It’s hard to learn about Teddy Roosevelt and not see parallels to Donald Trump.
Now, before you drag me to the pit, let me emphasize that their differences were fundamental, and they are on opposite sides of the ethical spectrum.
TR was unquestionably patriotic. He loved America, and its working class. Trump is a Russian stooge, and is contemptuous of everyday Americans.
TR was an avid reader, and legitimately an author. Trump is barely literate.
TR was a progressive reformer. This was true throughout his political life, and he was regularly a thorn in the side of the wealthy and powerful. Trump cares about nobody but himself, but otherwise kowtows to the wealthiest people.
TR valued physical fitness, strenuous effort, and genuine danger. Trump is a lazy wimp.
TR died at age 60.
Still, TR had a lot in common with Donald.
Both born of privilege, and largely squandered their inheritance with bad investments (in TR’s case, it was cattle ranching)
* Both were incredibly bombastic (everything was the biggest, the best)
* Both couldn’t stand not being the center of attention (TR’s daughter Alice famously said “ My father always wanted to be the corpse at every funeral, the bride at every wedding and the baby at every christening.”)
* Both, as president, felt compelled to weigh in on matters of social concern (TR was instrumental in the creation of the NCAA, which is the governing body for college athletics)
* Both intervened into foreign affairs only tangentially related to the United States (TR brokered peace between Russia and Japan), and orchestrated the creation of the Panama Canal)
Both were warmongers, and harbored very racist views about the differences between nations (although TR’s were more in line with the typical thinking of his time)
I think mainly their similarities lie with their personality - an almost pathological belief in their own viewpoint, and a constant need for attention.
Clearly, their time in office was wholly different. Still, they strike me as 2 sides of the same coin; maybe the light and dark versions of the pompous statesman.
This idea has been rattling around in my brain for a while. I welcome your thoughts.
I think there are other differences you may have overlooked, and some of the similarities are common to almost all presidents.
One striking difference is their position regarding nature and the outdoors. TR pretty famously was a conservationist that helped create the National Park system and felt that preserving the natural environment was a fundamental responsibility of humanity. Trump, to be blunt, does not agree with that.
I think almost all successful politicians, especially at the level of POTUS, believe that they should be the center of attention. Charisma and having all of the attention focused on you in every room you are in is par for the course. It’s pretty hard to find very many presidents you could credibly describe as “modest” - and they tend to be the ones that are rated highly by history.
I do think the warmongering and the notion that martial dominance and intervention is the primary way to protect American interests is similar. But even there didn’t TR famously say “speak softly and carry a big stick”? Trump doesn’t seem to believe in the “speak softly” part at all.
ETA: I think their primary similarity is that they are both populists. They relied on their “connection with the common man” for power, and were willing to go against long-held beliefs of their party to support what they saw as correct policy. For Trump that would be tariffs; for TR perhaps trust-busting.
I don’t see it, really.
There are a few points of coincidence as you note, but what matters is the way both men respond to these urges.
TR, whatever his many faults, was a thinking being, a reader, a writer.
He could be bombastic with decorum, he could gain the center of attention on his own merits, his foreign interventions and wars had thought behind them (and thus were mostly successful (for the U.S. if not for the world at large, poor Colombia!) ).
The historical character that Trump most resembles is not T. Roosevelt but Kaiser Wilhelm.
Teddy’s enormous personality and charisma is, to me, the closest parallel to Trump. A cult of Teddy existed that has seen few equivalents since. FDR comes closest, maybe with JFK or Reagan behind. Teddy could easily have won the 1908 election and got more votes than incumbent president Taft in 1912. His need to be the cynosure is like Trump’s in some ways, but Teddy earned that attention with his achievements (and magna cum laude at Harvard) and enthusiasms. He didn’t need to bully others to do things of interest to him; he made the world glow and people wanted in.
Nevertheless, you don’t have to hunt too long to find modern authors absolutely slagging Teddy. His faults, like his virtues, were outsized. Sure, he won the Nobel Peace Prize for brokering an end to the Russo-Japanese War, but nobody outside Asia remembers that the peace essentially gave Korea to Japan as a slave state. Why Japan? Because westerners saw the martial, quickly technologizing Japanese as the equivalent to the elite Aryan "race’ and the Slavic Russians as barbarians. Most of the rest of the horrors of the century stem from this.
People today celebrate his inviting Booker T. Washington to the White House, e.g., but forget that the blowback meant he never did that again and in fact continued the government’s heavy hand on blacks. Nor was he a true populist. The literal Populist Party of the 1890s would not have backed Roosevelt. Teddy battled Wall Street interests but that was about all they had in common. Populists were egalitarian, Teddy was elitist. He liked men of action, or at least ranchers in the wild, rather than farmers.
On balance, I still consider Teddy one of the best presidents and Trump by far as the worst. That a few comparisons can be made is trivia.
Oh, you sweet innocent. You think they already don’t have that idea?
Florida Republican Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna is leading the effort to add President Trump’s face to Mount Rushmore by introducing official legislation in the House of Representatives.
She introduced the bill one week after Trump’s second term began.
The Panama Canal was hardly tangentially related to the US. It was and still is an important connection between the East and West Coast. It is wrong for both of them to bully central America over it though.
A lot of ancient Egyptian and Roman sculptures are not in possession of their original faces. It was relatively easy to put the current boss’s head on an already existing statue. So, there’s historical precedent for remodeling one of the Rushmore heads.