President Donald Trump will visit North Dakota on Wednesday to see the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, a 96,000-square-foot facility exploring the 26th president's life, built in the rugged landscape where the young easterner built his conservation values while ranching and hunting in the 1880s. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing Associated Press.
The library officially opens over the weekend on July 4, the pinnacle of celebrations for the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Trump is coming early to see the $450 million project, a push of Interior Secretary Doug Burgum from when he was governor of North Dakota.
All living presidents were invited to the grand opening, which joins more than a dozen such libraries examining the lives and legacies of U.S. presidents from Ronald Reagan in California to Franklin D. Roosevelt in New York to Herbert Hoover in Iowa. The Obama Presidential Center recently opened in Chicago.
Trump will be the library's first official visitor, Library Executive Director Robbie Lauf said, and will speak at a nearby Western-themed amphitheater at an event run by Freedom250, the Trump-created group billed as nonpartisan. On Friday, Trump also plans to visit South Dakota's Mount Rushmore for Independence Day fireworks, as he did in 2020.
The president has often praised and even compared himself favorably to Roosevelt, declaring in 2020 that he was "the number one environmental president since Teddy Roosevelt." Trump began his second term by trumpeting construction of the Panama Canal during the Roosevelt administration. He even suggested that the U.S. might seek to take back the waterway from Panama to curb influence from China, though that goal was overshadowed by his suggestions that Washington might seize control of Greenland or that Canada could become America's 51st state.
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.