Eight days after President Trump was sworn in for a second term, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) introduced legislation to carve his face into Mount Rushmore.
Her legislation was later seconded by Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) who told Interior Secretary Doug Burgum that adding Trump to the carved images of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt was “essential,” citing Trump’s “accomplishments in restoring American greatness.”
Trump has long aspired to be part of Mount Rushmore. During his first term, he told Kristi Noem, then a South Dakota representative and now Trump’s Homeland Security secretary, that it was his “dream” to be on Mount Rushmore. Noem later gave Trump a model of Mount Rushmore with his visage on it.
We don’t know what George Washington, Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln might have thought about Trump joining their esteemed group. But we have a very good idea of what Theodore Roosevelt would have said.
In 1910, Roosevelt gave an address at the Sorbonne in Paris on the nature and responsibilities of citizenship. The most-cited quote from that speech is Roosevelt’s invocation of the “man in the arena … whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood” and “spends himself in a worthy cause.”
The White House Instagram account recently likened Trump to Roosevelt’s “man in the arena” quote, placing Trump’s triumphant visage amidst the ruins of Rome’s Colosseum.
It is unlikely whether either Trump or anyone else in the White House read Roosevelt’s Sorbonne speech. If they had, they would have learned that Roosevelt rejected relying on “men of inherited wealth and position” for leadership positions.
Roosevelt would have also been appalled by billionaires Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai and Tim Cook sharing the inaugural platform as Trump began his second term.
In his address, Roosevelt scorned those who refused to use their wealth toward advancing the common good, noting they were not entitled to public admiration and those who lauded such praise on them emanated from those “who are mean of soul.”
Trump’s exploitation of the presidency to advance his personal interests and line his pocketbook would have likewise appalled Roosevelt.
In just his first six months in office, Trump has held an exclusive dinner for top sellers of the $TRUMP meme coins that brought $148 million into his family’s coffers, proposed issuing a “Trump Card” which, for a cool $5 million, would grant visas to foreigners to enter the U.S. and Trump received a $400 million airplane gift from the government of Qatar.
Such actions would, said Roosevelt, render Trump “no longer of useful service.”
But perhaps what would have offended Roosevelt most is Trump’s success in pitting one group of Americans against another. Roosevelt warned that those born to wealth and power who exploit the less fortunate are “at heart, the same as the greedy and violent demagogue who excites those who have not property to plunder those who have.” Trump qualifies on both counts.
Demagogues, Roosevelt believed, were particularly dangerous because they seek to separate “class from class, occupation from occupation, men of more wealth from men of less wealth.”
In an insightful article in The Atlantic,Franklin Foer writes that Trump has declared war on the nation’s “managerial class,” including “lawyers, university administrators and professors, but also consultants, investment bankers, scientists, journalists and other white-collar workers who have prospered in the information age.”
The accusations leveled by Trump against the managerial class include their profiting “at the expense of real Americans,” and darkly suggesting the existence of a “deep state” run by those same elites.
Finally, Roosevelt would have strongly disapproved of Trump’s treatment of minority groups. He said “Probably the best test of true love of liberty in any country is the way in which minorities are treated in that country.”
“Not only should there be complete liberty in matters of religion and opinion, but complete liberty for each man to lead his life as he desires, provided only that in so doing he does not wrong his neighbors,” he continued.
Roosevelt’s views on the treatment of minorities were well known. In 1901 he invited Booker T. Washington to dine with him at the White House. One southern newspaper referred to their shared meal as “a blunder that is worse than a crime.” Another account described the dinner as the biggest news event since the assassination of William McKinley one year earlier.
But Trump has set a different standard, breaking bread with white supremacist Nick Fuentes and saying of him, “He gets me.”
Trump’s claims that minority groups are “poisoning the blood of our country” and are genetically disposed to commit crimes would have surely sent the Rough Rider into a fit of rage.
In his Sorbonne speech, Roosevelt not only spoke to those in authority but to all citizens:
“In the long run, success or failure will be conditioned upon the way in which the average man, the average woman, does his or her duty, first in the ordinary, everyday affairs of life, and next in those great occasional crises which call for heroic virtues.”
It is in such mundane activities and our response to great crises lies “the main source of national power and national greatness,” he said.
By Roosevelt’s measure, Trump does not belong anywhere near Mount Rushmore.
But the essential issue before us is not whether Trump deserves a national monument, but whether we, as citizens, are adhering to the high standards Roosevelt set.
John Kenneth White is a professor emeritus at the Catholic University of America. His latest book is titled “Grand Old Unraveling: The Republican Party, Donald Trump, and the Rise of Authoritarianism.”
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