In Support of Mount Trump-More:

When the Damage is Already Done

By: Danél Griffin

On January 28, 2025, eight days after Donald Trump was sworn in as United States President for his second term, MAGA’s feverish devotion to him was at its absolute peak – resulting in some proposed bills from his most devout elected followers that in any other scenario would play more like satire than serious propositions. Consider Tennessee Rep. Andy Ogles’s floating of a constitutional amendment to let presidents serve a third term – so long as their first two weren’t consecutive, a loophole transparently designed for Trump alone.

Meanwhile, Republicans in both Minnesota and Washington tried to medicalize political opposition by introducing bills declaring “Trump Derangement Syndrome” a bona fide mental illness, with one proposal even tasking the NIH to study and report on it annually. While most presidents worry about infrastructure or budgets, Trump’s allies kicked off his return to power by legislating his legacy – and his critics’ sanity.

And let’s not forget Trump’s tongue-in-cheek comment that he’d like to be elected pope after Francis’s death on April 21 of this year. Following Trump's comments, South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham posted on X, calling Trump a "dark horse" candidate for the papacy and asking the conclave and Catholic faithful to "keep an open mind about this possibility." Trump made good on Graham’s widely retweeted idea by posting an AI-generated picture of himself as the Pope onto his TruthSocial account – a sort of kidding/not kidding troll in line with the Trump 2028 hats currently selling out on his online store.

But despite these suggestions already sounding like headlines from The Onion (as with most things coming out of this administration), it was Florida Republican Rep. Anna Paulina Luna who really took the cake when she introduced H.R. 792, a bill directing the Secretary of the Interior to have President Donald J. Trump carved onto Mount Rushmore – joining Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt. The memorial, of course, wasn’t built with extra elbow room, making the proposal more theatrical than practical – but it does underscore just how quickly some lawmakers are trying to inscribe Trump into American iconography.

Luna’s proposal was almost exclusively dismissed as ludicrous, even among ardent Trump supporters (except, perhaps, on Newsmax) – primarily for its impracticality. Many of those suffering Trump Derangement Syndrome, meanwhile, were outraged that anyone would even suggest that Trump’s face deserved a spot on the sacred monument celebrating American presidents far more worthy of permanent engraving. Rushmore becoming Trump-more? How dare we thus tarnish the faces of our Founding Fathers and greatest leaders!

But hear me out: Trump’s face on Mount Rushmore actually tracks. I’d argue that he belongs up there just as much as the others do. His inclusion is, in fact, a rather perfect summation of that mountain’s white supremacist history for as long as it has had a white name – a name intended to erase the mountain’s Indigenous identity. Donald Trump’s face joining the others isn’t an upset but rather a grand epoch of what those faces represent.

I shall make my case by presenting a brief history of Mount Rushmore – all of which is verifiable and a matter of public record. Before it was a monument to presidential power, the granite cliff in the Black Hills of South Dakota was known to the Lakota people as The Six Grandfathers – a spiritual formation representing the four cardinal directions, the earth, and the sky. For centuries, it was part of the sacred geography of the Lakota, a people who understood land not as property but as kin, woven into the cosmology of prayer, ceremony, and identity. That sacredness was violated when the United States seized the Black Hills in 1877, an act that the Supreme Court later admitted was illegal but never repaired. The violation was motivated by greed: gold had been discovered, and the federal government chose profit over treaty. Six Grandfathers was subsequently renamed after Charles E. Rushmore, a (white, of course) New York attorney who visited the Black Hills in 1885 to inspect mining claims.

The violence that followed was not incidental. In 1875, President Ulysses S. Grant secretly ordered the U.S. Army to stop protecting Native nations who still roamed the Hills. This green-lit an extermination campaign in which bounty hunters were paid up to $300 per Lakota person killed – a staggering sum in its day, and one that made genocide a profitable industry. What had once been a mountain of prayer became a stage for bloodletting, a place where the federal government sanctified the idea that Indigenous lives were expendable when white wealth was at stake.

Half a century later, in the 1920s, South Dakota boosters sought a tourist attraction to draw money into the state. The project of carving presidential faces into the mountain was conceived as a celebration of “American greatness.” Yet the choice of Mount Rushmore – a stolen mountain in illegally seized land – ensured that the monument would function as a shrine to conquest. The sculptor chosen for the task, Gutzon Borglum, was not simply a man of artistic ambition. He was deeply enmeshed with the Ku Klux Klan, who had financed his earlier work on Stone Mountain, Georgia – a Confederate monument. Borglum’s ties to the Klan were ideological as well as financial: he shared their devotion to white supremacy and saw monumental art as a way to enshrine it in stone. The carving of Rushmore, therefore, was never a neutral act of patriotism; it was an extension of the racial violence that had already defined the Black Hills.

The monument, as we all know from postcards if not direct tourist visits, depicts four presidents, each selected to represent a supposed epoch of national progress. Read left to right, however, they form a clear genealogy of white supremacy.

George Washington: Celebrated as the “Father of the Nation,” he also fathered an economy built on slavery. Washington enslaved hundreds, pursued fugitive slaves across state lines, and only freed them in his will when he no longer needed their labor. He represents the foundational contradiction of America: liberty for some, bondage for others.

Thomas Jefferson: The author of the Declaration of Independence, he declared that “all men are created equal” while enslaving over 600 people in his lifetime. Jefferson fathered children with Sally Hemings, a woman he legally owned, and he envisioned an “empire of liberty” that in practice meant the displacement of Indigenous peoples. His presence on Rushmore enshrines the hypocrisy of Enlightenment ideals turned into tools of conquest.

Abraham Lincoln: Remembered as the Great Emancipator, his actual record is more complicated. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation freed only those enslaved in Confederate territory; border states loyal to the Union remained slaveholding. More damning for the Lakota, Lincoln approved the mass execution of 38 Dakota men in 1862 – the largest mass hanging in U.S. history – after the Dakota uprising, which had been triggered by starvation and broken treaties. On Rushmore, his face represents not liberation but the expansion of federal power at the direct expense of Native life. You’re also not likely to hear his 1858 quote in any Spielberg-directed biopics: “I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races.”

Theodore Roosevelt: The self-styled progressive was also an unapologetic imperialist who championed the conquest of Indigenous land and overseas territories alike. Building off of General Sherman’s declaration that “the only good Indian is a dead Indian,” Roosevelt once elaborated, “I don't go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn't like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.” Meanwhile, he celebrated war as a purifying force for white manhood, overseeing the violent assimilation of Native peoples into boarding schools and justifying empire abroad by the same logic that had governed genocide at home. His inclusion on the mountain was not incidental but definitive: Roosevelt embodied the white supremacist nationalism that Rushmore was carved to glorify.

Taken together, the four faces narrate a history of conquest disguised as progress. Washington lays the foundation of slavery; Jefferson expands the empire through theft of land; Lincoln consolidates power through selective emancipation and Indigenous execution; Roosevelt projects white supremacy onto the world stage. Their granite visages tower over the Black Hills as if to remind the Lakota that the violence that stole their land has been chiseled into permanence.

Considering Donald Trump’s relationship with white supremacy, I propose that he’d fit right in with that crowd and the genocidal history that the mountain continues to represent. Just look back to 2016, when white nationalist figures like David Duke openly endorsed his campaign – prompting Trump to say he was “ignorant” of Duke’s support, only to promptly “disavow (…) on numerous occasions over the years.” But when violent racially charged events like Charlottesville erupted in 2017, Trump muddied the waters by condemning “hate on many sides” before belatedly naming white supremacists – a pattern critics saw as emboldening extremist movements under the guise of ambiguity, rather than repudiating them outright.

Fast-forward to 2025, and Trump has his red pen aimed at the Smithsonian. Through his March 31 executive order Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, he set in motion a top-to-bottom review of Smithsonian exhibits, commanding removal of “improper ideology” and “divisive” language. Riding that wave, he declared on Truth Social that the Smithsonian is “OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was,” complaining that exhibits lack any sense of “Success,” “Brightness,” or “the Future.” “This Country cannot be WOKE, because WOKE IS BROKE,” he warned, instructing attorneys to scour through museums just as they did with universities.

In other words, Trump is basically doing to America’s white supremacist history what the United States government did to the Six Grandfathers: Erase it in favor of a version that better serves and soothes white people. He has thus become the champion and advocate of every face carved into that stone. And since the damage is already done, adding his face actually feels appropriate. It reminds those of us Americans living in what bodies that (in the words of John Quincy Adams) who we are is who we were.

Yet even with his face added, permanence is an illusion. Stone erodes. Nations collapse. What remains is memory – and the memory of Mount Rushmore is contested. For the Lakota, the Six Grandfathers are still there, beneath the scar, waiting for recognition. For the United States, the monument is a mirror held up to a history it prefers not to see: a nation willing to desecrate the sacred, to murder for profit, to carve its heroes onto the face of a stolen mountain while pretending that stone is synonymous with truth.

Mount Rushmore, then, is not simply a tourist destination. It is an altar to white supremacy, erected with stolen money on stolen land, sanctified by presidents who each advanced the project of conquest. To stand before it with uncritical awe is to accept that history. To name its history honestly is to chip away at the lie that stone was meant to preserve. I therefore say that we erect Trump’s face, so that it may ultimately crumble with the faces of those who paved his path. In doing so, we would sculpt the most backhandedly honest admission that white Americans could possibly make about ourselves.

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“It is the starting point in our recovery.”

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