By JACK DURA
BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) — President Donald Trump will visit North Dakota on Wednesday to see the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, a massive facility exploring the 26th president’s life, built in the rugged, lonely landscape where the young easterner built his conservation values while ranching and hunting in the 1880s.
The 96,000-square-foot library opens over the weekend on July 4, the pinnacle date of celebrations this year honoring the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. But 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, and bringing the official celebrations of the nation’s birth to a region synonymous with its westward expansion.
All living presidents were invited to the grand opening of the library, which joins more than a dozen such libraries throughout the country 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, bringing together four former presidents for the occasion.
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 Freedom 250, the Trump-created group billed as nonpartisan that he has tapped to organize the festivities he will participate in this week. 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’s a goal that 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 holding far lower-key boxing matches in the White House — though he 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.
Devastated, the New York native came to Dakota where he ranched cattle and hunted big game in the West during visits mostly from 1884 to 1887.
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 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.
Donors include oil executive Harold Hamm, the Waltons of Walmart fame, Citadel founder and CEO Kenneth Griffin and Burgum himself.
Burgum also has lobbied for Roosevelt’s induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, saying during an event previewing the Roosevelt library, “Keep your fingers crossed.”
That’s a nod to Roosevelt — who had become alarmed at the number of injuries and deaths of college football players — convening a 1905 White House meeting featuring the presidents of Harvard, Yale and Princeton to urge safety improvements in the sport. The discussions eventually 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 writer Will Weissert in Washington contributed to this report.