Shortly before noon on Wednesday, a star-spangled, old-timey train pulled into a tiny town in a lonely pocket of western North Dakota, and out popped President Trump.
He had traveled here with a large entourage to oversee the opening of the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, at the foot of the national park named after the 26th president. Mr. Trump spent more than an hour Wednesday touring the space.
“I know more about that museum than the people that built it,” he cracked.
The library was the passion project of Doug Burgum, the interior secretary, when he was North Dakota’s governor. He was there proudly leading the president around.
Many conservationists have objected that Mr. Trump and Mr. Burgum are the wrong stewards of Roosevelt’s legacy, given their own environmental records. At the library’s opening, Mr. Trump described people opposed to oil drilling as “environmental lunatics.” He also complained about his Supreme Court losses and attacked Democrats in vicious terms, taking an event that could have been an agreeably happy tent-pole moment of the nation’s 250th anniversary celebrations — people love Teddy Roosevelt — and pumping it full of hot political invective. Not that the crowd seemed to mind. It was full of Trump fans.
For the most part, though, Mr. Trump’s speech was a long and sometimes comical narration of the adventurous life and times of Theodore Roosevelt, told as only Donald Trump would tell it.
“He was really a great he-man,” Mr. Trump explained.
He tried relating his own travails as president to those of Roosevelt. While recounting how Roosevelt had charged into a hail of Spanish bullets at the Battle of San Juan Hill on July 1, 1898, Mr. Trump paused to comment that Spain was not a very good NATO ally, in his estimation. At another point, he said, “Speaking of Cuba, after many, many decades, it’s coming our way.”
He talked a lot about the Panama Canal and told the crowd how Roosevelt had sailed the Atlantic and scaled the Matterhorn. “Deep in the Amazon jungles, he would get extremely sick,” he said. “Maybe he shouldn’t have been there.”
“He had a freaking wild life, right?” Mr. Trump asked.
The town of Medora on the Little Missouri River, ringed by the jagged, geological wonders of the North Dakota Badlands, occupies a mythic place in Theodore Roosevelt lore (he actually hated being called “Teddy”). This was where he ended up after his wife and mother died hours apart on the same day, Valentine’s Day, 1884. He marked the day on his calendar with an X. “Wife was very young,” Mr. Trump recounted sadly as if he had known the family personally. “Mother was older, but she was getting by.”
After that tragedy, Roosevelt took the train as far west as it would go. “He arrived at this town, narrow-chested, 140 pounds,” Mr. Trump told the crowd. “He was sick. He was shattered from the death of these two people that he loved the most.”
The land and the animals and the Arctic winds that blow down unimpeded from the north helped heal the asthmatic New Yorker in the throes of his darkest depression. “I would not have been president had it not been for my experience in North Dakota,” Roosevelt would later say.
The library dedicated to him here is a gorgeous, 93,000-square-foot bunker built into the buttes of the Badlands. Mr. Trump was speaking out back of it, in the Burning Hills amphitheater. Behind him onstage was an adorably hokey backdrop of a Small Town U.S.A. at the turn of the 20th century. Donald Trump Jr. and his new Palm Beach socialite bride popped onstage to get their picture taken in front of an old-fashioned post office front. “Don just got married,” the president said from the podium. The crowd clapped. He looked toward his new daughter-in-law. “Bettina, thank you,” he said. “It’s going to be great.”
The president brought his two oldest sons with him to Medora, flying for the first time aboard the new Air Force One, a Boeing 747-8 given as a gift from the government of Qatar. “It’s a great plane,” Mr. Trump told the crowd. They clapped again.
North Dakotans wore T-shirts that said “Jesus Is My Savior, Trump Is My President” and hissed at the cameramen of the “fake news.” One man tried to lead a chant of “Let’s Go Brandon,” the coded anti-Biden curse. (It has been 527 days since Joseph R. Biden Jr. was president).
“Bet there aren’t too many Democrats here today!” one woman wearing a Stetson hat said as she took her seat and kicked up her cowboy boots while others lined up to get their picture taken with Mike Lindell, the pillow salesman who is one of the country’s most prolific spreaders of election denialism. Two women wandered by draped in a banner that read “Vance Rubio 2028.”
A series of speakers including the state’s Republican governor, Kelly Armstrong, and Mr. Burgum compared Mr. Trump to Roosevelt. The interior secretary told reporters that visitors to the center would hear Mr. Trump’s voice reciting Roosevelt’s famous “Man in the Arena” passage.
Close your eyes and imagine: It is not the critic who counts, not the one who points out how the strong man stumbled or how the doer of deeds might have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred with sweat and dust and blood …
Roosevelt and Mr. Trump both cleaved the Republican Party in two and became known for making audacious and unpredictable moves. Roosevelt was also “New York-centric,” Mr. Trump reminded. “That’s where he came from. Pretty rich family.”
That’s about where the similarities end.
“Oh my god, they could not be more different,” said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian who sits on the library’s board and is the author of a Roosevelt biography, “The Wilderness Warrior.”
Roosevelt had as pets two parrots and a pony, one hyena given to him by the King of Abyssinia, a dog named Skip that sat on his lap at the White House, and a badger he hand fed potatoes. Mr. Trump once said he would feel “a little phony” getting a dog.
Roosevelt busted up monopolies and industrialists and fought to bring the gilded age to a screeching halt. Mr. Trump is gilding the White House and promised oil executives he would undo dozens of environmental laws and stop new ones from being passed if they gave him a billion dollars.
Roosevelt prided himself on his military service. Mr. Trump did not serve.
To many naturalists, it was discordant to see a president who campaigned on “drill, baby, drill” consecrating a center dedicated to the ultimate conservationist president.
Earlier this year, several descendants of Roosevelt wrote to Republican senators, begging them to appeal to Mr. Trump to block an effort by House Republicans to open up an expanse of Minnesota wilderness to mining. Ted Roosevelt IV told The New York Times then that his great-grandfather would be “appalled” by Republicans’ attempts to open up mining near the preserve of glacial lakes and boreal forests known as the Boundary Waters.
Under Mr. Burgum’s direction, budgets for national parks have been siphoned off to pay for Mr. Trump’s gold and marble undertakings back in the capital.
Mr. Brinkley watched Wednesday’s speech and came away wanting.
“President Trump had a golden opportunity to praise Theodore Roosevelt as America’s great public lands and water conservationist president,” he said. “Yet, standing on a stage surrounded by the austere and rugged Badlands that T.R. so loved, he was unable to offer a line or two saluting our 26th president’s mind-boggling achievement of saving over 230 million acres of wild America.”
“Trump is the least outdoors-driven president our nation has ever produced,” Mr. Brinkley added.
