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Saturday, July 12, 2025
Trump officials scour national park gift shops for ‘corrosive ideology’ (Jake Spring, Hannah Natanson & Anusha Mathur, WaPo, July 12, 2025)
DONALD JOHN TRUMP's mentor was the angry ambitious louche lawyer ROY MARCUS COHN, who was red-baiting lying histrionic Wisconsin Senator JOSEPH R. McCARTHY's arachnid apparatchik. COHN was a closeted self-hating Gay man and a tortious termagant twisted lawyer for NYC organized crime families. Represented by ROY MARCUS COHN, DONALD TRUMP and his father, FRED TRUMP filed a bogus $100,000,000 lawsuit against the Nixon-era Justice Department when DOJ sued the TRUMPS for housing discrimination against African-Americans and Jews in NYC rental housing. Is the NPS order typical Trumpery, flummery, dupery and nincompoopery -- all hate and no substance, all hat and no cattle? Sick abuse of power in our National Parks and Seashores? You tell me. From The Washington Post:
Trump officials scour national park gift shops for ‘corrosive ideology’
The National Park Service’s directive is part of a wider Trump administration effort to reshape how American history is told at federal institutions.
Ranger dolls for sale at a gift shop in Grand Canyon National Park. (Brandon Bell/Getty Images)
Trump officials have directed staff at national parks to review all items in gift shops for anti-American content, according to an internal directive reviewed by The Washington Post. The move is part of the administration’s wider campaign to scrub federal institutions of “corrosive ideology” recognizing historic racism and sexism.
The directive instructs park staff to report by Friday any retail items that have content that “inappropriately disparages Americans past or living” or that includes “matters unrelated to the beauty, abundance or grandeur” of a natural feature in its description.
President Donald Trump issued an executive order in March seeking to reshape how American history is told at federal institutions including parks and the Smithsonian museums, blaming former president Joe Biden for casting historic U.S. milestones in a negative light. That order spurred an initiative asking national park visitors to report anti-American signs, which instead drew positive comments in support of the parks and criticisms of Trump officials for staff and budgetcuts, according to a Post review of leaked comments.
Park advocacy groups say they are concerned that the Trump administration is attempting to sanitize American history.
Follow Trump’s second term
“It’d be a shame to pull an actual historical accounting and a well-researched book off the shelves,” said Kristen Brengel, senior vice president of government affairs at the National Parks Conservation Association, an advocacy group.
The National Park Service said in a statement that it was acting in line with a directive by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to implement Trump’s executive order, which also applies to park associations and concession operators.
“We’re working closely with them to facilitate an efficient review that does not hinder or impede retail operations,” the Park Service said.
Brengel said park leaders face a choice of following the administration’s directive to flag everything that could possibly be deemed anti-American or following an individual park’s mission, which may be to inform the public about the civil war, Indigenous history, slavery or other topics this administration might consider defamatory of historical Americans.
“Will this result in the book stores just selling coffee table picture books? I don’t know,” she said.
She said the directive adds to the workload of parks that are already severely understaffed after the administration fired hundreds of employees and cut funding. “There is no park that can read every book on the book shelves in this time frame,” Brengel said.
National park gift shops are generally run by the staffs of “cooperating associations,” nonprofit groups that essentially adopt individual parks, but the Park Service has control over what is sold there.
Western National Parks, one of the largest such associations, is aware of the directive and will cooperate with park staff on it, spokesperson Julie Thompson said.
“Nothing has been dramatically impacted in terms of what we’re carrying on our shelves,” Thompson said.
She said she has seen no evidence that the interpretive missions of the parks, which are generally stipulated when they are established, have been affected.
“If we have a park that’s telling a difficult-to-hear story but that story is part of history, there’s been no attempt to change that story,” Thompson said.
Sarah Rank, business manager of the Mesa Verde Association, a nonprofit that supports Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado, said she had received no directives from the Park Service related to the shop.
“I’m not worried about it, because Mesa Verde National Park preserves the cultural history and landscape of the Ancestral Pueblo people and the descendant communities and Indigenous tribes affiliated with this place,” Rank said. “You can’t separate the connection.”
The policing effort comes after the related directive to post signs at all parks requesting that visitors report anti-American content.
Thompson and Brengel said the responses received through that initiative have been overwhelmingly supportive of the parks.
Since the Park Service debuted its comment-seeking initiative, it has received at least 1,700 comments from Americans visiting forests, mountains and historic battle sites across the country, according to a spreadsheet obtained by The Post. In some instances, the spreadsheet noted responses from park staffers.
The remarks are a mix of praise for the nation’s beautiful parks and knowledgeable staff, combined with laments that the Trump administration seems determined to slash employees and budgets. Hundreds of commenters took particular issue with a Trump directive seeking to root out national park signs that are “negative about either past or living Americans.”
“The signs are great! The rangers are great. They make me proud to be an” American, someone wrote while visiting Washington’s Mount Rainier National Park in June. “I’m confused why you’re worried about a volcano having signs that portray Americans negatively. … It seems a bit overdone at a geology park.”
The commenter added: “Also if an American did something negative in the past, why shouldn’t a NPS site discuss it? History isn’t just a collection of the good stories. It’s the good and the bad.”
Many other visitors steered away from politics to make more concrete complaints.
“Needs more restroom for public,” someone wrote while visiting Abraham Lincoln’s birthplace in June.
“The walkway wasnt easy bc there was a bunch of marsh in the way,” someone wrote while visiting Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve that same month.
Others flagged problems that are likely to fall outside the capabilities of park staff to fix.
“The glacier that is the park’s namesake is retreating at an alarming rate,” a visitor wrote about Glacier National Park in Montana. “Please do something substantial about climate change so my grandchildren will be able to see a pure, white sheet of ice like our grandparents did.”
A number of people visiting the White House took the opportunity to criticize Trump’s decision to pave over the Rose Garden.
“REPAIR THE ROSE GARDEN,” one person wrote.
“Hey someone got rid of Mrs. Kennedy’s rose garden. ****?” another wrote. “It was super nice looking and now looks like the grassy area at the local Hilton. Ew.”
In most cases, park staff responded to submissions by noting simply: “Park acknowledges, no action required.” Sometimes, when the commenter offered praise for an employee, park staff wrote of planning to pass the compliment along. Occasionally, comments were converted to maintenance requests — for example, when someone flagged an unclean restroom at Ohio’s Cuyahoga Valley National Park in June and when someone flagged a downed tree on the Lewis Spring Falls Trail within Shenandoah National Park in Virginia that same month.
When someone who visited the Padre Island National Seashore in Texas in late June wrote to “express concern about the limited and inaccurate representation of the Karankawa people in the current exhibits,” park staff labeled the feedback as “flagged for review,” the spreadsheet shows.
In other instances, park staff wrote responses to what visitors had shared.
“The new interpretive signs and displays are great. In addition to plants and animals, we learned about the native Americans and the long history in this country that makes us great,” wrote a visitor to Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve in Colorado. “... It makes [me] feel patriotic and love my country more.”
A staffer wrote back: “Positive comments like this underscore the value of these places, and of the interpretive messages that we are relaying, to the public.”
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