President Trump dedicated the $450 million Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in the North Dakota Badlands on Wednesday, and the press corps spent the day snickering — because nothing offends the permanent media class like a president who invokes a leader who wielded executive power for the people.
The event was a spectacle befitting America's 250th anniversary: Trump arrived on the inaugural flight of a refurbished Boeing 747 — a $400 million jet previously owned by Qatar and converted into the new Air Force One — then rode a red, white, and blue train emulating Roosevelt's whistle-stop tours through the same badlands where the 26th president ran cattle in the 1880s. Horseback riders dressed as Roosevelt's Rough Riders escorted the motorcade. Trump toured the 96,000-square-foot facility, conversed with a digital animation of Roosevelt, and delivered an hour-long speech despite a broken teleprompter and withering heat.
The Guardian called it Trump's "latest effort to cloak himself in the mantle of great men of history" and noted he "notably said little about his predecessor's environmental legacy." HuffPost ignored the library entirely to highlight social media mockery of the new Air Force One, noting the Qatar-donated jet has "raised serious ethical concerns" and that users on X gave it "humiliating nicknames."
Only the New York Post bothered to report on the library itself — a building designed by Norwegian firm Snøhetta to blend into the Badlands so seamlessly it's the only presidential library you can reach on horseback. The Post also told the story the other outlets wouldn't: during the 2020 George Floyd riots, leftwing activists and museum workers demanded the removal of the Theodore Roosevelt statue outside New York's American Museum of Natural History, calling it racist for depicting Roosevelt on horseback with an American Indian and African man on foot. The museum caved. The 168,000-pound statue had to be bisected and squeezed through the Holland Tunnel under cover of a January night — chosen, the Post reported, "for when marauding gangs of protestors would be less active" — before a transcontinental road trip requiring permits from 17 states. It now sits in an undisclosed North Dakota facility awaiting a permanent home on the library grounds.
Trump announced the National Endowment for the Humanities will award the library $750,000 for its first year. He told the crowd: "I'm honoring Theodore Roosevelt — that is, the man I have long admired. I don't admire too many people, I have to tell you — not a lot of people out there." He also recounted his conversation with the digital Roosevelt, asking about the Panama Canal: "How do you feel about the fact that the Democrats gave the Panama canal away for one dollar to Panama?"
Roosevelt was despised by the establishment of his own era — the trusts he busted, the canal he built, the executive vigor he wielded. That a president who models himself after that tradition draws the same contempt from today's press tells you everything about whose side the press is on.
