Like many of my fellow Americans, I have zero interest in any of the tacky, self-aggrandizing events President Donald Trump has planned for the nation’s 250th birthday. None of that is about us or our real history. Rather, Trump’s semiquincentennial celebrations are all about himself and a sanitized (and, frankly, pretty boring) version of the otherwise rich, complex story of the United States.
Instead, I’m traveling to Medora, North Dakota, for the grand opening of the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, which is directly adjacent to a large portion of the national park that also bears Roosevelt’s name. This is the only national park in the country which is named directly for a person.
Roosevelt became president just a couple months after America turned 125 — half its current age. Looking back to what a truly great Republican president accomplished then is an indomitably better way of guiding our path forward than to macabrely contemplate carrying on the pathetic, corrupt legacy of Donald Trump.
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First off, although Teddy Roosevelt had an “R” by his name during his time in office, his policies had more in common with those of his distant cousin FDR, a Democrat who served a few decades later, than they do with those of the current occupant of the White House (in case you were wondering, FDR was the first president to establish a presidential library, which is why Theodore Roosevelt is only just now getting one). For instance, though he was not able to get it fully done in his lifetime (nor has anyone else been able to get it fully done more than a century hence), Teddy Roosevelt backed “the protection of home life against the hazards of sickness, irregular employment, and old age through the adoption of a system of social insurance adapted to American use.”
What Roosevelt did accomplish, however, was plenty to firmly establish his place among the greatest American presidents of all time. Unlike Trump, who has repeatedly demanded the Nobel Peace Prize but will never be awarded it because he singlehandedly starts arbitrary new wars as well as exacerbates existing ones, Roosevelt won the Peace Prize “for his role in bringing to an end the bloody war recently waged between two of the world’s great powers, Japan and Russia.” Roosevelt was the first American to win a Nobel Prize in any category.
Although Roosevelt was also criticized as an imperialist for, among other things, personally fighting and killing an enemy soldier in the Spanish American War prior to his terms in office, the fact is that the U.S. engaged in no major foreign wars during Roosevelt’s time in office. Trump, obviously, shares neither Roosevelt’s background as a military veteran nor his predilection for peaceful U.S. foreign policy.
War and peace may make better stories for today’s museum-visiting public, yet Roosevelt’s contemporary reputation as a “trust buster” breaking up big businesses and protecting workers probably earned the respect of a large portion of his voters in his 1904 reelection campaign. Between 1902 and 1909, the Roosevelt administration initiated lawsuits under the Sherman Antitrust Act against 44 major corporations. In his second term, Roosevelt’s “Square Deal” policy portfolio seeking better relations between capital and labor earned him plenty of enemies in his own party who thought regular Joes were already getting too square of a deal. Trump, on the other hand, seats today’s tech oligarchs at places of prestige during nearly every presidential event, solicits billions of dollars from wealthy individuals and companies, and repays these monopolists for ideological favoritism on their platforms with a mostly “hands off” regulatory approach (as long as they stay in line, that is).
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Of course, Roosevelt may be best remembered today for his tireless environmental advocacy. The man protected approximately 230 million acres of public land during his presidency and came to be known as our “conservationist president.” This is, indeed, high among the reasons his presidential library will be located in Medora, near the site where, as a young man, he established his Elkhorn Ranch and first came to observe directly the decimation of America’s natural resources, which immensely saddened him.
In contrast, in his second term alone, Trump has set in motion the lifting of federal protection from more than 86 million acres of public lands. Few things seem to please Trump more than attempting to foul the air we breathe with soot, bespoil the water we drink with pollutants, and eradicate the native wildlife an increasingly small number of us live among.
I am disgusted to have to report that Trump announced plans to visit the new Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library a few days before I will, before it is fully opened to the public. I wish he could take something from this visit, but he won’t. Trump has proven himself incapable of learning or growth.
If Teddy Roosevelt were alive today, he would loathe Donald Trump and be utterly repulsed by almost all of this administration’s policies. This undeniable historical fact seems lost on our current president.
Nevertheless, as America turns 250 years old, I hope you’ll join me in remembering positive past examples of America’s true greatness and leave aside, for a moment, the dinginess of America’s sordid present. Halfway to 250, Teddy Roosevelt took us forward, not back. We should all look to his example in doing that again. Happy Fourth of July, everyone.
Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at [email protected].