Trump Doesn’t Walk in Our Parks, He Strip Mines Them

President Trump is not content with gutting the national parks service. After slashing its staff and budget, and opening up tracts of public land to mining and logging activities, the administration has spent the past year trying to open a quarter-mile strip of Yosemite National Park to an access road connecting Yosemite’s main routes to 83 acres owned by Nevada-based company Kingsbarn Realty Capital. The plan, first reported by NOTUS on Aug. 28, is potentially very lucrative for Kingsbarn, which is leaning toward building a resort on its land. 

The previous owner of the property, historically known as Hazel Green Ranch, sold it to Kingsbarn in 2024 after trying and failing to win approval for a connector road during the George W. Bush and Obama administrations. According to NOTUS, Kingsbarn CEO Jeff Pori began donating to “political campaign efforts” in October of 2024, including contributions to “the Republican Party committee, Trump’s campaign committee and associated PACs.” 

Yosemite Valley is a crown jewel of the National Parks system; its giant sequoias served as an inspiration for the idea of national parks under Abraham Lincoln. As Rebecca Solnit explained in a piece about Trump’s assault on public lands, breaking up, privatizing and otherwise allowing access to public lands like Yosemite — by sale, mining contracts or grazing allotments — degrades and threatens everything the park system was intended to safeguard as a trust shared by all Americans. Public lands, Solnit writes,

belong to all of us, a gift from the past because people worked hard to protect these forests, mountains, canyons, and a trust for the future, because the public should include everyone in this country alive now and everyone yet to come.

The Trump administration’s ruthless efforts to turn over public lands for mining and logging and fossil fuel exploitation while it also dismantles the US Forest Service and National Park Service is about turning long-term wellbeing for the many, human and more than human, into short-term profit for an elite.

These public lands have many kinds of value — the trees and grasslands are sequestering carbon as part of a natural climate amelioration, the mountains are watersheds, and most of these natural places now are key to rural tourism and outdoor recreation economies.

Plundering Yosemite so that a Trump crony can build a resort is almost too on-brand for this administration, but Trump Inc. has proven incapable of walking past an opportunity to enrich itself. Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner are trying to develop a resort on an Albanian island despite massive protests. Kushner presented Gaza redevelopment plans at Davos. Trump himself has been using national park service funds to bankroll his own pet “beautification” projects, “including gilding statues and the incompetent $16 million painting of the reflecting pool,” as Solnit points out in her column. Altogether, some $90 million in parks revenue has been diverted to Trump projects in Washington D.C., even as the National Parks Service tallies a repair backlog currently at more than $24 billion, according to PBS Newshour. 

There has been some pushback, here and there, by the courts. In June, a judge overturned a Trump executive order requiring that national parks remove all signs, exhibits and films that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.” While she ordered the administration to submit progress reports on its work returning the signs, and blocked further removals, the fight over public education at America’s national parks rages on. 

But it’s not clear how many people will even be around to greet visitors in the near future — in Yosemite or any of the other 62 national parks. Tiernan Sittenfeld, the president and CEO of the National Parks Conservation Association, told PBS NewsHour:

The 25 percent [DOGE] cut to National Park Service staff in the last year-and-a-half is having devastating impacts. Those are not just numbers on a spreadsheet. These are dedicated public servants who go to work every day to keep our parks running safely for visitors, for wildlife, for the future… And the visitor experience has already been diminished, whether it’s the long lines that we’re seeing to get into some of the most visited parks, whether it’s fewer Ranger programs, or whether it’s shorter visitor service hours. 

To learn more about the history of national parks, and how to get involved in the movement to protect them, visit the Campaign for National Parks.