The Trump Team Lies To The Public About Utah National Monuments

"You can virtually not even walk on it," Trump falsely claimed before slashing nearly 3 million acres from Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante.

Interior Deputy Secretary Kate MacGregor (right) speaks at an event Monday where President Donald Trump signed a pair of proclamations to slash the boundaries of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments by approximately 90%. Photo credit: White House, Youtube

Back in May, two of our Public Domain crew — myself and Roque Planas — spent a few days bouncing around Bears Ears National Monument in southern Utah. We camped in the Valley of the Gods. We hiked to an ancient ruin known as The Citadel, a defensive fortress that sits atop a remote rock peninsula along a deep canyon. We explored, cooked food under the stars, laughed and talked about the fight for the future of America’s public lands.

No one bothered us or interrupted that freedom.

Then on Monday, I watched President Donald Trump and his team tell a room full of reporters at the White House that all of the activities I had just enjoyed in Bears Ears were “virtually” impossible because the monument designation shut down recreation on the landscape.

“You can’t do anything,” Trump said before signing a pair of proclamations to again dismantle the boundaries of Bears Ears and nearby Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. “You can’t go hunting, you can’t go fishing, you can’t do anything, you can virtually not even walk on it.”

Those claims were totally false. But instead of correcting her boss, Interior Deputy Secretary Kate MacGregor backed him up.

“That’s exactly right, sir,” she said. “You are remedying that today.”

The Trump administration has a long history of lying and cherry picking data to advance its narrative about previous presidents purportedly abusing the Antiquities Act to designate large national monuments and lock people out.

But this was a different level of dishonesty. As they spoke, a giddy-looking Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), who spent his career advocating for the disposal of federal public lands, smiled in the background.

Hunting and fishing, nevermind walking, are explicitly permitted in both Utah monuments. One needs to look no further than the presidential proclamations that established the sites or, in the case of hunting, Utah’s own hunting regulations, which note: “All of Utah’s national parks and monuments — except the Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments — are closed to hunting.”

Despite MacGregor’s assertion, Trump didn’t “remedy” anything here. In fact, opening the landscapes to potential mining, drilling and other extractive development — the primary motivations for Monday’s rollbacks — could negatively impact hunting, fishing and outdoor recreation opportunities. After all, you won’t find many people flocking to a coal or uranium mine for their hunting, fishing or hiking adventures.

The Interior Department did not respond to Public Domain’s request for comment Tuesday.

During a press call Tuesday morning, Rep. Gabe Vasquez (D-N.M.) reflected on a recent turkey hunt he went on in Bears Ears and argued Trump’s rollbacks will hurt the outdoor recreation economy in rural Utah.

“Public lands are an economic engine, and it’s a sustainable engine,” he said. “Outdoor recreation, tourism, hunting and fishing support rural communities.”

Asked about the administration’s false claims about hunting, fishing and recreational access in the monuments, Autumn Gillard, coordinator of the Grand Staircase-Escalante Inter-Tribal Coalition, called it disappointing.

“There was no consultation initiated with the tribes on this issue,” Gillard told reporters. “If Utah leadership felt that their constituents were not being able to access this national monument in the way that they thought was applicable, then a conversation of mitigation should have been held with tribal nations so that we could have worked together to help mediate this issue. Statistics and data proves in the past that Utahns were accessing this monument, are still accessing it, and are in favor of maintaining the protection and preservation of the landscape found within Grand Staircase.”

At Monday’s signing ceremony, the Trump administration and allied Utah Republicans also resurrected another bogus claim about national monuments: that early monuments were small and that the Antiquities Act has been abused to safeguard large landscapes.

“The Antiquities Act is 120 years old, but the first monument that was created was only 1,200 acres,” MacGregor said at the signing event. “So if you think about it, since then, President Clinton, President Obama and President Biden have increased the acreage in the state of Utah and locked those acres up.”

Lee later chimed in to argue that the Antiquities Act was initially intended to protect “a few hundred, maybe a thousand or two [thousand], acres at the most.”

What MacGregor, Lee and others refuse to acknowledge is that presidents of both parties have consistently used the Antiquities Act, which President Theodore Roosevelt signed into law in 1906, to protect large areas as national monuments. In 1908, Roosevelt designated more than 800,000 acres of the Grand Canyon as a national monument — the precursor to what is now Grand Canyon National Park. Similarly, in 1909, Roosevelt designated 610,000 acres as Mount Olympus National Monument. It became Olympic National Park in 1938.

Trump’s proclamations on Monday strip a combined 2.9 million acres from monument protection, with the boundaries of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante each being cut approximately 90%. It is the largest rollback of public land protections in American history — significantly larger than Trump’s attack on the two monuments back in 2017.

On Monday, Trump boasted that his latest rollback “is better than the first time.”

“We’ve done something that was, I think, very desperately needed,” Trump said, adding that the monument designations were “very unfair to the people of Utah.”

In reality, more than 70% of Utah voters support keeping Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante as national monuments, according to a recent survey.

Aaron Weiss, executive director of the Center for Western Priorities, said in a statement after Trump’s proclamation signing that while Trump may have little understanding of the issue, MacGregor knows better. MacGregor is a veteran of the first Trump administration who between stints at Interior worked as an executive at energy giant NextEra Energy.

“Giving the president documents to sign based on false information is unconscionable,” Weiss said. “If she’s going to take over running America’s public lands while Doug Burgum plays pool boy, the least she can do is be honest with the president and the American people.”

Monday’s obliteration of the two national monuments came on the heels of Trump delivering a speech at the new Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in North Dakota, during which he compared himself to America’s conservation president.