Bill Press: Teddy Roosevelt was everything Donald Trump is not

Bill Press, Tribune Content Agency on Jul 2, 2026

When someone lies every time he opens his mouth, it’s impossible to say what’s the biggest lie of all. But clearly, after insisting he actually won the 2020 election, one of Donald Trump’s biggest lies is claiming he’s just like Teddy Roosevelt.

Trump did so again this week when he flew off to the opening of the new Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in Medora, North Dakota. Liar, liar, pants on fire! Nothing could be further from the truth.

True, like Trump, TR was a loud-mouth from New York who was elected president and survived an assassination attempt. But, otherwise, Roosevelt was everything Donald Trump is not: pro-environment, anti-corruption and fiercely respectful and protective of the law. TR was also not a twice-impeached, convicted felon.

The differences are striking. Teddy won the Nobel Peace Prize for ending the Russo-Japanese War; Donald started a pointless war against Iran, threatened war with Cuba and has done nothing to end the war in Ukraine. Teddy celebrated immigration as the core to American identity; Donald’s goal is to round up and export as many immigrants as he can. Teddy put on the uniform and led the Rough Riders into combat; Donald claimed bone spurs as an excuse to avoid military service.

Another big difference. As documented in historian Douglas Brinkley’s majestic “The Wilderness Warrior,” Roosevelt is the founding father of today’s environmental movement. It was, Roosevelt said, the work he was most proud of as president. He camped out in Yosemite with John Muir. He then went on to launch the U.S. Forest Service and create five national parks, 18 national monuments and 150 national forests.

Trump is the most anti-environmental president ever. He calls climate change a hoax, pulled America out of the Paris Climate Accords and rolled back all climate change programs adopted under Obama and Biden. He’s gutted the EPA, opened more federal lands to oil drilling and mining, and eliminated or weakened more than 100 environmental rules and policies. And he’s now diverting revenue from national parks to pay for his pet destruction projects in Washington.

But the biggest difference of all is how the two presidents dealt with corruption. Roosevelt fought it; Trump practices it. Roosevelt devoted his life to taking on the robber barons, busting up the trusts and attacking those who used positions of power to enrich themselves. People like Trump, who sees the presidency not as a chance to improve the lives of average Americans, but only as a golden opportunity to line his own pockets.

Other presidents have bent over backward to avoid even the appearance of profiting from the presidency. Trump doesn’t care. The first modern president to refuse to put his holdings in a blind trust, he doesn’t care about conflicts of interest. He thrives on them. He weighs every presidential decision based on how much money he can squeeze out of it. Conflicts of interest, be damned.

In financial documents released this week, Trump revealed he made a whopping $2.2 billion in 2025, including $1.4 billion from the cryptocurrency business he launched with sons Donald Jr. and Eric, with the help of $500 million from the United Arab Emirates.

On July 23, 2025 Trump signed a new “AI Action Plan” sought by U.S. high tech companies. The same day, Trump purchased stock worth between $1 million and $5 million each in a suite of tech firms, including Broadcom, Meta, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Nvidia. He signed the bill with one hand, while collecting cash with the other.

As reported by the New York Times, in September 2025 Trump personally negotiated a deal with the president of Kazakhstan giving a little-known American company access to one of the world’s largest untapped reserves of tungsten, a metal that the United States desperately needs for the production of missile warheads, fighter jets and computer chips. Ca-ching! It was later revealed Trump and sons own 20 percent of that company.

Most of all, as police commissioner in New York and later as president, Teddy Roosevelt went after public officials taking bribes. “There can be no crime more serious than bribery,” he declared in his 1903 State of the Union Address. Imagine then what Teddy would think of Donald flying to North Dakota on his new Air Force One – which is nothing but a blatant, $400 million bribe from the government of Qatar.

Were he alive today, Teddy Roosevelt wouldn’t suffer any comparison with Donald Trump. He’d be trying to put him in jail.

(Bill Press is host of The BillPressPod, and author of 10 books, including: “From the Left: My Life in the Crossfire.” His email address is: bill@billpress.com. Readers may also follow him on Twitter @billpresspod and on BlueSky @BillPress.bsky.social.)