Teddy Roosevelt’s failed Bull Moose campaign may portend the future of the GOP and Donald Trump
What happens when a former president decides he wants his old job back, regardless of what stands in his way?
As Donald Trump launches his third run for the White House, it is useful to look back at another ex-president, Theodore Roosevelt, whose campaign to regain the office from his successor, William Howard Taft, divided the Republican Party and ensured the victory of Democrat Woodrow Wilson in the presidential election of 1912.
In my view as a scholar of 20th-century American history, Roosevelt’s sense of entitlement, moral narcissism and belief in his own indispensability led him to turn his back on his party.