Shots were fired at former president Donald Trump’s rally in Butler, Pa., at 6:12 p.m. Saturday in an assassination attempt. Within minutes, conservative social media accounts began posting two photos side by side: a black-and-white one of President Teddy Roosevelt on the left and another on the right of Trump — blood streaked across his face — defiantly raising his fist to the sky.
A few minutes later, at 6:59 p.m., Elon Musk made a similar comparison on his social media site X, saying that the “[l]ast time America had a candidate this tough was Theodore Roosevelt,” a post that has since been viewed more than 100 million times.
Over the next two days, other prominent conservatives compared Trump’s reaction to Saturday’s shooting with a little-known assassination attempt that involved Roosevelt — who in 1912 was also a former president campaigning to recapture the White House. By doing so, those conservatives are seemingly hoping to intertwine Trump with the rough-and-tumble mythology that the country’s youngest president himself played up — a paragon of manliness who fought in wars, hunted big game and tamed the wilderness.
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Kurt Braddock, assistant professor of public communications at American University, said Republicans have for years been pitching themselves as “the party of manliness, the alphas, of the tough ones.”
“The Roosevelt comparison — it’s a way to build into that mythos,” Braddock said.
The ‘bullet speech’
A part of what has become Roosevelt’s manly image happened in the fall of 1912. Roosevelt, who had served two terms as president from 1901 to 1909, was running for a then-unprecedented third term. When it was clear he would lose the Republican nomination to the man who had succeeded him, William Howard Taft, Roosevelt continued his campaign as a third-party candidate in what became known as the Bull Moose Party because Roosevelt described himself as “fit as a bull moose,” according to the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.
He was on the campaign trail on Oct. 14, 1912, in Milwaukee, where he was to give a speech at the Milwaukee Auditorium. About 8 p.m., he was leaving the Gilpatrick Hotel when saloonkeeper John Schrank, who suffered from mental illness and opposed a president having a third term, stepped out from the crowd, pointed a .38-caliber revolver at Roosevelt and shot him in the chest, according to a Library of Congress article about what happened.
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Unbeknownst to the would-be assassin, Roosevelt was protected by his heavy overcoat and two items in his breast pocket: a metal case for his eyeglasses and a 50-page speech manuscript he had folded in half, the article states. Although the bullet still pierced Roosevelt’s chest, those objects slowed it down, preventing it from hitting any vital organs.
Roosevelt staggered a bit and then fell into a seat beneath him while his stenographer leaped out of a car and wrestled Schrank to the ground to prevent him from firing again, according to the article.
An angry mob quickly surrounded Schrank but Roosevelt defused his supporters’ growing fury, shouting at them, “He doesn’t know what he is doing” and ordering them not to “strike the poor creature,” the article says. Roosevelt kept order until police arrived and arrested Schrank, who was later diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and committed to an institution for the criminally insane until his death in 1943.
Then, against the advice of his doctor, Roosevelt ordered his entourage to the Milwaukee Auditorium, where he took to the stage and addressed his supporters, according to the article. At one point, he held up the bullet-ridden manuscript that had saved his life.
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“I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot,” Roosevelt told the crowd, “but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose.”
“The bullet is in me now so that I cannot make a long speech,” he added. “I will try my best.”
Even though he was bleeding, Roosevelt spoke for 90 minutes. Afterward, he was taken to a hospital in Milwaukee, and eventually Chicago, where doctors decided not to remove the bullet from his chest. Roosevelt was released a week later and was back on the campaign trail by Oct. 30.
Any sympathy or admiration he might have garnered from the assassination attempt did not help Roosevelt in his reelection bid, at least not enough. He and Taft lost to Woodrow Wilson.
After his defeat, Roosevelt spent several years exploring and surveying a river in the Amazon basin, writing and advocating for political causes, the Library of Congress article says. He lived until 1919, when he died at his home near Oyster Bay, N.Y., with Schrank’s bullet still inside his chest.
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The “bullet speech” story has become part of the Roosevelt mythology, evidence of his toughness and manliness.
Two foes
In her 2006 book, “Rough Rider in the White House,” Wake Forest University history professor emeritus Sarah Watts said Roosevelt, like many of his contemporaries, struggled with what it meant to be masculine at the turn of the century, which led him to become “a man whose personal obsession with masculinity profoundly influenced the fate of a nation.”
That obsession was born of his insecurity, itself a product of being maligned as a “wimp” by his father and a “Nancy boy” while serving as a young New York assemblyman. Like other East Coast elites of the late 19th century, Roosevelt abhorred his own physical weakness and what he saw as the larger “degeneration” and “effeminization” of American civilization.
“He saw two foes within himself: a fragile weakling and a primitive beast. The weakling he punished and toughened with rigorous, manly pursuits such as hunting, horseback riding, and war. The beast he unleashed through brutal criticism of homosexuals, immigrants, pacifists, and sissies — anyone who might tarnish the nation’s veneer of strength and vigor,” according to the publisher’s description of Watts’s book.
More than a century later, Americans are again anxious about their country’s standing and wrestling with the idea of manhood.
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Comparing Trump to Roosevelt appeals to both the far-right and more mainstream conservatives, Anthony Nadler, professor of media and communications at Ursinus College, told The Washington Post. “Red pilled” internet users see both as “champions of hypermasculinity” in their respective eras, Nadler said, while more moderate voters worried about what they see as the country’s waning place in the world see warriors who fight for them, whether it’s against large corporations in the early 20th century or global elites more than 100 years later.
‘Heroic storytelling’
That’s been part of a years-long strategy by Republicans characterizing a Biden-led America as weak and pitching Trump as “the only one who can bring them back, ” Braddock said.
“They couldn’t have asked for something better to occur to give them a marketing technique that allows them to tap into that idea,” he said.
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Yotam Ophir, associate professor of communications at the University at Buffalo, said he’s disturbed by the manhood framing, because it risks exalting the assassination attempt. “A day when a presidential candidate is being shot at is a day of national tragedy for America. It’s the embodiment of our social upheaval,” he said.
Instead, people should be having critical discussions about the political atmosphere that led to the assassination attempt, not indulging in the “heroic storytelling” that threatens to not only pit Trump as the hero of a story in which his political opponents are villains, but also glorifies political violence itself.
“It is not an event to celebrate. Despite what Mr. Trump shouted to his fans, this is not the time to fight one another,” Ophir said. “It’s a time for de-escalation and collective soul searching.”
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