President Donald Trump has mused in the past about joining the likes of Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln on the iconic Mount Rushmore.
While the president himself hasn’t made an effort to alter the historic memorial to include his likeness, his supporters have, including Florida congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna, who is sponsoring legislation that would order that the president’s bust be carved in. And Interior Secretary Doug Burgum this year suggested in an interview with Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law, that there was room on the national memorial for an additional face.
Putting aside the question of whether it is physically possible to carve Trump’s face into Mount Rushmore, the president would likely need congressional approval to make any changes to the site, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, according to Jeremy R. Paul, a professor of law and former dean of the Northeastern University School of Law.
On top of that, Trump could face lawsuits from stakeholders, such as tribal nations or environmental groups, that would have to play out in court before any alterations could proceed, Paul says.
Tribal nations and indigenous groups in particular would have strong legal grounds to challenge such a proposal. Mount Rushmore is located in the Black Hills region of South Dakota, land considered sacred to the Lakota Sioux. In 1980, the Supreme Court ruled that the U.S. government had illegally taken the Black Hills from the Lakota people.
Commissioned by Congress in 1925, construction on Mount Rushmore began in the late 1920s under the direction of sculptor Gutzon Borglum. The National Park Service took over the project in 1933. It was completed in 1941. Lincoln Borglum, Gutzon’s son, helped oversee the completion of Mount Rushmore as its first superintendent.
Robin Borglum Kennedy, the daughter of Lincoln Borglum, told the New York Times that she is deeply opposed to any changes to the memorial.
“It was conceived as a tribute to the ideals of America, not to any one man,” she told the Times.
But if Luna’s bill were to pass — as unlikely as that may be — there are still procedural hurdles to an administration-directed carving of Trump’s face on Mount Rushmore, including environmental and stakeholder reviews stipulated by the National Environmental Policy Act and the National Historic Preservation Act.
“The National Park Service is the starting point for anything Trump might want to do with Mount Rushmore, and the service reports to the secretary of the Interior,” Paul says.
Should the administration move forward with such a plan, it would represent a break with Department of Interior’s own preservation standards for the treatment of historic places, which states that any work should focus on “the ongoing maintenance and repair of historic materials and features rather than extensive replacement and new construction.”
And, geologically speaking, the effort may not even be feasible, as the Times documents at length. The National Park Service has said that there is no more room on the mountain for another carving, noting in a statement: “The carved portion of Mount Rushmore has been thoroughly evaluated, and there are no viable locations left for additional carvings,” according to the Times.
“If there truly is no room, then the whole question is moot,” Paul says. “That would put an end to this.”
There have been legislative efforts to enshrine deeper protections for memorials like Mount Rushmore. In 2023, South Dakota Rep. Dusty Johnson introduced a bill called the “Mount Rushmore Protection Act” that would prohibit “any federal funds to alter, change, destroy, or remove any name, face or other feature on the Mount Rushmore.” The National Park Service opposed the bill on the grounds that it might make it harder for the agency to properly care for the memorial.
More recently, Trump has been eyeing a nearby site in the Black Hills to establish a park called the “National Garden of American Heroes,” an effort that indigenous groups in South Dakota are presently opposing.