Two Saturday afternoons ago, after mowing the lawn at my girlfriend’s condo in Old Louisville — but several sunsets and rises before the Republican National Convention... JD Vance becoming Trump’s running mate... Biden dropping out... and rumors of Beshear being tapped as Harris’ VP, made even by the founder of this very paper — I was rifling through various documents on my computer, when I ran across an essay I’d written years back on the attempted assassination of Theodore Roosevelt — the ending of which was wrapped up in a neat little bow of tedious cliches about Teddy’s fortitude and courage under fire.
I initially wrote the screed for a scholarship competition, as a broke non-traditional undergraduate student at Columbia University, while living in the Bronx and studying African American studies and political science.
I wouldn’t win. But the organization I applied to did reach out to let me know I was a close contender and that their judges had enjoyed the pacing and descriptions and suggested if I polished the piece and resubmitted, I’d likely take the cash prize home the following year. Somehow, the essay got filed away, and I never looked back at it.
Out of pure coincidence, hours after rereading it, and thinking it wasn’t half bad, and even serviceable for future use, at least after I struck through all the hackneyed and high-minded platitudes I’d slipped in, as you do to sell yourself as an egalitarian befitting a prize, 20-year-old Thomas Mathew Crooks shimmied up a warehouse roof in Butler, Pennsylvania with an AR-15 assault rifle and shot Donald Trump in the ear at a campaign rally, coming within an inch of blowing the former president’s brains out all over his fanbase, seated in the bleachers behind him, and altering the trajectory of our Republic.
At the time of the shooting, I was about as far away psychically as one could get from a DJT rally.
My girlfriend and I were in a nesting mood, about to play Jeopardy (we record the episodes and compete against one another like vicious hyenas fighting for scraps of carrion in a battle royale of wits to decompress in the evenings), when one of us ran across the breaking news on social media and immediately turned to CNN to catch up on the coverage.
Trump’s now iconic response — his face streaked with blood, his fist pumping in defiance, flanked by Secret Service agents while shouting “Fight! Fight! Fight!” — surprisingly, even impressed me.
Setting aside, the legitimate arguments about Trump putting his own Secret Service’s lives at risk, while he selfishly dilly-dallied to fire up his base, not knowing if there might be more than one shooter, from a pure, unadulterated optics standpoint, which is Trump’s entire program, the marketing, especially with his base, appeared pitch perfect.
“He’s a lock.” I cynically commented to Lisa. “This is the best thing that could have ever happened to him.”
She rolled her eyes and breathed a heavy sigh, disturbed by the prospect of living in the all-encompassing Trump vacuum another four years — we’d witnessed firsthand the chaos and political violence Trump stoked, and FELT THE FEAR after attending the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in 2017 to counter-protest.
In kind, not long after the images went viral, mostly conservative thinkers began making comparisons on and offline between Theodore Roosevelt and Trump.
Elon Musk wrote on X hours after the shooting, “Last time America had a candidate this tough was Theodore Roosevelt.”
Later in the week, on Wednesday night, Don Jr. sold the same sentiment in his Republican National Convention speech, a precursor to J.D. Vance’s featured primetime sermon, historicizing, “At a political rally less than one mile from where we stand tonight, Teddy Roosevelt was struck by a would-be assassin's bullet. But he didn’t quit either. He finished his speech and kept fighting.”
Even Steve Schmidt, a former Republican operative, political commentator and vocal Trump critic, wrote “The political consequences of this assassination attempt will be immense, and they will benefit Donald Trump, who just responded to being shot in the exact same way that Teddy Roosevelt did.”
It is in the wake of these comments and reading several other takes on the T&T comparisons in national newspapers, I decided to dust the essay off and join the conversation. I thought it might be a fun thought experiment for the readers to decide how much Roosevelt-like Trump really is . . .
***
ON OCTOBER 14, 1912, unemployed saloonkeeper John Flammang Schrank shot Theodore Roosevelt, with a .38 caliber Colt revolver at close range outside the Gilpatrick Hotel in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Plagued by delusions and angered by what he saw as an autocratic attempt to usurp power, Schrank stalked the former president – who was out on the campaign trail and vying for an unprecedented third term – through more than a half-dozen states over a period of weeks.
Roosevelt, who’d vacated the White House four years earlier after serving two consecutive terms from 1901 to 1909, sought to recoup his former office by challenging his successor and estranged friend, incumbent Republican president William Howard Taft, after becoming disenchanted with his protégé’s rightward tilt.
Teddy would lose to Taft at the contentious Republican convention that June. But he would stay in the race, running instead as an independent on the Progressive Party ticket, dubbed the “Bull Moose Party”—a reference to a remark Roosevelt made about his own stamina, stating “I’m as fit as a bull moose.”
After having dinner, at approximately 8 p.m., Roosevelt and his entourage were exiting the hotel and getting into an open-air car – en route to deliver a stump speech four blocks away at the Milwaukee Auditorium – when Schrank appeared from an expectant crowd and fired his gun.
According to O.K. Davis, the acting publicity chief of the Progressive Party and eyewitness to the shooting, as reported by the New York Times two days after the shooting, the Lieutenant Colonel got into his car and stood to doff his hat to the cheering crowd, when Schrank pushed his way through the throngs of people and shot the former president point blank in the right side of the chest.
Roosevelt fell back into his seat, as his stenographer, Elbert E. Martin, a 6-foot-tall former football player, pounced on Schrank, grabbing him by the neck and wrestling him to the ground.
A mob quickly “swarmed” the assassin, but Teddy, allegedly unphased after being shot, called out, “Don’t hurt him, bring him to me.”
Upon freeing the gun “from the assassin’s grip,” Davis described how Martin “dragged the fellow to his feet and handed the revolver to the Colonel and then twisted the man’s face around so that the Colonel could see him.”
As Roosevelt studied his assassin, angry cries from the bloodthirsty mob yelled, “lynch him!”
Roosevelt managed to quell the mob until the authorities arrived, after which the former president directed his subordinates to drive him on to his speaking engagement as planned.
Bleeding, his aides beseeched him to seek medical treatment. But Roosevelt refused. Sensing his wounds were not mortal, against the protestations of even his personal physician, Roosevelt was adamant about continuing to his previously scheduled rally—an x-ray would later reveal the bullet lodged in his chest muscle, where it would remain for the rest of his life.
Remarkably, the impact of the bullet was slowed after travelling through both a 50-page folded copy of his speech he was set to deliver, and a steel eyeglass case stowed in his breast pocket, where he kept his iconic Pince-Nez spectacles.
Upon arriving at the Milwaukee Auditorium before a large crowd, with blood clotting on his shirt and a bullet lodged in his chest, Theodore began his address entitled, “The Progressive Cause Greater Than Any Individual,” by joking:
Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose.
He would preemptively apologize to the audience for his need to deliver an abridged speech; accounts vary on its length, but even its brevity, it ranged from 50 to 90 minutes. Only afterwards, would he agree to go the hospital.
Shrank would spend the rest of his life, 31 years, until he died in 1943, in a mental institution after being found legally insane.
The sympathy and folk hero status Roosevelt engendered, who was already lionized for his alpha-male masculinity, would not be enough to win another presidential term.
He would finish ahead of Taft, making it one of the most storied third-party runs in American history, but the fracture in the Republican party would split the vote, and lead to the Democratic candidate, Woodrow Wilson winning the general.
