\n \u201cI started laughing,\u201d Noem recalled in a 2018 interview<\/a> with the Argus Leader. \u201cHe wasn\u2019t laughing, so he was totally serious. \u2026 I said, \u2018Come pick out a mountain.\u2019\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n Though the president has spent much of his second term taking steps to impose his style and tastes on architecture in the nation\u2019s capital and even has an airport now named after him in Florida, the buck might just stop in South Dakota. He would quite literally need to pick out another mountain \u2014 it\u2019s structurally not possible to add a fifth face to the storied monument.\n <\/p>\n \n Mount Rushmore sculptor Gutzon Borglum wrote in 1936 that the stone had \u201cserious\u201d limitations.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cI doubt if it would be possible to change the composition, which is fixed, in any way to include a fifth head,\u201d Borglum said<\/a>.\n <\/p>\n \n Nevertheless, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, who oversees the National Park Service, said<\/a> during an interview that there is \u201ccertainly\u201d room for Trump\u2019s face. And Trump ally Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, a Florida Republican, has introduced legislation that would arrange the carving, which she said<\/a> would \u201creflect his towering legacy.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n The bill<\/a> is currently stalled, and her office did not respond to CNN\u2019s request for comment on whether Friday\u2019s trip will prompt a renewed push for passage. The legislation has little to no chance at clearing the Senate, where it would need Democratic votes.\n <\/p>\n \n With or without a Trump visage, the president is returning to the national park \u2014 participating in a flyover, delivering remarks and watching a fireworks show celebrating the country\u2019s 250th anniversary \u2014 in a vastly different climate from his 2020 visit.\n <\/p>\n \n Six years ago, Trump visited Keystone, South Dakota, at a moment of crisis. The country was in a worsening<\/a> global pandemic with no vaccine as officials feared a surge in cases around the holiday weekend. And culture wars were raging, with protests<\/a> over racial divides breaking out across the country after the death of George Floyd.\n <\/p>\n \n Trump\u2019s Rushmore speech to a crowd of thousands briefly referenced Covid-19, thanking the first responders and scientists \u201cworking tirelessly to kill the virus.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n But it took a dark and divisive turn as he railed against cancel culture, which he described as a \u201cpolitical weapon\u201d and \u201cthe very definition of totalitarianism,\u201d coming at a moment when protesters were tearing down statues<\/a> from Confederate monuments and other controversial historical figures.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cOur nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children,\u201d Trump told a crowd of thousands on a red, white and blue-decorated stage in front of the iconic carving.\n <\/p>\n \n He continued: \u201cAngry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our founders, deface our most sacred memorials, and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n Much of that 2020 speech centered on remembering the country\u2019s past and casting it in a glorious light, and Trump repeatedly decried attempts to examine the faults in that past (a fact made more ironic by Mount Rushmore\u2019s sculptor\u2019s ties<\/a> to the Ku Klux Klan). Trump made that message a hallmark of his 2020 and 2024 presidential campaigns. Shifting public sentiment on the issue, in part, helped propel him to victory in 2024, setting the stage for an aggressive cultural agenda<\/a> in his second term.\n <\/p>\n \n It was also under the watchful eyes of Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln in 2020 that Trump first announced plans for a \u201cGarden of American Heroes,\u201d a sculpture garden honoring figures from the past.\n <\/p>\n \n The president signed an executive order to establish the garden, which was quickly rescinded during the Biden administration and then re-instituted in 2025. The project has a plot of land in West Potomac Park in Washington, DC, but none of its sculptures have been completed<\/a>.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"President Donald Trump returns to Mount Rushmore on Friday, and though the president has openly mused about adding…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":740875,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,3,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":["post-740874","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-news","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/740874","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=740874"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/740874\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/740875"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=740874"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=740874"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=740874"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"President](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/gettyimages-2284214524.jpg\")
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