Last week, The New York Times published an explosive report entitled “Under Trump, Protected Wild Horses Are Going to Slaughter.” It immediately went viral—as it should have. While it’s hard to top the recent litany of Trump’s assaults on wolves, migratory birds, the ocean floor, rivers, forests, national parks and refuges—public lands in general—the Times report struck a nerve, for who among us is in favor of America’s great symbol of freedom meeting such a horrific fate? As I told Newsweek years ago, “America’s mustangs deserve better than a trip to the gallows.” When the Times piece came out, many were shocked, though not surprised to learn that Trump would mount such a war, as indicated by countless posts on social media from the horrified: “Of course Trump would do this…”; “Only Donald Trump would come after wild horses…”; “This is a new low—if such a thing is possible”; and so on. But here’s another shocking (to many, though not those in the wild horse advocacy community, which is bigger and broader than you think) revelation. Wild horses have not had a friend in the White House since Richard Nixon. It was under President George W. Bush that things really got heated, as I said in another Newsweek interview from 2008: “For the past eight years, the president has wrapped himself in the flag, and now, three days before the Fourth of July, his administration announces plans to exterminate our greatest icon—the very horse we rode in on.” But the sad fact remains: every president since Nixon, including Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama, has waged war against the very animal—other than the eagle—which most represents freedom.
In 1971, Nixon signed the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act, landmark legislation that has endured numerous attempts to unravel it. The oft-maligned commander-in-chief is remembered mostly for the Watergate scandal, which has led to the ongoing affixation of “gate” after every subsequent government malfeasance since then. But another element of his legacy is that he signed several critical pieces of environmental legislation—most of which his fellow Republicans have also been trying to modify or outright obliterate—an endeavor at which Trump has excelled with a series of executive orders that have sent many land, sea, air and wildlife advocacy groups into overdrive. To stop the onslaught, they have filed an avalanche of lawsuits, which was surely the administration plan all along: Full steam ahead while tying up the opposition for years.
Trump’s move to take out wild horses was foretold in Project 2025 using language that’s been employed for years by enemies of the mustang, and many wild horse advocates warned about this aspect of the Heritage Foundation’s policy blueprint when it surfaced during the 2024 election. But there was so much else in that report that was concerning; other matters quickly subsumed the question of wild horses, as it always is, or has been, until The New York Times report last week. For entities that seek to remove wild horses from areas where they are protected—including Big Beef, Big Mines, and Big Timber—what the administration is carrying out is welcome. As I’ve said since publication of my book Mustang: The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West in 2008, “wild horses are the last thing standing between us and public lands.”
Nixon’s endorsement of bills protecting the environment, wildlife, and wild horses and burros is often dismissed as being politically advantageous. It was. Powerful Democratic leaders brought him these bipartisan landmark bills. Yet some time ago, I realized that a childhood secret fueled Nixon’s motivation for signing the law protecting wild horses and burros, a fact he revealed to an interviewer years after he left office. In the annals of Nixon decoding, as I wrote on Truthdig, “this secret stands as the full-on Rosebud of the man who is perhaps the most misunderstood president in history, the very Citizen Kane of the East Coast Xanadu that is the White House.” “We need the tonic of wildness,” Nixon said during the signing ceremony for the bill, quoting Henry David Thoreau. This statement still ranks as a truly astonishing moment in contemporary American history. Can you picture Nixon giving that speech?
I learned of Nixon’s involvement in wild horse preservation while working on Mustang years ago. At some point, I realized that Nixon was a truly tormented man, one who hated rock ’n’ roll and asked radio stations not to play it but happily shook hands with Elvis when he came a knockin’ at the White House gates, a man who spied on fellow citizens making use of the First Amendment when they criticized him, while at the same time defending the one animal that most represents freedom (for the sake of argument, I’m laying down a hierarchy here, with all due respect to brother eagle). And it wasn’t just that he signed the bill and then quoted Thoreau, which would have been more than enough; as I document in my book, he actually went further, much further, and this is the rest of what Nixon said when he signed the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act: “In the past 70 years, civilization and economics have brought the wild horse to 99 percent extinction. They are a living link with the conquistadors, through the heroic times of the western Indians and pioneers to our own day. … More than that, they merit protection as a matter of ecological right—as anyone knows who has stood awed at the indomitable spirit and sheer energy of a mustang running free.”
Often, actors have the greatest insight into a character’s motivation and true essence. The more I thought about the paradox of Nixon, about his own private wars and how they became public, as they always do, in his case, playing out on the world’s stage, the more I wanted to understand him. So, I turned to my friend Wendie Malick. This wonderful actress has spoken so eloquently on behalf of wild horses on many occasions over the years, recommending that Obama read Mustang. What was it in Nixon, I asked, that brought about his defense of wild horses? Clearly there was much more to the story than the sweaty, paranoid guy who hated Eastern elites and didn’t look good on television.
“I think he identified with them,” Wendie said. “They weren’t being treated well. They were being rounded up and trapped, sent to the slaughterhouse.” Indeed, it was the intrepid Velma Johnston, a Nevada figure known as Wild Horse Annie, whose efforts led to the bill that Nixon signed. While traveling on a remote highway on her way to work as a secretary in the 1950s, she saw blood spilling out of a truck. She followed it and watched as injured and bleeding mustangs were being offloaded and herded into a slaughterhouse. From then on, she devoted her life to bringing public awareness to this awful practice, gathering numerous tales of brutal roundups leading to a bloody end for wild horses, all legal for decades, ultimately organizing a nationwide campaign which led to the 1971 bill. I tell it in Mustang, from her childhood in Nevada, contracting polio and being confined in a full-body cast for years, to county, state, and finally, national success and the triumphant moment at the White House. You can listen to her story on the audio edition of my book; Wendie Malick narrates that portion. Wild Horse Annie’s bodycast had left her with a facial disfigurement, which no doubt led to her deep identification with Nevada’s “misfits,” the thousands of wild horses who were considered not beautiful by the perfection-obsessed equestrian world, not to mention the many ranchers who wanted them gone to make way on the range for more cattle. It’s not for nothing that wild horses were deemed “vermin” or “pests” by those who sought to exterminate them—and some persist in this labeling even today.
I’ve long wondered if Nixon had viewed The Misfits, the well-known but under-appreciated John Huston film with Marilyn Monroe as a woman seeking a divorce in Reno and finding out about the horrific roundups of wild horses after which they were taken to slaughter. In the 1961 film, written by her then-husband Arthur Miller and perhaps loosely informed by the story of Wild Horse Annie, she intervenes in a roundup. Still, she is unable to stop it—and it is said that participating in scenes about those roundups ultimately factored into the demise of its three stars—Marilyn, Clark Gable, and Montgomery Clift—soon after it came out. (It was Gable and Monroe’s last picture.) The place where The Misfits was shot became known as “Misfits Flat”: in a way, the geographic metaphor for all that’s right and wrong with America, a country populated by people who don’t fit in—and often don’t want to—or try and fail at that endeavor, at which point trouble ensues.
That horses had been cast aside and not appreciated must have resonated deeply for a man like Nixon. As he famously said in 1962, after losing the California governor’s race two years after losing his presidential bid, “You won’t have Richard Nixon to kick around anymore.” But actually we do, because that’s what happens whenever anyone mentions his name, and that’s what’s still going on with wild horses, which brings me to Nixon’s secret. It has to do with his earliest childhood memories, and as it happens, one of them—to my surprise, and then, ultimately not—is all about a running horse. With wild horses back in the news, I am once again pondering the man whose signature made their protection official. Years ago, armed with Wendie’s insight, I pored over the Internet for more information about this misunderstood president, hoping to find what led him to identify with wild horses. Why did he feel kicked around – an affliction that seemed to underlie his entire life? It’s one thing to lose an election, actually two: first, the aforementioned race for California governor, and the second, to the telegenic JFK in the 1960 campaign for the presidency—and endure an endless media hazing. And who among us could recover from being told by 80,000 people that you suck, which is what happened one day in Yankee Stadium when he entered with the late owner George Steinbrenner for a game against I don’t remember which team and the entire crowd started chanting “Nixon sucks! Nixon sucks!” as soon as he was spotted. Yet his torment seemed so profound, so ancient, that I suspected those experiences must have opened up some unresolved wound. As it turned out, that’s exactly what happened.
And that’s how I came across the Rosebud of this president’s story. While trekking through the Internet, I discovered a series of interviews he did with reporter Frank Gannon. “He talks about his boyhood in Yorba Linda and later Whittier,” I wrote in Truthdig. “He recounts loving memories of his parents, like the one in which his mother goes outside to make pie filling, whipping the fresh California air into it to add that special something. But there’s another recollection he spoke of elsewhere, the one that seems to explain a lot, everything perhaps, if one is predisposed to look for that one thing, and even if not, here it is.” In this one, he’s a toddler, riding with his mother and sister in a horse-drawn buggy. The buggy rounds a corner, and there is a jolt; he is thrown from the vehicle as it continues, hitting his head as he falls. The horse runs away with the buggy, and young Richard races after it, to no avail. And there he is, dizzy perhaps, stunned maybe, possibly bleeding but determined nonetheless—left in the streets by a runaway horse, an animal that is running faster and faster, trying to break free, vanishing in a trail of dust. And on runs the future president, into his life, the world, the White House, ranting about people who oppose him, compiling an enemies list, making war with Vietnam, peace with China, awed by the sight of a horse running free, forever left behind, which explains to a degree why we have any wild horses at all on the range, despite the never-ending attempt to erase them.
Perhaps the exposure of Donald Trump’s attempt to take out wild horses is what it will take to end the decades-long practice of siphoning them out of government management pipelines, auctioning them off to unscrupulous buyers, who then ship them off to the slaughterhouse, to really protect them once and for all. As we’ve all witnessed, there hasn’t been this kind of sustained outrage around any other issue under Trump’s second term, and it shows no sign of diminishing. But I’m not surprised. As I’ve seen at many book-related talks and events since publication of Mustang and into the present, and what we are all seeing right now, wild horses are the one issue that cuts across all party lines. Literally everyone shows up for my presentations—Democrats, Republicans, veterans, cowboys, kids, grown-ups, teachers, nurses, ranchers, UPS drivers (I know because they identify themselves during post-talk Q&A sessions), people who wander in off the streets because they’ve seen a store flyer. When I speak of the history of wild horses in America—that once there were two million on the range and throughout the frontier era and in a period known as “the Great Removal” they were wiped from their homelands, appropriated for cattle drives, wars, or slaughter, with the remainder (a fluctuating number, possibly 73,000 today) consigned to “herd areas” across the West (not unlike reservations for Native Americans)—most people are outraged and want to know what they can do to stop this rolling disaster. Everyone wants to head off the horse thieves at the pass. That’s because the wild horse is in America’s DNA, and right now it stands a chance of being either wiped out or protected and honored for all time. “No horse, no America” is how I conclude my talks. But until the efforts to eradicate them are halted, I continue to raise the question that I have asked for years: Why are we, a cowboy nation, destroying the horse we rode in on?
