maybe not."

Maybe not? Maybe not? That was his response to the one head of government on the planet who most closely shares Trump’s perspectives on ultranationalism, on transforming democracies to more autocratic rule, on evading responsibility for one’s own crimes, who’d traveled across the Mediterranean and the Atlantic precisely to get Trump’s tariff removed, and who’d hand Gaza over to Trump so he could build hotel casinos? His geopolitical soulmate (allowing for the possibility, however remote, that Trump and Bibi have souls)?

What that tell revealed was Trump the sociopath and Trump the fanatic foe of income taxes on the rich. Sociopathically, it showed that one of Trump’s goals in imposing his tariffs was to humiliate every other head of government on the planet. As to policy, it showed that Trump sees tariffs not just as a way to rebuild domestic manufacturing, but also, however contradictory this may be, as an end in themselves, or rather, as a means to replace income taxes on people like himself—actually, on himself primarily—with income from tariffs. He has argued, after all, that the income from tariffs will close much of the roughly $5 trillion hole created by renewing his tax cuts for the rich in the Republican budget now beginning to move through Congress. This, of course, is ridiculous, but it also requires us to look more closely at the president whom Trump takes as a model: William McKinley.

As the head of a House committee in his pre-presidential days, McKinley authored the bill that imposed the highest tariffs ever levied on imports, 49.5 percent. As president, he also built America’s first transoceanic empire, making war on Spain to take over not just parts of the Caribbean but the Philippines as well.

The point about McKinley’s tariffs is that they weren’t imposed as bargaining chips to get other countries to reduce theirs. They were enacted to protect domestic industry—presumably—and also to provide government funding at a time when much of the nation was seeking to dump tariffs and switch to a federal income tax as the way to cover the government’s expenses.

Trump is said to be nostalgic for the 1980s, the greed-is-good decade, but the past to which he’s really borne back ceaselessly is the first Gilded Age. "We were at our richest from 1870 to 1913," he said a few days after returning to the White House. "That’s when we were a tariff country. And then they went to an income tax concept. It’s fine. It’s OK. But it would have been very much better" to have stuck with tariffs instead.

Of course, the federal government didn’t really do very much until the 1930s; its only real peacetime expenditures during those presumably golden years of the late 19th century were pensions to Civil War veterans and survivor benefits to their widows and orphans. That much, tariffs could cover. The government, you’ve probably noticed, does a lot more today.

But the notion that "we were at our richest from 1870 to 1913," and the belief that this was the result of tariffs, requires a level of historic idiocy that’s hard to fathom. To be sure, those were the years when America became a manufacturing power, with huge growth in the railroad, steel, oil, and meatpacking industries. The great fortunes of that age were concentrated in those industries: railroad (Huntington, Fisk, Gould, Vanderbilt, Harriman), steel (Carnegie, Frick), oil (Rockefeller), meatpacking (Armour, Swift). None of those were industries, however, that were threatened by foreign imports. No one was shipping railroads, oil, steel, or meat across the oceans to our shores.

It was immigrants who were crossing the oceans to come to the U.S., immigrants whom all those robber barons put to work at poverty wages to build their empires for them. It was immigrants who were chiefly responsible for increasing the U.S. population of 39 million in the 1870 census to 106 million in the 1920 census. It was immigrants from around the world and internal immigrants from rural America who filled the tenements and slums that spread across urban America during those years, slums that the better classes believed were homes only to the lazy and the shiftless until Progressive Era studies showed that the slums were where the majority of the working class was compelled to live for lack of income. At the start of the 20th century, a host of studies concluded that an urban family needed an annual income of $600 to $800 to live in something better than squalor, while also noting that the average annual income of a working-class family was $450.

When Trump says those were the years when "we were at our richest," the "we" refers only to the topmost sliver of the one percent, but that, of course, is the "we," both then and now, for whom Trump is concerned. I don’t expect him to have read the Progressive Era studies or any histories of the era he valorizes, but I do think he might have heard of tenements, the Lower East Side, the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, pervasive child labor—that sort of thing.

Magnates of that era did benefit from tariffs, but while some appreciated them for reducing foreign competition, most of the very richest appreciated them as a way to fund the government that precluded switching to an income tax. They were well aware that a host of labor, populist, and progressive organizations—the Knights of Labor, the AFL, the Farmers’ Alliance, the Grange, the Populist Party, and many others—condemned the tariffs as a sales tax on their members and agitated for an income tax instead. Trump speaks dismissively of the 16th Amendment, which enshrined income taxes in the Constitution in 1913, as a device some "experts" put over on the American people. What made those taxes constitutional, however, were the ratifications of that amendment by both houses of the legislature in 36 of the (then) 48 states. It was the generation of Americans who most experienced tariffs who dumped them in favor of a (mildly) progressive income tax.

As Trump sees them, tariffs afford him a way to humiliate other world leaders and just maybe cut taxes on the rich, most particularly, himself. The latter belief requires a lot of self-delusion, but self-delusion and sadism underpin much of what we’ve come to call Trumpism.