Disdain for the new president was palpable within the political, intellectual, and social establishment. Many members of his own Republican Party found his ascendancy horrifying with the party chairman renouncing “that damned cowboy in the White House.” Newspapers censured him as “impetuous, impatient, and wholly lacking in tact.” One of the nation’s leading writers sputtered, “we have never had a President before who was destitute of respect for his high office; we have had no President before who was not a gentleman; we have had no President before who was intended for a butcher, a dive-keeper or a bully.” Critics lined up to condemn his childish impulsiveness (“You must always remember that the president is about six,” noted a weary foreign ambassador), his bad manners (“he lectures me on history as though he were a high-school pedagogue,” complained one of America’s leading historians after a White House dinner), and his unseemly aggression and bluster (an acquaintance described him as “still mentally in the Sturm und Drang period of early adolescence”). The new leader of the United States, in the opinion of many of the nation’s elite, was a bellicose, bloviating blowhard.
No, this is not the latest excoriation of President Donald Trump but one aimed at a predecessor who, although separated by a century and a quarter, shared many of the same impulsive political traits: Theodore Roosevelt. The parallels between the two men are striking. Like The Donald, TR bucked the Republican Party establishment, assumed the presidency in unexpected circumstances — the former from a stunning election upset and then an equally stunning political comeback, the latter from the assassination of his predecessor — and then quickly came to dominate the political scene as a maverick leader. Likewise, the two chief executives displayed a set of personal characteristics that simultaneously fueled their success and triggered accusations that their outlandish conduct violated every norm of respectable politics. They share a blithely belligerent, combative political style that revels in controversy and savors blunt confrontation. Trump, like Roosevelt, is a “happy warrior.”
The term had originated in the 1807 William Wordsworth poem, “The Character of the Happy Warrior,” written to honor Lord Nelson after his triumph over Napoleon’s navy and heroic death at the battle of Trafalgar. Such a figure, the romantic poet wrote, “Whom neither shape nor danger can dismay/Nor thought of tender happiness betray …. /Finds comfort in himself and in his cause;/And, while the mortal mist is gathering, draws/ His breath in confidence of Heaven’s applause.”
Bradley Gilman affixed the description to the 26th president in his 1921 biography, Roosevelt: The Happy Warrior, where he described his subject as a joyful crusader undaunted by adversity. The left-wing novelist John Dos Passos, in Nineteen Nineteen (1932), also depicted TR as a “happy warrior” but of the posturing, braggart variety.
In subsequent decades, observers would borrow the phrase to describe such figures as Al Smith, Hubert Humphrey, and Ronald Reagan, who entered the political fray with a confident, sunny optimism. But it is Roosevelt, the original recipient of the “happy warrior” moniker, who appears most akin to Donald Trump in terms of political impulse. For both men, a relish for political combat has provided both a key to their success and a potential source of peril.
A controversial image attended these two happy warriors from the start. With oversized personalities and an insatiable appetite for media attention, TR and Trump came to dominate the political landscape as celebrities. Many complained that their self-promoting showmanship overwhelmed their political leadership. As one critic groused about the headline-grabbing TR, “While he is in the neighborhood, the public can no more look the other way than the small boy can turn his head away from a circus parade followed by a steam calliope.” Mark Twain grumbled that Roosevelt was “always showing off; always hunting for a chance to show off; in his frenzied imagination the Great Republic is a vast Barnum circus with him for a clown and the whole world for audience; he would go to Halifax for half a chance to show off and he would go to hell for a whole one.”
Trump, of course, has earned a similar torrent of condemnation for attention-grabbing antics. The Atlantic termed him the twenty-first century’s “ghastliest showman” and denigrated him as a superficial spectacle, “image all the way down.” The Washington Post granted that Trump is “an incredibly gifted entertainer” who can “function as a one-man television network” while Vox argued that a thirst for “always being the center of attention” and an “incredible knack for publicity” fueled first his business career as a New York real-estate developer, then his meteoric political rise. Slate sneered that Trump’s hit reality television show, The Apprentice, elevated him “from a sleazy New York tabloid hustler to a respectable household name” while also creating an “American fraud” with an overblown image of his business acumen, wealth, and character.
Similarly, the two presidents displayed an aggressive, confrontational political style that preferred blunt talk to genteel norms, mixing it up to seek common ground or adopt soothing rhetoric. An observer of Roosevelt’s interactions with other public officials was astonished at how “he simply runs over [them]. He has no patience with long speeches or extended explanations. He cuts people off in the middle of sentences, tells them he knows all about it, and very often announces his decision before the caller has more than fairly started.” A U.S. Senator blanched at this “steam-engine in trousers” while Henry Demarest Lloyd, a muckraking journalist and ally of TR, concluded his friend had “the same appetite for the spread of ideas by explosion as Napoleon.” Elihu Root, TR’s Secretary of War and a close political adviser, observed that his boss was a fighter at heart and “completely dominated by a desire to destroy his adversary.”
Trump’s exploits on this front have become legendary. In one of his advice books on business, Think Big, he proclaimed, “I love to crush the other side and take the benefits …. You hear lots of people say, that a great deal is when both sides win. That’s a bunch of crap. In a great deal you win — not the other side. You crush the opponent.” This pugilistic impulse surfaced politically in 2015 when he announced his candidacy for the presidency with the statement, “I cannot sit back and watch this incompetence any longer,” before proceeding to demolish his Republican primary opponents with a barrage of attacks.
In the general election, he tore into Hillary Clinton as a corrupt, radical elitist who might deserve jail time. Trump’s in-your-face style flavored his recent 2025 inauguration speech. Proclaiming “America’s decline is over,” he lauded his defeat of a “radical and corrupt establishment” which over the last four years had mismanaged domestic affairs while stumbling into “catastrophic events abroad” as outgoing President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris sat a few feet away looking as if they were suffering from acute indigestion.
A bombastic streak of narcissism also characterized these presidents’ happy warrior mode. When Roosevelt’s self-aggrandizing memoir of the Spanish-American war, The Rough Riders, came out, humorist Finley Peter Dunne quipped that it should have been titled “Alone in Cuba.” A similar story made the rounds that TR used the personal pronoun so frequently in the book — thirteen times in the first four sentences alone — that halfway through its typesetting, the publisher, Scribner, had to order a new set of capital I’s. TR’s daughter, the acid-tongued Alice Roosevelt Longworth, confessed, “My father always wanted to be the corpse at every funeral, the bride at every wedding, and the baby at every christening.”
Trump’s notorious need to be the constant center of attention has prompted even greater howls of outrage. In his 2015 announcement speech, he bragged, “The American Dream is dead — but if I win, I will bring it back bigger and better and stronger than ever before.” As president, he described himself as “a very stable genius” and constantly inflated his image with a series of outlandish claims: that “a million and a half people” attended his inauguration making it the biggest in American history, that he made “perfect phone calls” to foreign leaders, that his administration “has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country.” As one commentator noted, Trump’s unrelenting self-praise reminded him of the old joke: “The narcissist says to a friend, ‘Let’s stop talking about me. Let’s talk about you. So what do you think about me?’”
These happy warriors’ blunt talk and healthy self-regard have nourished a childish fondness for insult and name-calling. TR delighted in concocting colorful insults for his political opponents. He derided an opponent for having “a mind that functions at six guinea-pig power” and termed a hostile Supreme Court justice “an amiable old fuzzy-wuzzy with sweetbread brains.” Others earned florid denunciations as an “unspeakably villainous little monkey” and “a pin-headed anarchistic crank, of hirsute and slabsided aspect.” While Roosevelt seldom used bad language, he once derided the strait-laced Republican presidential nominee Charles Evans Hughes as “a psalm-singing son of a bitch.” Such outbursts inspired Root to send the president a good-natured chastisement upon the occasion of his birthday in the White House. It read, “All your friends are delighted to hear that you have turned 43 and we have great hopes for you when you grow up.”
Trump, of course, has shocked modern sensibilities with his stream of juvenile personal attacks on political opponents. The public insults first surfaced in the 2016 election when he coined the sobriquets of “Little Marco” Rubio, “Low Energy” Jeb Bush, “Lyin’ Ted” Cruz, and “Crooked Hillary” Clinton for his adversaries, then continued during his presidency with “Crazy Nancy” Pelosi, “Pocahontas” Warren, and “Sleepy Joe” Biden.
Trump also has leveled insults at media opponents, claiming that Chris Cuomo looked like a “chained lunatic” on television, Don Lemon was “the dumbest person in broadcasting,” and “Psycho Joe” Scarborough was a failed television host suffering low ratings. As conservative commentator Jonah Goldberg despaired after observing one of Trump’s name-calling tirades, “It’s all so exhaustingly childish, made all the more exhausting because it works.”
Strikingly, TR and Trump’s Happy Warrior extol action and real-world skills and belittles intellectual speculation, cultivated gentility, and artsy sophistication. Ironically, Roosevelt, who authored some three dozen books and served a term as president of the American Historical Association, seldom missed an opportunity to admonish high-minded intellectuals who remained at a distance from the nitty-gritty of society.
In a famous speech of 1910, popularly known as “The Man in the Arena,” he warned that “the man of learning” needed to avoid “a cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticize work which the critic himself never tries to perform, and intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life’s realities. …. Shame on the man of cultivated taste who permits refinement to develop into fastidiousness that unfits him for doing the rough work of a workaday world.” Far superior was “the man who was actually in the arena, whose face was marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly.”
In another famous speech delivered a decade earlier, “The Strenuous Life,” Roosevelt urged his countrymen to embrace “not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life, the life of toil and effort, of labor and strife.” As Henry Adams observed of a friend whom he often found infuriating and occasionally endearing, TR displayed “the singular primitive quality that belongs to ultimate matter — the quality that mediaeval theology assigned to God — he was pure act.”
Trump, in cruder fashion, has expressed a similar preference for action over reflection, results over theorizing. Again, ironically, this anti-intellectual sensibility belies his Ivy League education at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Finance. But as Trump noted in his Art of the Deal, “Perhaps the most important thing I learned at Wharton was not to be overly impressed with academic credentials.” Instead, he has attributed his subsequent success in business and politics to following this pragmatic formula: “I aim very high and then I just keep pushing and pushing and pushing to get what I’m after.”
Trump perceives a corrosive alliance among the nation’s intellectual class, social elite, and political establishment, which has become manifest in the federal government bureaucracy, or “deep state,” with its array of experts armed with high-minded ideas and unrealistic theories. These “experts are terrible. Look at the mess we’re in with all these experts we have,” he has told campaign audiences.
In foreign affairs, Trump insists, the United States needs to employ tough, skilled deal makers from the business world instead of “well-meaning but naïve academic people negotiating who do not know what they are doing in real-life situations.” He has promised to apply his own hard-won skills as a man in the arena: “I talk common sense and practical realism learned from the school of hard knocks. I’ve been there, done that, suffered through adversity, gone into debt, fought back, and come out on top, much bigger and stronger than ever before.” This sensibility inspired his infamous statement that “I love the poorly educated,” which was less an endorsement of ignorance and more a preference for ordinary people’s common sense over ideologues, theorists, and wonky bureaucrats.
The most vivid illustration of TR and Trump’s tough, action-oriented ethos came with their instinctive reactions to assassination attempts. In 1912, a mentally deranged man shot TR in the chest at point-blank range as he was about to give a campaign speech. As blood spread slowly over the front of his shirt — a glasses case and folded copy of his speech kept the bullet from penetrating the heart — he delivered his address after telling his audience, “It takes more than that to kill a bull moose!” Similarly, after an assassin’s bullet barely missed his head while ripping through his ear during a 2024 campaign rally, Trump was rushed from the stage by Secret Service agents as he shook his fist and shouted, “Fight! Fight! Fight!” with blood streaming down his face.
TR and Trump’s passion for action and impatient desire for results have produced a cavalier attitude toward the Constitution. Roosevelt, eager to deploy the federal government to promote the public good, described Constitutional restraints as “a bit of outworn academic doctrine …. It can be applied with profit, if anywhere at all, only in a primitive community such as the United States at the end of the 18th century.”
In 1902, for instance, as winter approached and a labor strike that had shut down many of the nation’s coal mines, a frustrated Roosevelt threatened to send in federal troops to reopen them. Congressman James Watson protested that such action would violate Constitutional protections against seizing private property without legal due process, causing an infuriated president to grab him by the shoulder and exclaim, “To hell with the Constitution when the people need coal!” When the Supreme Court struck down several of his attempts to use the federal government to regulate business, TR acclaimed the virtues of “pure democracy,” angrily endorsed the popular recall of high court judges, and denounced the notion of making the “Constitution a means of thwarting instead of securing the absolute right of the people to rule themselves.” Such attitudes caused the Speaker of the House, Joseph Cannon, to lament that Roosevelt had “no more use for the Constitution than a tomcat has for a marriage license.”
Trump’s casual disregard for the Constitution has been equally controversial. In a 2017 interview with Fox News, after a few months as president, he complained of its checks and balances, “It’s an archaic system. It’s really a bad thing for the country.”
In a 2019 speech, he claimed that Article Two of the Constitution bestowed “the right to do whatever I want as president.” After his 2020 election defeat, Trump engaged in various maneuvers — pressuring election officials, strong-arming political allies, making incendiary speeches that culminated in the Jan. 6 insurrection — designed to dislodge a lynchpin of our Constitutional system, the peaceful transfer of power. Two years later, he was still insisting that the 2020 election results were such a “massive