Trump Recalls ‘Conversation’ With Theodore Roosevelt — Who Died 27 Years Before He Was Born

President Donald Trump claimed Wednesday that he once had a “conversation” with former President Theodore Roosevelt about the Panama Canal, even though Roosevelt died in 1919 — nearly three decades before Trump was born in 1946.

During a speech at the opening of the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in North Dakota, Trump said, “I even had a conversation with Theodore Roosevelt. I said, ‘What do you think about the Panama Canal? Do you consider that your greatest achievement? How do you feel about the fact that the Democrats gave the Panama Canal away to Panama for $1?”

Yet according to Trump’s communications advisor, Margo Martin, it seems the president was actually referring to an artificially generated Roosevelt on display in the new library. Martin’s Wednesday post on X shows Trump, alongside Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, asking questions of the AI rendition before his speech.

Nonetheless, the president again repeated the unfounded claim that the canal was sold to Panama for $1, a detail that no parts of the 1977 Torrijos-Carter Treaties, negotiated by former President Jimmy Carter, mention.

After Trump made the claim once more on Wednesday, the crowd booed audibly, not at the president but at “the Democrats” who “gave the Panama Canal away to Panama for $1.”

Trump continued of Roosevelt, “You know, he built the Panama Canal, preceded, really, by a man who was actually, he was the ‘Tariff King,’ [former President] William McKinley. He was the president, and they took his name off Mount McKinley, and I put it back on because it deserved it.”

Also during Wednesday’s speech, Trump fantasized about joining Roosevelt as part of a father-son duo to receive the Medal of Honor, joking that he would simply award the nation’s highest military decoration to himself and one of his sons.

Of his sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, both in the audience, the president said, “We’ll have a threesome. I’ll pick out one of the two [to award the medal].”

Watch the clip above via Fox News.

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