Theodore Roosevelt as Trump precursor.
P resident Trump claimed his inner Theodore Roosevelt when he recently posted one of TR’s best lines on Facebook:
It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually the man in the arena.
To which one can only say to the man in our arena: It’s about time. Some of my National Review colleagues have noted accurately that Trump’s “remake the world” second-term debut resembles that of Franklin Roosevelt. Other commentators have pointed to the ways in which Trump resembles Richard Nixon. But the most glaring likeness among presidents is that of President Trump to the Bull Moose. Though a century apart — TR served from 1901 to 1909 — these two chief executives have favored the same modus operandi: using unpredictability to amass power. And the record of Theodore Rex, as Edmund Morris titled his TR biography, bodes ill for both the economy and the Republican Party.
But to the similarities. They start, for both men, pre–White House. As Trump did, TR staged his pre-presidential efforts as much with an eye to public recognition as to sustained reform or strengthening institutions. Whenever TR stumbled, he pivoted to a new venture and publicized it like mad, though the medium in those days was the printed word, not season after season on The Apprentice. Before the cognoscenti had even absorbed the meaning of the young Roosevelt’s humiliating fourth-place score in a key 1886 New York City mayoral contest, for example, TR was off to the Badlands, memorializing his ranching experiences in dispatches and books such as Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail.
As Trump does, TR routinely alienated GOP grandees, circumventing them to get ahead. As Trump has, TR skillfully cultivated the media — so skillfully that members of Congress were left trying catch up with whatever shifts in public opinion resulted from the politician’s press alliances. TR’s Rupert Murdoch was the widely syndicated William Allen White of Kansas’s influential Emporia Gazette. TR’s equivalent of Fox News was the New York Herald, whose owner, William Randolph Hearst, drummed a steady beat of support when Roosevelt called for war against Spain.
Today, Murdoch must be scratching his head over what his showcasing Trump has wrought, especially now that Trump decided to sue both Murdoch and his Wall Street Journal. White, too, found that he had second thoughts about his decision to back TR: “Roosevelt bit me and I went mad,” White reportedly told a colleague.
When in 1896 Roosevelt sought a post as assistant secretary of the Navy, the president-elect, William McKinley, hesitated before hiring him: “I am afraid he is too pugnacious.” A valid concern, for, as Evan Thomas reports in his War Lovers, as assistant secretary TR unrelentingly lobbied for a war that McKinley did not want: invasion of Cuba to force out the Spanish Empire.
What would happen to Cuba, McKinley’s fellow skeptics asked, subsequent to its liberation from oppression? McKinley nonetheless caved and invaded, inadvertently staging Roosevelt as the hero of San Juan Heights.
A reluctant Republican Party gave the victorious Rough Rider the second spot on the 1900 presidential ticket for the same reason the reluctant GOP gave Trump his presidential nominations: They saw he would bring the votes.
Roosevelt got those votes through sheer bombast. TR’s empire-mongering can’t be characterized as “MAGA,” for the nation was younger then. But it was surely “MAG.”
“Is America a weakling, to shrink from the world work that must be done by the world powers?” the candidate asked. “No!” Sounding for all the world like Senator Mitch McConnell, Mark Hanna, the GOP powerhouse of that era, expressed horror: “Don’t any of you realize there’s only one life between this madman and the presidency?”
After McKinley was assassinated in 1901, the madman had the office. The occupant of what he labeled the Bully Pulpit — “bully” as in “excellent” — proved a literal bully as well. As new president, TR perpetually unnerved fellow Republicans, pivoting back to domestic politics. As Trump has, TR cast his campaigns in moral terms rather than economic ones. Where Trump launched his tariff war, TR made war against trusts, large combinations of companies. Relying more on whim than statute, Roosevelt segregated trusts into “good trusts” and “bad trusts.”
TR targeted an invincible-looking industry that, in those days, mattered as much as the interstate highways, or the internet, do today: railroads. James Hill’s Great Northern Railway took over a struggling competitor, Northern Pacific. Roosevelt asked Hanna what he made of the combined entity, Great Northern Securities. Hanna replied that it was “the very best thing possible for the future of the whole Northwest territory.” Roosevelt nonetheless sicced the Justice Department on the Great Northern.
J. Pierpont Morgan, a participant in the beleaguered deal, called on the president to inquire, as desperate steel importers these days do from time to time, whether their attorneys might work out the matter behind the scenes.
No. Next, the disconcerted Morgan asked whether other investments of the House of Morgan might be assailed. Roosevelt’s reply captures the chill of arbitrary leadership. The administration would not go after the other Morgan companies, he said — unless “they have done something we regard as wrong.” As Edmund Morris reports in Theodore Rex, to observers such as French Ambassador Jules Jusserand, Roosevelt seemed “more powerful than a king.”
That power suited many voters fine, which is why Roosevelt won so headily when he ran for office on his own in 1904.
Of course TR, like Trump, occasionally supported laws that aligned with his impulses. One example is the Elkins Act of 1903, which made it illegal for railroads to charge different freight rates for different customers. This shallow effort to achieve market “fairness” deprived the railroads of a standard business tool: the ability to provides discounts to those who buy the product in larger quantities. Shares in railroads promptly dropped more than 20 percent, a shift that undermined TR’s premise of railroad invincibility. Another sore point was internecine violence in the young Republic of Cuba, the latter raising questions about the merits of another TR premise, invasion for regime change. “Just at the moment I am so angry with that infernal little Cuban Republic,” wrote Roosevelt in a 1906 letter, “that I would like to wipe its people off the face of the earth.”
Just as railroads were recovering from the Elkins Act came another blow, the Hepburn Act of 1906. The act gave authorities power to set freight rates at what was “fair” and “reasonable” — terms arbitrary enough to give regulators unprecedented license. The railroads reacted to these price controls the same way Big Pharma is reacting to Trump’s proposals to set prices for drugs — with shock. After all, the Grand Old Party was supposed to be the party of big business.
Caveat (political) emptor.
Regarding the railroads, a petulant president suggested in the summer of 1907 that “certain malefactors of great wealth” had deliberately put their companies in distress “in order to discredit the policy of the government.” Commented the Commercial and Financial Chronicle: “It seems almost incredible that a person of superior intelligence like the president should seriously advance such an argument.”
Though other factors contributed to economic weakness in the period, it was Roosevelt’s bullying of business that brought about a true crash. In the fall of 1907, rail stocks had dropped to levels 30 percent below those of 1906. The panic spread to banks and trusts. By November, the value of listed stocks had dropped 37 percent from their 1906 high. TR found himself forced to turn to his own Wall Street demon, J. P. Morgan, to organize and co-fund a Wall Street rescue. But while Washington and Wall Street could halt a panic, they could not prevent the resulting recession: In 1908, nonfarm unemployment moved up past the 10 percent line, quite a jump from the 1.4 percent level of just years before. When, in 1909, the former president embarked on a safari, Morgan was said to have remarked that he hoped “every lion would do its duty.”
The Roosevelt evidence suggests that the greater challenges may be ahead of us, especially when it comes to the post-Trump succession. For TR did not relinquish power easily, a fact that may already be giving Vice President Vance pause. When the presidency of his chosen successor, William Howard Taft, didn’t proceed to his taste, TR challenged Taft for the 1912 Republican presidential nomination. Summoning their courage, the GOP convention selected Taft, not TR, as the candidate. TR promptly established a third party, the Bull Moose Party, thereby throwing the election to the Democrat in the race, Woodrow Wilson. It took another eight years — and the passing of TR from the scene in 1919 — for the Grand Old Party to find its footing.
Given the evidence, why does it take Trump himself to hammer the TR-Trump resemblance? The answer is that conservatives and Republicans have spent recent years building up TR as a useful Republican model. Today’s conservatives are loath to see their icon become — like so many other Republican treasures — collateral damage of the Trump era. Yet the record suggests it might be safer to stick with Reagan.