Welcome to today's podcast sponsored by Hillsdale College. All things Hillsdale at hillsdale.edu. I encourage you to take advantage of the many free online courses there. And of course, listen to the Hillsdale Dialogues, all of them at Hugh for hillsdale.com or just Google Apple. iTunes, and Hillsdale. Morning, glory and evening, Grace America. I'm Hugh Hewitt. And indeed, I am going up the country at the close of today's show. I'm out the door and off to the airport.
And on to an airplane and gone for two weeks. Dwayne will handle the duties tomorrow. And then we've got Dwayne, Kurt Schlichter, Mark Davis. Who am I forgetting here? Ed Morrissey and some. And I think that's it. Have I forgotten someone? Dwayne, Flickter, Davis, Morrissey, Dwayne. That's it. That's next week and the week thereafter. You know them all. You'll love them all. And I get to go on a big news day.
And I know it's a big news day because I got called in to do America's Newsroom this morning with Bill Hemmer and Dana Perino. And we covered three subjects in the course of five and a half minutes. So I'm going to use that to set up the show today. Here's my hit with. Fox News this morning with Bill and Dana. Hewitt is here with us, Fox News contributor. Great to have you. Senator Kennedy was on with Laura Ingram last night saying this.
I think it's pretty clear that the president has tariff authority. Congress gave it to him. Sooner or later, the Supreme Court is going to have to address this. Those who oppose the executive branch and those who oppose the legislative branch and are seeking recourse in the courts are at some point. going to dig up more snakes than they can kill. All right, Hugh. This all came down last night. A lot of people looking at it and from lots of different directions. So many opinions. What's yours?
Well, good morning, Danny. Good morning, Bill. I read the opinion this morning by judges Katzman, Reif, and Rustani. The trade court, it's just another district court. It just has three district court judges hearing this. They're very good at trade matters, not so good at con law.
be appealed to the federal circuit. It will eventually end up at the Supreme Court. I understand their ruling on the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, but they don't do a lot of con law. And I do not understand why they did not stay their injunction, because they are.
messing up a lot of ongoing negotiations. So I think it was reckless in the extreme for three district court judges to mess up all these international trade issues. And I do understand the China trade tariffs as being national security. I can even understand And the 10 percent international, the global 10 percent tariff is being related to a sort of tax on our defense.
budget that we do for the rest of the world. So whatever the opinion of these three judges, they're just district judges. They're not very self-aware. It's got to get up to the federal circuit. I hope it's stayed immediately. It's got to eventually go to the Supreme Court because the IAEP has it's a case of first impression for this kind of a question under the IAEP of 77. So it'll eventually get the Supreme Court. I just wish they had stated, and I hope the federal circuit states it today.
Okay, this is like the court in the corner, right? Who had ever heard of it? I mean, most of us had not, and 95% of the people watching the same. Now, with regard to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, he wants to crack down. on the number of visas given to Chinese students. I'll read two things for you here. The investigation uncovering Chinese academic espionage at Stanford. You're quite familiar with that. And here are the number of student visas from China. It's the line in yellow.
versus other countries, which is the line above it in gray. So significant number of students from China. What do you think about the merits of this, Hugh? I think they have great merits. I would revoke every single one of them. until, for example, Jimmy Lai is freed by Xi Jinping, the general secretary of the Communist Party there. And I would send them all back and then carefully vet every one of them, because it is well known, and it was known in Trump One, that most of the students here...
on visas from China, are under duress of the communists in China, meaning that they've got family, they've got friends, they've got instructions, and not all, but if you've got 300,000, I believe that's the number, students here from the P... They're all beholden to the Chinese Communist Party one way or the other. And if even only 10 percent of them, 30,000, are actively engaged in spying and stealing and espionage, that's a major problem. So I think Secretary Rubio is continuing.
what Secretary Pompeo did under President Trump in his first term, which is crackdown on the Chinese Communist Party and its agents in the United States. So I'm 100% with them. Send them home when they free Jimmy Lai. He's being honored by the Brantley Foundation. We have to really wonder, what do they do? and to whom are they doing it.
President Xi's daughter herself actually attended Harvard in 2014. She graduated. She had a pseudonym that she graduated under. This is the New York Times. I don't know if this is the best argument. I've heard better ones, but here, let me read this to you from the New York Times.
will no doubt fuel worries amongst the roughly 275,000 Chinese students in the United States, as well as professors and university administrators who depend on their research skills and financial support. I mean, is that something we can do without? Dana, I'm sympathetic to some of these who are innocent.
But I am worried about the national security of the United States. And the fact of the matter is the largest espionage operation ever conducted in history is being conducted by the CCP against us. Right now, we are in Cold War 2.0. People have to wake up. Secretary Rubio was chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee before he went over to Foggy Bottom. He knows of which he speaks. And pretty much everybody who studies this space knows.
that this is a problem. We've just ignored it because the money they bring to the universities is so great. Some message from the White House is how do you offer 300,000 student visas to the Chinese nationals every year when you know they're legally required to gather intelligence for the CCP? Hugh, thank you. Hugh Hewitt, we'll see where that goes. And I love, we move quickly through that. Now I want to slow down a little bit and go back to the court of international trade.
It's good court. They're very smart. They're stuck away up in New York. They have a very limited jurisdiction, specialized court. So they get this whopping big declaration of Liberation Day by President Trump. And they're the trial court. They get the first whack at it. And they invoke a couple of things, in their opinion, including the non-delegation doctrine, which most of us who teach con law tell our students is dead, dead, dead. Maybe it's in a coma.
Maybe it will be resurrected by the federal circuit or by the Supreme Court. But as far as I know, it's dead, dead, dead. And for them to invoke that in whole or part, then they also say, and even if it's not. an illegal delegation of authority to the president. He's not done it the right way, which is they're on better, firmer footing there. But as I read it, I said to myself, OK, this all makes sense. There are three smart people.
They will give their opinion that an injunction ought to be, they'll enter an injunction, and then they will stay the effect of it until such time as the Trump administration has an opportunity to appeal it. They did not do that. Meaning that... Supposedly, all the tariffs are back on. I pity the poor guy is putting the stickers on and off of the goods and keeping track of the tariffs to collect. Do we have to give the money back that we collected under the tariffs? It's billions of dollars.
The courts are not very practical sometimes. The practical thing would have been to say, we think this is wrong. We don't think he can do this. I voiced the same concern about the IEP of 1977, that they don't have the authority to do this. I've said that.
On this show, you've heard me say, I worry about this. And it got tested in the First Circuit, by the way, as well. There are concurrent cases going on. But this is quicker. Federal Circuit sits here in D.C., I believe. They'll get it. I hope they stay the injunction. and have some briefing, some moral argument. We'll get a second opinion. And if they don't stay it, if the Federal Circuit's in D.C., and I've never argued before the Federal Circuit, so I don't know.
They can't. I think they're the justice who would be their justice of first resort would also be the chief justice because he's the D.C. Circuit justice. I hope he issues a stay and refers it to the court, not for the shadow docket. But for October and first first Monday in October, they come back, schedule an early hearing, have a full briefing. It's a big deal. There's a case of first impression.
For those of you who remember con law distantly, if you're a lawyer, Justice Robert Jackson in the Youngstown sheet and tube cases, called the steel seizure cases, said there are three zones of presidential power. It's not the majority opinion, but it's the most influential. Zone number one, flood tide of the presidential power is when the president is acting with his inherent authority of Section two of the Constitution, plus a grant of authority from Congress. That's where Trump is now.
Over here in Article 3 are the courts, and they can overturn a flood zone of authority that he's doing that. That's perfectly reasonable for them to do, and the Supreme Court might uphold them. But there's no reason to run in. And I'll be right back after this. America, I'm Hugh Hewitt inside the Beltway. Welcome. I'm breaking a lot of my rules this half hour.
One of my rules is never have on someone who's way smarter than me, and Alan Dershowitz is. Never have on someone who's taught con law longer than me, and Alan Dershowitz has. And never have on an author of a book that I haven't read, and his brand new book, The Preventative State, has not... We need this book. I want the answers in this book. So I'm going to begin with the simple question. What's going to shock me the most in the preventative state?
That it's not political, that you wouldn't know reading the book, whether I supported or opposed Biden or Trump or Kamala Harris, you wouldn't know whether I was a liberal or conservative or Republican or Democrat. It's a book for. all people who care about the future of our country. It's a book about how we are quietly and without any kind of debate moving toward a preventive state in which the government has the power.
to do things they've never had before based on artificial intelligence and our ability to predict cataclysmic events and they're doing it for all good purposes they're doing it to prevent the spread of disease to prevent nuclear proliferation to prevent terrorism, to prevent the kinds of killings we saw in the District of Columbia of these two young people. We're doing it for all the best purposes, but we're doing it in a way that threatens our civil liberties.
Unless we construct a jurisprudence, a way of thinking about this. You know, we know that it's better to convict, to acquit 10 guilty people than to acquit. even to convict even one innocent person. But we don't know whether it's better to detain 10 innocent people in order to prevent 9-11 or Israel's October 7th or Pearl Harbor. We don't have a jurisprudence of prevention. And after 60 years of thinking about it and teaching it and writing it,
about it, I finally decided to write what I consider my magnum opus, my most important book, The Preventive State. But you wouldn't know. That it was an important book because The New York Times has refused to review any of my books since I defended Trump. Harvard University won't allow me to speak since I defended Trump.
No liberal media will interview me or cover me because I'm now, you know, a defender of Donald Trump, even though I didn't vote for him the first two times, but because I defended his constitutional rights against him. unconstitutional impeachment, I am absolutely canceled by the liberal media, the New York Times, CNN, you name it. David Mamet was on the program yesterday about his brand new book, and he's lost a lot of friends.
Yeah, well, David's lost a lot of friends because he says good things about Trump. He didn't defend Trump the way you did, but he said good things about Trump. I want to start, Professor Dershowitz, with a question I posed. at his dining room table to Mark Zuckerberg when he invited a half dozen conservative pundits to come break bread with him. I said, Mark, can you predict who's going to be a school shooter? And he looked at me like...
What? Like minority report? And I said, yeah, if you get enough data, this is before AI was a big deal, probably six, seven years ago. If you get enough data together, can't you find a pattern that would suggest this individual is on the Internet because they all leave trails? is going to be a school shooter. And he told me, no, I can't. Well, I think now we can, Professor. What do we do if we can?
Well, we have what are called red flag laws now, which are based on our ability to predict who the shooters will be. And we have a lot of false positives. We deny guns to people who would not use them improperly in order to prevent...
even one school shooting. So we're going to make mistakes. We're going to have either false positives or false negatives. False positive is when you say a person is going to do it and you do something to him and he won't do it. A false negative is when you say, oh, he won't do it. And then he does it. regret it horribly. So we're going to have those mistakes. And our question is,
how to balance those mistakes. I'll give you an example from history, the best example of mystery, and it's very central to my book, and I think a lot about this. 1935, Great Britain and France could have invaded Germany and prevented the Holocaust. costs and prevented 50 million people from dying. In fact, Goebbels thought they would because
He and the Nazis were violating the Versailles Treaty. But the British and the French decided, no, Hitler was really not as bad as people thought he was. So we're not going to do it. We're going to let them arm. We're going to let them be stronger. As the result of that false negative 50 million.
people were killed. If Churchill had been the prime minister, he would have invaded Germany. And then he'd have been relegated to the bowels of history, saying he was a warmonger, he killed 10,000 people, it was needless, Hitler was never going to do any of these things. The problem with predicting is that science is blind to the future. And Mark, who I remember from college, Mark Zuckerberg, and I've met him since.
He's a brilliant guy, and he will be part of the ability to predict. We're not going to predict perfectly, but we will have a much better basis for predicting than we ever had before. And as a result, we'll make. mistakes, but will make hopefully fewer mistakes. So you cited the Nostrum. It's actually a maxim that it is better to...
acquit 10 guilty, then convict one innocent. I first heard that from a guy named Jerry Israel, who you may or may not have known. He taught me criminal pro at Michigan. And Jerry Israel, I think if he said it once, he said it 25 times. And so deeply embedded in me. And I get it. But we were dealing them with handguns and murders and things like that, not weapons of mass destruction. You're mentioned in the publicity materials for the book. Does that change?
The standard when we're dealing with WMD and toxins and viruses. Of course it does. First, number one, don't believe what Professor Israels or Professor Yale Kamasur or Professor Alan Dershowitz read to you from Blackstone. We never believed that it was better for 10 guilty to go free than for one innocent to be wrong.
We said it, but we never believed it. Juries don't act that way. Prosecutors don't act that way. We don't want 10 murderers on the street. We're prepared to convict a couple of innocent people to prevent murder. So we never. never really abided by that. But surely we can't abide by that in the age of a nuclear catastrophe. And we don't. After 9-11, we certainly didn't abide by that. We tortured people.
We confined them. We made a lot of mistakes in order to prevent another 9-11. If we could have prevented the first 9-11 by... horribly detaining people. Look, we had an experience with this once after Pearl Harbor, which could have been prevented, but it wasn't. We didn't have the right use of intelligence. What did Roosevelt do? We put 110,000 innocent Japanese. people of Japanese descent into camps, not concentration camps or death camps, but they were still...
And those were all false positives. They wouldn't have committed. Maybe one or two of them would have committed treason or espionage, but certainly nothing to justify that kind of mass reaction. So what happens is. We wait. We have the false negative. We wait. The event occurs, and then we overreact. And so we're wrong on both sides of the equation. We don't do enough before, and we do too much after.
I'm sure you can probably even do it in Latin. I'm sure you remember Cicero's maxim in war, the laws are silent. Are we in war all the time now, Professor? Now that there is no abroad, now that we have hypersonic missiles, are we always at war? We are always at war. And not only are we at war, but our allies are at war. Look at Israel. They're at war 24-7. And they... fell into the same trap that we were just talking about with Pearl Harbor. They didn't do enough to prevent...
October 7th is a disaster, the worst intelligence disaster in modern history, not preventing October 7th. And now maybe people are arguing Israel is overreacting. Maybe they're doing too much. But that's inevitable. Every country does that. I can't think of a single example in history where a country was unprepared, allowed a disaster to occur, which could have been prevented, and then overreacted after the fact.
We need to construct a jurisprudence to tell us how to balance the mistakes on either side. We're doing it wrong because we haven't really thought it through. I've been thinking about this now for 60 years. I was teaching. prevention for 60 years. And law schools haven't caught up. They don't teach it. They don't think about it. Yeah, you mentioned the movie Minority Report. That's the closest we've ever come to having a major public debate on this issue of prevention. I'm hoping my book...
and preventive state will stimulate the debate, at least among academic colleagues. I don't think it will. I'll give you an example. I sent 100 copies of this book. to every single member of the law school faculty at Harvard, every single member, the dean, the president of the university. I have not gotten a single response because I defended Trump. People aren't writing to me. People aren't going to read my book. This is one of the most important books.
written about the law in modern times. In not only my view, but you read some of the blurbs of Stephen Breyer. Stephen Breyer. Stephen Breyer blurbed your book. Well, he introduced it. Larry Summers blurbed my book, you know, Ed Irwin Chemerinsky.
They all thought it was a very important book. But the Harvard Law School faculty doesn't want to have anything to do with me. Stand by, Professor. We're going to go to break. I'm going to talk to you during the break. I'm going to bring you back after the break. We'll put it all on YouTube as well, because I think this is... It's the toughest problem. And Professor Dershowitz...
is perhaps the greatest civil rights authority that we've got out there talking. So I'm going to milk the cow. Stay tuned. So, Professor, during this time, which will go on to YouTube, and I might use it in hour three if we've got time, I want to ask you about Brandenburg test.
I don't think it works anymore because of the fact that. I agree with you. Okay, so what do we replace it with? You know what it is. I know what it is. My audience knows what it is because I've taught them. What do we replace it with? We replace it with a loser definition of incitement. You can incite. It doesn't have to be one-on-one incitement. Under Brandenburg, it has to be me talking to you, basically, and saying, go out and kill somebody. If you get somebody in front of a crowd.
saying, globalize the Intifada. Palestine should be free, free of Jews, from the river to the sea. There's a real argument that those can incite the kind of killings that we saw. in the District of Columbia. That's a debate worth having. And have you seen any indication from SCOTUS that they're moving that way? Because they got stuck in a rut.
Because of Justice Kennedy, and God bless him, but it was Justice Kennedy who messed up the jurisprudence over war prisoners who were being detained at Gitmo. Do you think that the court can get out of the rut? I do. I think this Supreme Court is very pragmatic. Kavanaugh, Barrett, Gorsuch, they're very pragmatic. And I think the other two are a little ideological, but they're ideological, I think.
perhaps on the right side of this issue. So I think they can get out of this rut. I think we're going to see the first movement is going to be a limitation on New York Times versus Sullivan. Now that's going to be the malice. requirement that judges decide whether there's malice or not is, I hope, going to be thrown out. I'm bringing such a case, so I'm hoping that will happen. You know, that will itself be part of the preventative state.
it will prevent a lot of incendiary rhetoric, which in turn fuels incendiary acts. I mean, if we just cut it back a little bit, you're working on the preventative state, aren't you? Yeah. And this comes from somebody who worked on New York Times versus Sullivan. I was one of the law clerks that helped write one of the opinions in New York Times versus Sullivan. And now I regret how it's been applied. Were you a Fordist clerk? Who did you clerk for?
Arthur Goldberg, who was on the court. You're a Goldberg clerk. There aren't many of you because Johnson talked him off of the court. Yeah, there are only six of us. Steve Breyer is one of them as well. Oh, no kidding. Oh, that's real inside baseball. I'll play that in hour three. Stand by, Professor. We're going to come back on to the national show, and we'll talk more about the preventative state.
Welcome back, America. I'm Hugh Hewitt. Professor Alan Dershowitz is being generous with his time. His brand new book is The Preventative State. The preventative state is available at Amazon, at Barnes & Noble, every bookstore that's online, every bookstore in America, probably most airports in America. And the preventative state asks the question, what are we going to do to stop serious harm?
Now, Professor Dershowitz, you have seen and I have seen what happened to the young two Jews in D.C. last week. Murdered at close range by a fanatic from Chicago who knew what he was doing and went to the Capitol Jewish Museum. I bet you we could have predicted that. But we might also have predicted that the other people in his radical fringe group and the members of Antifa are going to do violent things.
How do you change the law to deal with the mortal lock, as we used to say in the horse betting business, of someone doing violence? Well, not only could it have been predicted, but in my book, The Preventive State... I actually predicted it. I predicted it in two of my books, this book, and also I wrote a book called The Palestinianism. And I predicted it, and I predicted it based on my experience.
I defended a lot of protesters during the Vietnam War, and some of them were violent. And some of the violent ones turned into murderers. Kathy Boudin became a murderer, murdered two policemen. The Weathermen became murderers. They planted bombs that killed people. So when you. tolerate and encourage the way, for example, the Harvard Divinity School and Public Health School encourage violent actions against Jews and against Israel. When you encourage that, when you tolerate students.
kidnapping two janitors at columbia university you're going to see the move from this kind of violence to going out and getting a gun and killing it's going to happen i got an honorary degree last week from a small college in florida The security people, this is the day after the killing in D.C., the security people came over to me and said, sorry, Professor Dershowitz, but we have to give you a route to escape. We will have extra guards and they will have.
bulletproof shields to protect you because we're worried that there could be copycat. attempts to get at you the way they killed these two people. So, and by the way, it's always the case. They come for the Jews first, but they're never the last. We're always the canary in the mine shaft. And when you start killing, and by the way,
way, one of the people who killed him in this room wasn't Jewish. He was a very religious, evangelical Christian. But when you go after him and start killing them, Christians come next. Well, let me close this way. The preventative state, I'm going to read it as soon as it arrives. I want to get you back in June after I've had a chance to digest it and talk professorial-level stuff with you when I've read your case study.
But in terms of the rule, I always like a black letter. I teach con law students. I try and teach them how to pass the bar. What do you think the black letter law is going to end up having to be about imminent threat and detention? I think if you see imminent threats, there's going to be a constitutional right to detain. I think we're going to begin to err on the side of security a little bit more. You know, as Ben Franklin said, we shouldn't give up.
a lot of liberty for a little bit of security, but you have to give up a little bit of liberty for a lot of security. And the thesis of the preventive state is to try to decide exactly how much liberty. How much non-essential liberty are we prepared to give up in order to prevent? How many cataclysmic events that we could prevent?
We're not preventing now. Could we have prevented 9-11? Yes. Could we have prevented Pearl Harbor? Yes, but at a cost. And the question is, what is that cost and is it worth it? And that's what I argue in my book, The Preventive State. Last question, Professor. We need a dialogue on that. We need a dialectic. Has any academic of any standing engaged you yet on the preventative state? Because that's how you actually move forward.
Yeah, and they won't. As long as I don't renounce Donald Trump, and as long as I proudly say I defended him the way John Adams defended the people who were accused of the Boston massacre, as soon as I say that... Trump's first impeachment was unconstitutional, and I'm happy I defended him. As long as I say that...
Academics will not engage me. They have canceled me. They ignore me. I wrote this book for history. Maybe in five years, in 10 years, people will begin to appreciate this. I believe that we will have a jurisprudence for the preventive state. But I think my defense of Donald Trump has prevented this from becoming part of the dialogue at current American universities. I wouldn't send it to Harvard Law. I would send it to the Senate. And I'd also send it.
to the justices and maybe the D.C. Circuit, someone who's going to have the ability and the authority to actually act. on a rational basis to move the law forward because we have to get... Brandenburg doesn't work. New York Times v. Sullivan doesn't work anymore. It was great for the 60s and the 70s. It's not great for the WMD era. And by the way, does Israel... Do I have a counterpart to this in their law?
No, Israel does have some restrictions on free speech. In actual practice, they have an enormous amount of free speech, but they don't have a constitution. And all I want to do is start a debate. I'm not sure I know the answer. I want to hear from everybody. I want to hear from... I used to want to hear from the American Civil Liberties Union, but the ACLU has become the anti-civil liberties union. They have nothing to say about this.
Organizations like FIRE do have something to say about this. I want to hear it from all people, from civil libertarians, from free speech advocates. I want that debate to begin. And the preventive state should be pushing us toward having that debate because we have to be able to prevent and at the same time not deny people the right basic rights of free speech.
Alan Dershowitz, thank you for joining me. I'll be back in June. The book will have caught up with me on my travels. The Preventive State is in bookstores now. That's what it looks like if you're watching on the Salem News Channel, if you're listening on the Salem Radio Network. Preventive State, Alan Dershowitz. You cannot miss it. You ought to read it. You ought to be part of the debate going forward. Professor D, thank you so much for joining me. I appreciate the time.
Very, very intelligent questions. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. I hope so. It's what I do. Not as long as you do it, but it's what I do. Thank you so much. It's so easy to save money with Consumer Cellular. It's the same fast, reliable service of the big wireless companies, but without the cost. It's so easy to switch. Inflation is still taking a dent in your monthly expenses. You need to investigate Consumer Cellular.
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can find out if you qualify for a monetary reward. Call 800-220-3800. That's 800-220-3800. Call now. Advertisement sponsored by Legal Help Center may not be available in all states. I'm Hugh Hewitt inside the Beltway, but I'm going way out to North Dakota to talk to Ed O'Keefe. Ed is the CEO of the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library Foundation. which will soon open its doors to the public out there in North Dakota. Hello, Ed. How are you? Well, hello, Hugh. Good to be with you.
I've got to tell you, every time I see Doug Burgum, both when he was governor of North Dakota and when he became Secretary of the Interior, when I see Senator Kramer, anyone with a North Dakota connection, they tell me about this library. Tell me about this library, Ed. We're all singing from the same song sheet, Hugh. I mean, that's the North Dakota pride we've got going. Well, the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library is under construction in Medora, North Dakota.
It was where TR came and lived as a rancher and a cowboy, lived what he'd later call the strenuous life for the better part of two years. He owned that ranch for almost 20 years and said, I never would have been president except for my experiences in North Dakota.
He came a broken man to a broken land. He recovered and healed in nature, and he went on to become the great American president we all know and love. And on July 4th, 2026, the 250th anniversary of America, This incredibly unique institution on 93 acres of beautiful land in the Badlands of North Dakota will open to the American public and the world.
Now, Ed, we share something in common. I have twice been the CEO of the Nixon Foundation, and I oversaw the construction of the Nixon Library in 1989 to 1990. It's not easy getting people to pay attention to a construction site. But you've been pretty good at that. Why is that? Why the continuing fascination with Teddy Roosevelt?
Well, I think Theodore Roosevelt is like a Rorschach test. I mean, what you see in him says more about you than it does about him. I mean, Elizabeth Warren's favorite president is. T.R. Josh Hawley's favorite president is T.R. Obama and Romney's favorite president, T.R. I mean, it's a remarkable kind of person that brings together Democrats, independents, Republicans.
Everybody seems to find something they love about this enduring figure. And he's a quintessentially American president. He kicks open the door. to the American century. He's the first president in an airplane, the first in a submarine, the first to go in a motorcade, the first American to win the Nobel Peace Prize. He saves the game of football. And oh, by the way, basically reinvents the concept of the national park system.
234 million acres of conserved land, doubling the size of the national parks. I mean, he's just something for everyone in Theodore Roosevelt's presidency. But I do, I feel a kinship with you, Hugh. It's not an easy job. to get folks to pay attention to a president who's been gone from the earth for 100 years. You had the benefit of Nixon being with you during some of your process. Obviously, TR is not with us.
During this one. But it's you know, he's he's with us in spirit. And how did you end up doing this? Because it's unusual. I always ask other presidential library director, foundation directors. I don't know if yours is going to the archive when you're done, but mine didn't. Our stayed private for many, many years, and then it went to the archive, and then I went back and ran the foundation again. I'm just curious, how did you end up at the TR Foundation?
Thank you, Hugh. I spent some time in media. And after I was done in media, I was thinking about what to do next. I wrote a book about Theodore Roosevelt. I'm from North Dakota. And I met Doug Burgum. And Doug is a heck of a salesman. He's a very good recruiter. If you don't want to do something, do not have Doug Burgum be the person recruiting you to do it.
It's a remarkable opportunity. I mean, it's something so unique and so special for my home state of North Dakota and for the nation. It's a gift for America and for the world. It's not something I ever expected in my career, and I'm just blessed that the opportunity came to me. Now, the interesting part is you have a lot of land. Nixon Library was on 20 acres. Reagan Library had a lot of land. Other ones are on less land.
What are you going to do with all that land? 94 acres is a lot of land. How big is the actual museum footprint? Yeah, it's a great question here. So the actual library is 100,000 square feet. It's in a west wing, which contains the exhibit experience, and an east wing where we have a 301-seat auditorium as well as classroom space. But the 93 acres is really what makes it special. It's designed by Snohetta, an American architect that's done some extraordinary work.
in our country. They did the 9-11 Museum here in New York. They did the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art out in California. They have really... They're landscape architects. And we like to say that the library is the landscape. So as opposed to Reagan or Nixon or many of the other libraries in the system, you have space to not just get in, but get out. to go on a hike, to go on a mountain bike ride, to ride a horse.
up to the library i mean it wouldn't be the tr presidential library if you couldn't ride a horse uh to it and indeed you can do that so we want people want families to come we want the theodore roosevelt presidential library to be the presidential library where kids drag their parents and families can really get to know this American hero and to decide how they can be a part of America and how they can contribute and give back.
in their civic and citizenship duties. So some people won't know this. The landscape and building architect is often different from the museum designer. And museum design is a specialty. There are a lot of fabulous museum design companies out there. Who are you working with and what did they bring to the project? Why did you pick them?
I love this. I never get these questions. I'm clearly talking to someone who knows his way around presidential libraries. So we're working with a great firm called Local Projects. And we're trying to design something that's not really your father's presidential library. We're going to have a narrative gallery that has traditional objects under glass, artifacts, exactly what you'd expect, the chronological experience of Theodore Roosevelt's life.
But between those, you have adventure galleries where you can immerse yourself in the experience of TR's life. We want people to do things and feel things in the boyhood recreation of his Roosevelt Museum of Natural History. We want you to feel curious, to reach inside a tree trunk and explore what's inside, to open a book and an extinct species of bird might join a wall of wonder. We really feel like Theodore Roosevelt's life is... an example um it's not you're learning not just about
You're learning from him. So you can decide the change you want to be in the world and get in the arena just like TR. So we're working with local projects. We're working with dimensional innovations out of Kansas City. We're working with some fabulous. set designers and exhibit designers, Split Rock Studios and Blue Rhino out of Minnesota. We've got so many subcontractors, I can hardly keep track of them at the moment because it's going to be a really fabulously immersive, almost theatrical.
experience. Well, it sounds wonderful, Ed. Now, the most important question is location, location, location. It's going to open on July 4th next year on the 250th birthday. Which interstate is it close to? Because I want people to see in their mind a map. North Dakota isn't exactly on everyone's journey, but everyone will go once they know they can get to the TR library. How do you get there?
The journey is the destination. We're on Interstate 94. We're only about four hours north of Mount Rushmore. We're 20 miles from the Montana border. about five hours from Yellowstone at National Park and about six hours from Glacier. So we hope people are going to travel the TR Triangle. They're going to be families on their Great American Road. They're going to see Mount Rushmore. They're going to come to the theater.
presidential library maybe head out west and go do yellowstone or glacier and we are right next to theodore roosevelt national park the only park named for a person let alone a president so there's Already 800,000 visitors a year that come to Theodore Roosevelt National Park. It's it's a great, beautiful 74,000 acre park. Again, a place where you can go out picnic or horseback ride. We've got 144 mile.
mountain biking trail that goes right by the library and next to some of the most beautiful parts of the park. So it's going to be a destination for people to spend some time, not just in the museum, but outdoors, in nature. Being in the place where Theodore Roosevelt actually lived, actually branched, actually was a cowboy. And you, too, can go discover the wonders that he explored in his time.
Very last, very practical question. Where do people want to have their conference there stay? Have you figured out with a hotel partner yet or a chain partner yet? We've got a minute, Ed. You got to stay at the Rough Rider Hotel. We got about 600 hotel rooms in town and the Rough Rider is awesome. The Badlands Motel is right there with the National Park there and with our partners over at the Theodore Roosevelt Medora Foundation.
on a summer musical from memorial day to labor day you can see a great american musical in an outdoor amphitheater seats 3 000 people plenty of places to stay plenty of places to eat This is the next great American road trip for you and your family. So come on out to Medora, North Dakota after July 4th, 2026. You can see the TR Library. It's an inaugural year. And, Ed, what's the website?
trlibrary.com. Get in the arena. Join us at trlibrary.com. Ed O'Keefe, great to talk to you. trlibrary.com. Go make a plan. July 4, 2026, a new must-get-to destination. I am glad to give a lift to a fellow Presidential Foundation exec.