Theodore Roosevelt was a man who believed deeply in the conservation of national resources, the rejection of corporate gifts, and the supremacy of American independence from foreign entanglements. Donald Trump flew to his presidential library on a $400 million Boeing 747-8i donated by the Qatari government and told the audience, per Fox News, that after his tour he now knows more about the museum than the people who built it. Roosevelt is not available for comment. The teleprompter broke during the speech, which Trump addressed with the enthusiasm of a man who considers unscripted remarks an upgrade.
The Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library opened Wednesday in Medora, North Dakota, which is the small town where Roosevelt arrived in 1883 as a grieving young widower and left, according to his own account, transformed into the man who would become America’s 26th president. The library is a genuine achievement, two decades in the making, built by private donations without federal funding, which is the kind of institutional discipline Roosevelt himself would have recognized as correct. Trump flew there on a plane funded by a foreign government and then signed a conservation bill. The Museum is inscribed with Roosevelt’s words: “The nation behaves well if it treats the natural resources as assets which it must turn over to the next generation increased, and not impaired.” The new Air Force One is leased to the nation by Qatar for the duration of Trump’s presidency, after which it goes to his presidential library.
Trump told reporters at Joint Base Andrews before boarding: “This will be the first flight of what I think is maybe the greatest commercial plane ever built. I said to Boeing, what’s the best one? He said, ‘this is the best plane ever built, and you’re going to have the privilege of flying it.'” He said this about the plane. That Qatar gave him. To fly to a museum named after a president who famously refused corporate gifts.
After touring the museum with Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, Trump told the crowd he now knows more about the Roosevelt library than its builders, a claim he made with the confidence of a man who has been in a building for three hours and believes this constitutes expertise. He then signed the Great American Outdoors Act Reauthorization, a conservation measure, on the grounds of a museum dedicated to a man who expanded the national park system by 150 million acres, having arrived on a foreign government’s plane to do it.
Roosevelt’s famous quote about national resources is inscribed on the museum’s wall. It was there when Trump toured. Whether he read it is not confirmed.
When the president visits a museum dedicated to conservation and rejecting corporate gifts, in a plane donated by a foreign government, and tells the crowd he knows more about the museum than its builders, what exactly was learned on the tour?
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