MEDORA, N.D. (AP) — President Donald Trump visited North Dakota on Wednesday to see the newly built Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, a massive facility exploring the life of America’s 26th president.
Watch the event in the video player above.
Saturday’s official opening of the library coincides with July 4th celebrations honoring the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
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Trump came early to see the $450 million project, a boost for Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, a former governor of North Dakota, while also bringing the nation’s birthday festivities to a region synonymous with its westward expansion. The 96,000-square-foot library is in the rugged, lonely landscape where Roosevelt built his conservation values while ranching and hunting in the 1880s.
In an address after touring the library, Trump compared himself favorably to Roosevelt and said the 26th president “embodied the heart and soul and fight and spirit of our country, as much as anyone who ever lived.”
Trump recounted episodes from Roosevelt’s life, praising his bravery and toughness as an outdoorsman and politician.
“He had a freakin’ wild life,” Trump told the audience at a Western-themed amphitheater. “He didn’t want to be quiet. He wanted to be great.”
The Republican president made the trip aboard his new Air Force One, a Boeing 747 given to the United States by Qatar. Trump said he asked Boeing, which is set to deliver new planes for the president’s service in 2028, whether there were any countries with potential substitutes in the interim.
“I said, ‘Who has the best one?’ They said, ‘Qatar,” Trump said, adding that he was assured, “‘There’s never been a plane like it.'”
All living presidents were invited to the grand opening of the library, which joins more than a dozen throughout the country examining the lives and legacies of U.S. presidents from Ronald Reagan in California to Franklin D. Roosevelt in New York and Herbert Hoover in Iowa. The Obama Presidential Center recently opened in Chicago, bringing together four former presidents for the occasion.
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Trump was the library’s first official visitor, according to the library’s executive director, Robbie Lauf.
Trump said his administration was giving $750,000 to support the library’s first year.
On Friday, the president plans to visit South Dakota’s Mount Rushmore for Independence Day fireworks, as he did in 2020.
Trump has often described an affinity with Roosevelt. Trump began his second term last year by trumpeting the construction of the Panama Canal during the Roosevelt administration.
Trump even said the U.S. might seek to take back the waterway from Panama to curb influence from China. That goal has been overshadowed by his suggestions that Washington might seize control of Greenland or that Canada could become America’s 51st state.
Given a chance to talk with an artificial-intelligence version of Roosevelt at the library, Trump asked if the 26th president considered the Panama Canal his greatest achievement. A digital Roosevelt said he took pride in it while also listing achievements involving parks, medicine and his Square Deal.
In the run-up to staging a UFC fight on the White House lawn for his 80th birthday, Trump said he was aware of Roosevelt holding far lower-key boxing matches in the White House. Trump made no mention of Roosevelt having detached the retina of his left eye during one such sparring session.
The trip also underscores the president’s esteem for Burgum, who has become a key face of and cheerleader for the president’s expansive renovation projects around Washington.
Roosevelt was a New York native with a strong connection to North Dakota
Roosevelt visited Dakota Territory in 1883 to hunt bison. On Valentine’s Day the next year, his mother and wife died hours apart in the same house in New York.
Devastated, Roosevelt came to Dakota where he ranched cattle and hunted big game in the West during visits mostly from 1884 to 1887.
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He underwent deep personal growth from his experiences, including chasing boat thieves down a river, standing up to a bully in a bar and working alongside cowboys who ridiculed him for wearing eyeglasses.
Roosevelt, who served as president from 1901 to 1909, later said he never would have been president were it not for his experiences in North Dakota.
Near the library is Theodore Roosevelt National Park. Visitors can hike trails and drive a scenic route through the colorful, rugged Badlands where bison and wild horses roam.
In 2019, Burgum championed the library to North Dakota’s Republican-led legislature when he was governor, touting its tourism potential. The legislature approved a $50 million operations endowment, requiring library planners to raise $100 million in private donations, a goal met in 2020. Donations total about $354 million as of early 2026.
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Donors include oil executive Harold Hamm, the Waltons of Walmart fame, Kenneth Griffin, founder and CEO of Citadel, a hedge fund, and Burgum himself.
Burgum also has lobbied for Roosevelt’s induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Roosevelt became alarmed at the number of injuries and deaths of college football players and convened a 1905 White House meeting featuring the presidents of Harvard, Yale and Princeton to urge safety improvements. That helped sparked the founding of the NCAA, college’s sports governing body.
The library will showcase Roosevelt’s ideas and artifacts
Visitors will learn about Roosevelt’s conservation ideas and his Rough Riders regiment of the Spanish-American War, but also his “horrific comments” about Native Americans and other issues “that have obviously aged poorly,” Lauf said.
Artifacts, many of them out of public view for decades, will tell Roosevelt’s story. Visitors will see his Rough Riders uniform; the 1884 diary grieving his terrible loss; and the eyeglasses case, speech and shirt from the 1912 assassination attempt against him.
Organizers hope the library draws families and thousands of school children from the region, as well as some of the millions of motorists who travel to Yellowstone National Park and the Black Hills.
“It’s a feature, not a bug, that we are in a county of 1,000 people and a town of 120,” Lauf said. “TR came here for that purpose.”
The Dakota Resource Council on Tuesday hosted several conservation leaders who criticized Burgum and Trump for policies they say contradict Roosevelt’s conservation principles, such as cutting staff and budgets and prioritizing energy development on public lands.
Last year Burgum signed an order prioritizing the openness and accessibility of parks to the public amid the workforce cuts. He has compared America’s public lands and natural resources to “assets” that should be responsibly developed to exert “energy dominance.”
Associated Press writers Will Weissert and Josh Boak in Washington contributed to this report.
