It was the most consequential camping trip in American history: In 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican, asked the naturalist John Muir to guide him into the wilderness of California’s Yosemite Valley. After three days and an unexpected snowstorm, the two men emerged, bedraggled but gratified. Camping beneath the valley’s giant sequoias, Roosevelt later wrote, “was like lying in a great solemn cathedral, far vaster and more beautiful than any built by the hand of man.”
The 26th president went on to lay the groundwork for an audacious policy: America’s wild lands should be publicly owned and protected in perpetuity. For over a century, Republicans have mostly defended and expanded this legacy, in large part because of their personal connections to the outdoors. But something has changed since President Trump returned to office last year: His inner circle consists almost exclusively of hyperonline MAGA ideologues, whose passion for American landscapes generally begins and ends at the golf course. The Roosevelt Republicans are in retreat. The indoor Republicans have arrived.
In the past year or so, this new conservative vanguard has rolled out the most boldly anti-environment agenda in modern American history. Recently this has included taking steps to allow a foreign company to mine for copper just upstream of Minnesota’s beloved Boundary Waters wilderness.
Before the rise of the indoor Republicans, conservatives’ affinity for wilderness was a powerful force in American politics. As the historian Douglas Brinkley put it to me, “There was something about huddling around the campfire exchanging stories, hunting and fishing — it was part of the DNA of the Republican Party.”
This helped ensure a nearly bulletproof consensus among Democrats and Republicans to steward public lands. While lawmakers and cabinet members argued about the details of environmental regulations, the core ethic of conservation — protecting clean air, clean water and wilderness for future generations — remained reliably bipartisan.
Since the rise of the MAGA movement, many Republican elites no longer seem interested in riding horses in the Rockies or fly fishing in the Adirondacks. Jackson Hole is out. Palm Beach is in.
Leaders of several nonpartisan and right-of-center nature conservation groups — the de facto representatives of the nation’s hunters and recreationists — told me they have spent decades building rapport with federal officials who admired the conservation groups in the same way Roosevelt admired Muir. In the past year, those partnerships have mostly eroded.
Many of the career civil servants they once worked with at agencies such as the Interior Department have quit, been fired or been sidelined by Trump loyalists focused on retribution and dismantling government bureaucracy.
Many conservationists had hoped that Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, a former governor of North Dakota, would stand up for public lands and environmental protections. More so than any other cabinet member, he styles himself as a Westerner, hosting a cowboy-themed Christmas party and displaying a mounted elk head in his D.C. office. Even REI, the liberal-leaning outdoor retailer, endorsed his nomination for the top job overseeing the nation’s public lands and national parks. (The company later apologized for its endorsement.)
Instead, Mr. Burgum appears to be a yes man, cowed into submission by Mr. Trump and his sharper-elbowed advisers like the White House deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, and the Office of Management and Budget director, Russell Vought. On Mr. Burgum’s watch, the Department of the Interior has systematically pursued resource extraction over conservation and let go of about a quarter of the National Park Service staff.
During Mr. Trump’s first term, some pro-conservation Republicans with MAGA clout played a moderating role in the White House. In 2020 Donald Trump Jr. and the hard-right commentator Tucker Carlson, both avid outdoorsmen, helped block the proposed Pebble Mine in Alaska, which threatened one of the world’s most productive salmon fisheries.
In 2020 the younger Mr. Trump helped found a magazine and lifestyle brand, Field Ethos, which hawks $100 waxed canvas toiletry bags and embossed mimosa glasses. But in the current administration, he has shown less interest in conservation than in feathering the family nest by inking deals with online betting markets and crypto start-ups.
The few conservative elites who are still fighting to protect cherished trout creeks and bird habitats are outnumbered and outgunned. If this momentum continues and resistance fails for three more years, some of our nation’s unique and sensitive landscapes, from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to Bears Ears National Monument, will be even more endangered than they are today.
When future historians look back on this era, the most telling anecdote about the triumph of the indoor Republican might be the president’s decision in 2025 to pave over the White House Rose Garden, which he framed as a chivalrous effort to defend American women from the vicissitudes of nature. “You see the women?” he told an interviewer. “The grass was wet. Their heels are going through the grass.”
Maybe it’s too much to expect every president to go camping, but the American right will have to decide how much to tolerate a generation of leaders who are ambivalent or outright hostile to our nation’s natural heritage. Time is of the essence; political parties recover faster than ecosystems.
Stephen Lezak is a researcher at the University of Oxford and the University of California, Berkeley, who studies the politics of climate change.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
The post MAGA Elites Are Indoor Cats appeared first on New York Times.
