President Trump went out to North Dakota on July 1 to dedicate the Theodore Roosevelt Library, a project which Trump himself helped pull together. In his rambling manner, surrounded by a group of cowboys dressed like TR’s Rough Riders, he went through Roosevelt’s biography, praising him as a wonderful example of “the American spirit.” No doubt this is a personal commitment on the part of the President, whose foibles and missteps have largely been tinged by his admiration for this miscreant president, whether in his Venezuela gambit or in his Iran debacle.
The sudden emergence of Teddy Roosevelt after the brutal assassination of President William McKinley began the long journey of America from the constitutional republic created by our founding fathers and sanctified by the blood of the nearly 700,000 Americans who died in the Civil War, including the blood or our arguably greatest president, Abraham Lincoln, to something resembling the British Empire, which Teddy Roosevelt admired and intended to replace with an American version. Roosevelt was, in fact, the nephew, and protégé of James Bulloch, who had headed the Confederacy intelligence service’s operations from within London during the Civil War. Trump’s lauding of TR as the great American is a far more egregious travesty than the 47th President’s attempt to turn the historic city of Washington into a new tinsel town with his new White House ballroom and his Arch de Triumph on the Potomac, all for the edification of the rich and famous.
