Trump as Teddy Roosevelt
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https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/10/that-old-republican-brawl/
That Old Republican Brawl
Republicans should learn from their own history to avoid a replay of the 1912 election in 2024.
If Republicans have this much trouble choosing a speaker of the House, they can’t consider policy. If they can’t consider policy, they can’t build a strong platform. And if they can’t build a strong platform, they will have nothing to stand on in the next presidential election.
The default will be a mêlée of loyalists of various stripes — traditional Republicans, the odd libertarian, Trump revivalists — and of course, Donald Trump himself. The result is that policy itself will get neglected in the crucial 2024 year, to the enormous detriment of the American economy.
The price of such a free-for-all becomes clear when you go back to another point when Republicans brawled: the year 1912.
Playing the Trump role in that period was Theodore Roosevelt, though TR hadn’t started out as a powermonger. In his early years TR was a reformer, shining a spotlight on corruption in New York state. The early TR was also an American expansionist and a warrior — the Rough Rider who breached a steep ravine to emerge victorious at the Battle of San Juan Hill. Roosevelt became president after an assassin felled William McKinley in 1901.
And the presidency went to Roosevelt’s head. As president, he electrified the nation with impulsive forays — to call some of them “policies” would be a stretch. He forced a coup in Colombia to secure the Panama Canal, a step so brazen that Senator S. I. Hayakawa of California would comment of Panama, “We stole it fair and square.” But it was on the domestic front that most Americans focused. Here Roosevelt proved equally heedless, wielding the Department of Justice like a cudgel against business leaders he branded as “malefactors of wealth.”
