Since the election pundits have from time to time compared
Donald Trump to various former presidents, most frequently Andrew Jackson
because both were racist populists with tempers who liked talking tough and
using the military. But I’ve also seen writers find similarities in Trump’s temperament
to both Adamses, in incompetence to Buchanan and in dishonesty and political
strategy to Nixon. Trump himself has spoken of his accomplishments as worthy of
a Lincoln, which to people who live in the real world is akin to claiming an
average Little League baseball player is as good as Mickey Mantle or Willie
Mays (or Giancarlo Stanton and Mike Trout for younger readers).
Not surprisingly, no one has mentioned Theodore Roosevelt,
probably because TR is depicted as a hero and one of our greatest presidents in
most history books and the American public already realizes how unprepared and
incompetent Trump is for the job he has now held for about eight months.
But as Stephen Kinzler’s depiction of TR in hisentertaining and illuminating The TrueFlag reminds us, Trump and Teddy share so many personality, character
and class traits that you might think they’re the same person. The True Flag discusses the debate
surrounding the Spanish-American War and its bloody aftermath in which American
soldiers tortured, raped and slaughtered their way to victory against rebels in
the Philippines, the first time the United States used its military might to
make acquisitions beyond the borders of the contiguous 48 states. The book focuses
on the imperialist arguments made at the end of the 19th century by TR, Henry
Cabot Lodge and the yellow journalist William Heart, who with Joseph Pulitzer
pretty much invented fake news. They and many others were in favor of
projecting American military might, holding possessions in which the
inhabitants could not have free elections and extending U.S. control to peoples
considered racially and culturally inferior. On the other side, the peaceniks believed
fervently that the U.S. should not pursue military adventurism and that it was
unconstitutional suppress the voting rights of people in other lands; they
included such luminaries as Mark Twain, former President Grover Cleveland, Jane
Adams, Andrew Carnegie and the distinguished Senator Carl Schurz.
Nowhere in The True
Flag does Kinzler mention Donald Trump, but the picture he paints of TR is
so similar to the Donald we have seen for the past 30 years that you could swear
it was Trump being described.
Let’s start with their backgrounds. Both TR and Trump were
born in the lap of luxury with a silver spoon in their mouth, on third base and
thinking they hit a triple. Filthy rich. The Roosevelt family had what’s called old
money. Very old money. The original Roosevelt arrived in the New World from
Holland sometime in the years just before 1650 and bought a lot of land in
mid-town Manhattan, the original source of the family wealth. Trump family
money also originally came from real estate—developing and managing properties.
Inherited money gave TR and Trump immediate access to the public
through the news media and to political circles that would not be available to
most people. Both used that access to expatiate about controversial topics,
going to war and projecting America’s might in TR’s case and, for Trump,
spreading the bold-faced, racially-tinged lie that President Barack Obama was
not born in the United States.
But access doesn’t necessarily translate to respect. For the
most part, the ruling elite, including the Republican Party, disliked both and
found both to be a royal inconvenience, and with good reason: The Rough Rider was
and Trumpty-Dumpty is a self-centered and loud-mouthed buffoon who often spoke/speaks
without thinking and acted/acts impetuously. The center of TR’s world was TR,
who thought himself the best man for every job and burned to wield the power of
the presidency. Sound familiar? Many in the Republican Party at the turn of the
20th century feared that the irresponsible Roosevelt would gain the power that
he so blatantly sought. Same for Republicans during the 2016 primary and
election season.
But while despised by the political, civic and intellectual
elite, TR and Trump were/are highly popular with large segments of the American
public, thanks to the news media. In TR’s day, the media meant newspapers, of
which there were many, many more across the country than today. Interestingly
enough, Teddy’s rise in the public esteem was fueled to a great extent by one media
giant, William Randolph Hearst, who owned and ran a media empire of newspapers
based on sensationalizing the news and saber-rattling for wars of conquest.
Hearst grew to dislike Teddy, especially after Hearst also became infected by
political ambition.
Here’s where the similarities get really sick: Both Theodore
Roosevelt and Donald Trump built their reputations on fabrications. TR was the
warrior, the hero, the Rough Rider who led a band of volunteers up San Juan
Hill against the Spanish Army in Cuba. In fact, the hero spent a total of two
afternoons in battle. His one casualty was an escaping unarmed prisoner
surrounded by TR’s men who he shot in the back several times. Kind of sounds
like big game hunting.
Most of us now know that when Donald Trump agreed to be the
business mogul featured in the original “Apprentice” he was a failed real
estate developer and casino operator in multiple bankruptcies and a mess of
financial trouble. It was the mass media—the television show and the
entertainment and celebrity media that covered it—that established his
reputation as a business master of the universe, thus giving Trump the platform
to pursue his sometimes successful and sometimes disastrous branding business.
Two frauds that the media turned into celebrities.
The last similarity: both were accidental presidents. The
Republican Party made Teddy McKinley’s VEEP to remove him from power and the
public eye. The plan backfired when McKinley was assassinated and Roosevelt
assumed the presidency. Let’s not dwell too long on the long string of freak
occurrences that enabled Trump to win the electoral college despite losing the
popular vote by about three million, including the wave of voter suppression
laws, the interference by the Russians, the weakness of the other Republican
candidates and former FBI Director James Comey’s ridiculously stupid twin
decision to release information about the Clinton probe but not about the
Russia-Trump connection.
A consideration of the differences between the two men is
sobering, because it reminds us that the problem with Donald Trump is his not
his emotional frailties but his political positions and the reasons he holds
them.
Roosevelt believed in science and in weighing the evidence,
which among other things, informed him of the need to protect the environment
from the degradations of human beings. He backed down from his imperialism once
he became president and had more information and experience (and perhaps the
power after which he lusted). TR was well-read. His beliefs in domestic matters
tended towards the progressive, which in those days meant minimizing the power
of large corporations and setting the rules to create fairness for workers and
consumers.
By contrast, Trump is poorly read and educated and holds a
basket of deplorable beliefs about immigration, crime and the economy that are
rooted in the myths of the 1950’s, and by myths I mean beliefs that were wrong
then and not held now. On global warming and environmental regulations, he has
ignored basic science and the advice of virtually every reputable expert in
favor of his own irrational beliefs. He looks past the crime statistics which
shows an enormous long-term decline and instead believes in the harsh image of
crime in the cities depicted in the tabloid newspapers that he read in the
1960’s and 1970’s, before the days of cable news.
Which brings us to the issue of racism. TR made and
Trumpty-Dumpty makes a large number of racist statements. Racism was inherent
to the Rough Rider’s imperialism and lurking behind many Trump’s beliefs and
actions. But TR’s racism reflects the mainstream thinking of his era. Like
Woodrow Wilson and much of the Progressive movement, TR believed in the
inherent superiority of white people of European descent. Racism tars his
reputation, but most every other white American was racist at the time. I doubt
that TR would be an overt racist today, since all his views, even his foreign
expansionism, were mainstream. By contrast, Trump’s racism puts him out of the
mainstream. Virtually every Trump statement or action to be condemned by other
Republicans has involved denigration of or harm to African-Americans, Muslims,
Mexicans or other non-white minorities. He flirts with racist groups that hold
views that are so far out of the mainstream as to be an anathema to virtually
everyone else.
Finally, despite his heavy-handed narcissism, Roosevelt
ended up being one of our better presidents, rated by some among the top ten.
In contrast, by ending DACA and U.S. support of the Paris agreement, disrupting
relations with long-term strategic allies, cracking down on immigrants, trying
to kill the individual health insurance markets created by the Affordable Care
Act, threatening the civil rights of the transgendered and rolling back
environmental, business and educational regulations, Trump has already done
enough damage to America and the world to rate as the second worst person ever to
win the electoral college or succeed a dying or resigning president. All he has
to do to slide below Harry Truman to the very bottom of the list is convince
the American military to drop a nuclear bomb on some enemy.
The lesson, again, in comparing these two highly
narcissistic individuals is that it’s not the state of Trump’s emotions that
should be of concern, but his politics. It’s his harmful, racist and misogynist
stands and beliefs that are most dangerous to the future of the United States.
