The Arena and the Hologram
On July 1st, the President of the United States flew to Medora, North Dakota, to open the new Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library. While he was there, he had a conversation with Teddy Roosevelt. That's not a joke and I'm not being cruel — the library has an AI hologram of TR, and the President asked it whether the Panama Canal was its greatest achievement. Then he stood up in front of the crowd and compared himself to the man, while his people spent the week telling reporters the two presidents are cut from the same cloth.
I've held Theodore Roosevelt as a personal hero most of my life, and I want to talk about that comparison — because I've done the reading, and I have receipts.
Here's one for free before we start. July 1st, the day they picked to open that library, is the anniversary of the day in 1898 that Theodore Roosevelt charged up Kettle Hill in Cuba at the front of his own men, on horseback, into rifle fire. A hundred and twenty-eight years to the day. I don't think anybody planning that event knew it. That's kind of the whole essay in one sentence, but stay with me anyway.
What the man actually was
Theodore Roosevelt wrote roughly forty books. Naval history he started researching in college. Memoirs of ranching in the Badlands — the same Badlands where they built that library. Biographies. An account of nearly dying on an unmapped river in the Amazon. On top of the books, historians estimate around 150,000 letters. When his wife and his mother died in the same house on the same day — Valentine's Day, 1884 — he wrote one line in his diary, went west to the Dakota Territory, and wrote his way through the grief. That was his operating system his entire life: the rage, the sorrow, the fight — it all went onto paper first. He is likely the best-read man ever to hold the office; by his own account he got through a book a day, sometimes two or three.
The current president's most famous book was written by another man. That's not my opinion — the ghostwriter, Tony Schwartz, has spent years saying publicly that he wrote it and regrets his part in it. And his own former officials have described, on the record, redesigning the President's Daily Brief around a man who wouldn't read it — shorter, more pictures, oral summaries.
One of them wrote forty books. The other one wouldn't read a briefing. His aides say they're the same.
The underdog's president
Roosevelt is remembered as the trust-buster, but look at what the fights actually were. When the coal miners struck in 1902 and the mine owners refused to even sit at a table, TR became the first president in American history to step into a strike on any side but the owners'. He threatened to seize the mines with the Army if the companies wouldn't accept arbitration. The miners got their raise. When a muckraking novel exposed what was actually in America's meat, he didn't call the author an enemy of the people — he ordered an investigation, believed it, and signed the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act inside the year. He called his program the Square Deal, and the square part meant square for the man at the bottom.
And here's the one that'll twist some folks up, so I'll say it plain: in 1912, running as a Progressive, Roosevelt's platform called for a national system of social insurance — protection against the costs of sickness and old age. Health coverage. For the sick and the elderly. A hundred and fourteen years ago. The grandfather of American conservatives was campaigning on the thing that gets you called a communist today. Words mean things, and so does history.
He hated a bully all his life, and not in speeches. As a young rancher out west, a drunk in a Montana saloon pulled two guns on him and called him Four Eyes. By TR's own account he put the man on the floor with three punches and that was the end of it. As police commissioner he walked the New York beat at midnight to catch his own crooked cops. As president he boxed in the White House until a punch detached his retina and half-blinded him — and he kept it secret so the sparring partner would never know.
The land
He saw this country's wild places and understood, before almost anyone in power, that they could be lost. Standing at the Grand Canyon in 1903 he told the country to leave it as it is — that man could only mar it. He laid the cornerstone of the arch at Yellowstone's north entrance the same year; it reads "For the Benefit and Enjoyment of the People." Not the shareholders. The people. By the time he left office he had protected on the order of 230 million acres — national parks, 150 national forests, the first 51 federal bird reservations, 18 national monuments under an Antiquities Act he signed. It is, acre for acre, maybe the largest single gift any president ever handed the future.
At the library opening, the current president bragged about ripping 90 acres away from the federal government for the project — his words, per the reporting — and laughed that they still haven't figured out what happened. Ninety acres, taken as a boast. Two hundred thirty million, given as a trust. Same cloth, they say.
Toward the guns
In 1898, Roosevelt was Assistant Secretary of the Navy — a safe, powerful desk. He resigned it to enlist, raised the Rough Riders, and led that charge on the 1st of July. In 1917, at fifty-eight years old, half-blind and carrying a bullet in his chest from an assassination attempt he'd finished an 84-minute speech with, he begged President Wilson to let him raise a division and take it to France. Wilson said no. So his four sons went. The youngest, Quentin, was shot down over France in July 1918. Teddy Roosevelt died six months later, and the people who knew him mostly agreed on the cause.
The man being compared to him received five draft deferments during Vietnam — four for school, one for bone spurs. Decades later, the daughters of the podiatrist who made the diagnosis told reporters their late father did it as a favor to the family landlord. I can't prove that last part and won't pretend I can; it's their account. What's documented is the deferment, and a man who, asked about it years later, couldn't recall which foot.
One of them ran toward a war twice and gave it a son. The other one has a note.
The part where I'm honest about my hero
Regular readers know my rule: facts are facts whether they land on my side or not, and heroes don't get exemptions. So here's the ledger's other column. Roosevelt was an imperialist — the Philippines happened on the watch of men he championed and under ideas he preached. And that Panama Canal the hologram called its proudest achievement? TR got the land for it by backing Panama's secession from Colombia with American warships, and boasted about taking the isthmus afterward. He carved his canal out of the country I'm moving to in a few months. I get to hold him as a hero and hold that against him at the same time. That's what reading whole men instead of stickers gets you: both columns of the ledger, and the spine to look at each.
But notice what even the ledger's bad column shows. His sins were the sins of a man who believed in something larger than himself so hard it ran him through other people's countries. Every flaw points outward, toward a vision — wrong sometimes, arrogant sometimes, but never once small. Find me the vision in a hologram conversation about whether Democrats sold a canal too cheap.
The arena
Roosevelt's most famous words are the ones about the man in the arena — how it's not the critic who counts, but the man whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who errs and comes short again and again, and who, at worst, fails while daring greatly. People quote it at gyms and graduations. Here's what they miss: it's a description of a cost. The arena bloodied him. It took his eye, took a bullet, took his son, and most historians will tell you it took his life at sixty.
That's the mantle being claimed by a man whose idea of the arena is a rally stage, whose blood spilled for the country is zero pints, and whose conversation with Theodore Roosevelt required a hologram — because everything Roosevelt actually left us is in books, and that was never going to be the way he'd meet him.
The library opened to the public on July 4th, this country's 250th birthday. I think TR would have loved the library. I've told you what I think he'd have made of the man who cut the ribbon — and if you think I'm wrong, good: the sources are below. Argue with them, not me. That's how the man himself would have wanted it. He'd have read every one.
— A.D.B.
Sources
Washington Post, July 1, 2026 — "Trump honors a president he sees as a peer," Medora library opening and aide comparisons
Snopes, July 2, 2026 — fact-check of the "conversation with Teddy Roosevelt" (AI exhibit at the TR Presidential Library; public opening July 4, 2026)
New Republic / speech transcript, July 1, 2026 — "ripped 90 acres away from the federal government" remarks
Theodore Roosevelt, An Autobiography (1913) — Mingusville saloon account, police commissioner years
Library of Congress / Theodore Roosevelt Center, Dickinson State University — books (~40) and letters (~150,000)
Tony Schwartz interviews, The New Yorker ("Donald Trump's Ghostwriter Tells All," July 2016) and subsequent — authorship of The Art of the Deal
Washington Post / on-record accounts of former intelligence officials — oral and visual adaptation of the President's Daily Brief
1902 Anthracite Coal Strike — TR arbitration and threatened seizure; Dept. of Labor history
Meat Inspection Act and Pure Food and Drug Act (1906)
Progressive ("Bull Moose") Party Platform of 1912 — social insurance plank covering sickness and old age
Grand Canyon speech, May 6, 1903; Roosevelt Arch, Yellowstone (1903), inscription "For the Benefit and Enjoyment of the People"
National Park Service — TR conservation record: ~230 million acres, 5 national parks, 18 national monuments, 150 national forests, 51 bird reservations; Antiquities Act (1906)
Battle of San Juan Heights / Kettle Hill, July 1, 1898; Medal of Honor awarded posthumously, 2001
Milwaukee assassination attempt, Oct. 14, 1912 — 84-minute speech with the bullet lodged in his chest
WWI volunteer division request (1917), denied by Wilson; Quentin Roosevelt killed July 14, 1918; TR's death Jan. 6, 1919
New York Times, Dec. 26, 2018 — podiatrist's daughters' account of the bone-spur diagnosis (presented as their account)
Selective Service records as reported — five deferments (four educational, one medical, 1968)
"The Man in the Arena," from "Citizenship in a Republic," Sorbonne, April 23, 1910
