Americans may wish to escape politics while on vacation, but
no such luck: If you’re visiting any national monuments this summer, the Trump
administration is determined to impose its cramped, totalitarian worldview on
your experience. Visitors
to Teddy Roosevelt National Park, in North Dakota, will see signs with a Q.R. code inviting them to report displays that are too critical of “past or living Americans”
or insufficiently rapturous about the “beauty, grandeur and abundance” of the
landscape.
The move stems from a
May order to this effect from Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, emphasizing
Trump’s orders to take action to ensure that public monuments do not contain
“depictions or descriptions that inappropriately disparage Americans past or
living … and instead focus on the greatness of the achievements or progress of
the American people or … the beauty abundance, and grandeur of the American
landscape.” The order even encourages the public to report “any signs or other
information that are negative about either past or living Americans.”
While Trump undoubtedly thinks he’s protecting Roosevelt—to whom Trump has
sometimes
been
compared—from “woke” revisionism, this is just one in a series of this administration’s assaults on the twenty-sixth president’s legacy.
Roosevelt had considered the question of respecting the
nation’s leaders—and landed in a decidedly different place than Trump. “Patriotism
means to stand by the country,” he wrote in 1918. However, Roosevelt clarified,
that does not mean that the president or other elected officials should be
spared from criticism—quite the opposite. Of the president, he wrote, “It is
patriotic to support him in so far as he efficiently serves the country. It is
unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or
otherwise he fails in his duty to support the country.”
This surely counts as “negative” information, but Trump and Roosevelt did have much in common. Like
Roosevelt, Trump is a crude imperialist dedicated to American expansionism
regardless of the desires and aspirations of the rest of the world. He probably
will not succeed in colonizing Greenland and Canada (or Gaza) as Roosevelt once
colonized the Philippines, but his rhetoric to that effect is sincere. The men
share an obsession with masculinity—their own and that of the country. (On
Roosevelt’s imperialism and his cartoonish tough-guy persona, you might be
surprised to find that a 2008 Yale University Press book by future senator Josh Hawley is quite
good.) The two presidents also share a racist
and eugenicist
worldview.
But as the existence of the Theodore Roosevelt National Park—and
Teddy’s comments on patriotism—suggests, that’s where the comparison ends. Roosevelt
has been called the “conservation president.” He enacted the Antiquities Act of
1906, which gave him—and presidents ever since—broad leeway to declare new
national landmarks and monuments. He used the law to protect six cultural
areas, including Montezuma Castle, and 12 natural areas, including a huge
swath of the Grand Canyon. He also doubled the number of national parks from
five to 10, adding Oregon’s Crater Lake, South Dakota’s Wind Cave, North
Dakota’s Sully’s Hill, Colorado’s Mesa Verde, and Platt, Oklahoma. He created
150 national forests and 55 bird sanctuaries and game preserves. In total, he protected some
230 million acres of public land.
At
the 1903 dedication of the gates of Yellowstone National Park, the
first-ever national park, which had been created by President Ulysses S. Grant
in 1872, Roosevelt said, “Nowhere else in any civilized country is there to be
found such a tract of veritable wonderland made accessible to all visitors … noteworthy
in its essential democracy.” Private lands, he said, can benefit the larger
community but from the standpoint of the public interest, “could never be more
than poor substitutes” for national parks “created, and now administered, for
the benefit and enjoyment of the people.”
That’s probably why Trump and congressional Republicans hold
our public lands in such deep contempt. Why would they let “the benefit and
enjoyment of the people” stand in the way of billions of dollars for the
superrich? The version of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act currently being negotiated
in the Senate puts hundreds of millions of acres of public lands up for sale to
pay for billionaire tax breaks. Some of those targeted are popular
recreation spots, hunting grounds, wildlife conservation areas, and even
historic sites. An April poll by YouGov found
that 71 percent of Americans, including 61 percent of Trump voters, oppose the
sale of public lands to private bidders.
In another disturbing contrast, while Roosevelt created the
Antiquities Act, Trump is working hard to weaken it by running
roughshod over its curbs on executive authority and undermining its ability to
protect much-cherished sites. Trump
is considering abolishing some national monuments, particularly those
commemorating the history of Indigenous Americans; if he does, he will be the
first president ever to do that. (Congress has abolished fewer than a dozen
since the Antiquities Act.) To that end, Trump’s Department of Justice issued
an opinion with a highly original interpretation of the Antiquities Act,
declaring that the president can get rid of national monuments as he pleases (that opinion overturns a 1938 opinion
to the contrary, which stated that while Congress had some authority to abolish
monuments, the president could not).
Then there’s Trump’s proposed budget, which also cuts hundreds
of millions of dollars from the National Park Service this year and much more
next year—as much as $1.2 billion, a
30 percent cut—angering even Republicans. The affected NPS funds support rangers,
emergency responders, bathrooms, visitors’ centers, and much more. That’s not
even counting the cuts and chaos that DOGE brought to the parks system, which
have already reduced staff and are leading to safety problems in the parks.
Public lands, including national monuments and parks, are by
definition a public good—not a private one. They are a critical part of the
American commons, which we all share equally. Roosevelt believed in this ideal,
but Trump emphatically opposes it. And while Roosevelt welcomed criticism of
his complex presidency, Trump is attempting to shut down debate over it. Trump
has just as little regard for the public sphere as he does for public lands. It
is unpatriotic not to oppose him.
The post The Big Difference Between Donald Trump and Teddy Roosevelt appeared first on New Republic.
