Our National Parks Deserve Better Than Trump

The National Park System, which will be flooded with visitors this summer, has a bipartisan pedigree. Woodrow Wilson signed the National Park Service law that established our system, but Teddy Roosevelt’s setting aside millions of acres of public lands gave it substance. Ulysses Grant signed the law creating the first national park, Yellowstone. There have been tensions between the parties over parks. James G. Watt, Ronald Reagan’s first secretary of the Interior, was a zealous religious sagebrush rebellion conservative who tried to ban the Beach Boys from performing on the National Mall on July 4 because he thought they’d bring in a bad crowd. (Ron and Nancy loved the California band, and Watt became a goner.) No wonder Ken Burns named his documentary series on our national parks “America’s Best Idea.”

It took the klepto-genius of Donald Trump to see the National Park Service as a pile of cash, as he continues his campaign to redo Washington in fetid neo-autocratic style.

Michael Scherer unveils part of the scam in The Atlantic.

It’s not that Washington hasn’t needed sprucing up. The fountains at Meridian Hill or Malcolm X Park are finally working. But most of Trump’s sprucing has been to promote his own glory.

In March, Trump tore up the flagstone paving the busy walkway in the West Colonnade, connecting the White House residence to the Oval Office, and replaced it with polished black African granite, carved in Italy.

The walkway is festooned with gold-lettered plaques intended to epitomize the administrations of each of the 47 American presidents. The exhibit more closely resembles the work of Mussolini’s son-in-law, Count Galeazzo Ciano, who headed up il Duce’s Ministry of Propaganda.

Eight noted historians have told The New York Times that the summaries are riddled with “falsehoods, misrepresentations, insults, praise, [and] self-promotion….” Written by Trump himself, the shameless exhibit “is not so much bad history as it is anti-historical,” said Sean Wilentz, the Princeton historian. The screed of dull, drilled invective against Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, coupled with the self-aggrandizement of Trump, is the stuff of Guinness World Records. Harding’s theft of national lands at Teapot Dome, Nixon’s crimes at the Watergate complex and other scandals are conspicuously omitted. The Monroe Doctrine, which Trump has used to justify interventions in the Americas, is misinterpreted, twisted, and extolled.

The notorious White House ballroom project, still incomplete, is described as built. His description of the alleged accomplishments of Trump 2.0 is prolix, consuming more verbiage than the combined accounts of the presidencies of Lincoln and FDR.

When a reporter asked Trump who was paying for the remodeling of the walkway, Trump answered: “Paid for by me.”

That was false. You, the American taxpayer, paid for it. In fact, the National Park Service spent $347,503 last year to replace the stucco on the colonnade wall so Trump could hang pictures of the U.S. presidents alongside the jaundiced plaques. Documents say the project was a “Rush project at the request of POTUS.”

National Park Service budget documents disclose that the walkway replacement cost taxpayers $689,232, all part of a $1.3 million project that includes new hardware for nearby doors.

Scherer explains that Trump has redirected taxpayer money from national parks across the country to his personal pet projects, leaving the parks unable to make needed repairs or hire staff. Expected funding for more than 900 Park Service projects never arrived—including $424,000 to replace a guardrail on the edge of a cliff in Colorado’s Gunnison National Park. Trump never liked guardrails anyway. The National Park Service employees identified the site as “a significant safety hazard for visitors.” For some parks, nearly 70 percent of approved funds have been pulled back.

Trump has also deployed National Park Service folks to Washington, D.C., for his Freedom 250 events, which he has called a “Trump Rally.” This has generated a crisis because the Park Service had already lost almost a quarter of its staff since he took office. In his 2027 budget, Trump calls for cutting staff by another 3,967 full-time employees, a 31 percent reduction. What does he have against the NPS, the guardians of our national treasures?

That budget also requested another $10 billion to beautify Washington, which is nearly eight times the amount spent on National Park Service projects in 2025. The Senate Appropriations Committee stripped that request out of its marked-up version of the president’s budget.

The administration has a propensity for keeping what’s happening in the national parks under the radar screen. Early this year, the Interior Department instructed its employees that they could not share information about serious injuries or deaths on public lands, instead redirecting all such information through the Department of the Interior’s Office of Communications.

The Interior Department manages the National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Reclamation, and Bureau of Indian Affairs. Those agencies are responsible for about 20 percent of all land area in the United States, hundreds of millions of annual visitors, and spending $88.6 billion in taxpayer dollars annually.

As The Washington Post reported, more than 300 million people visit America’s national parks each year, and about 350 of them die there (not always from accidents). In the past, park service employees could identify deaths or injuries caused by unsafe conditions and warn others in the area. Now the propaganda guys from the Interior Department control that information and release it in a drip feed.

It did not release the information that a 72-year-old man died of extreme heat on a popular trail in the Grand Canyon on June 12. NPS employees wanted to warn other visitors, but the Interior Department did not release the information. Four days later, a couple aged 67 and 68 also died of extreme heat on the same trail.

The profligate diversion of our appropriated tax dollars to whatever satisfies Trump’s latest whim and caprice is as emblematic of Trump’s largely unchecked imperial reign as is the decay of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, which used to offer a mirror-like vista connecting the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument. The Pool represents a massive architectural landmark on the National Mall. Today, the Pool stands militarily guarded, according to Trump, to keep Antifa from attacking it.

Lamentably, the Pool is in despicably poor condition with murky water, blooming algae, and peeling paint, despite a recent $16 million renovation.

To a traumatized generation, symbols are important. The Pool is the iconic backdrop for major civil rights milestones, including the 1939 performance by Marian Anderson, who braved death threats to sing “America” to the American people. The DAR had turned down the event’s backers’ request to use its hall. And of course, this was the site of Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech.

Robbed of our tax dollars appropriated to Trump’s own personal ends, we, the people, are losing the monuments of our freedom. And what do we have to show for it? An exhibition of jaundiced anti-history at a White House of ill repute that increasingly looks like a bordello. A swamp-like reflecting pool full of algae and a significantly diminished country. We pay for this with our treasure, and even with our lives, as our precious national parks become death traps for unwary visitors.