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The writer is author of ‘A Biography of a Mountain: The Making and Meaning of Mount Rushmore’
In the 100-year history of the Mount Rushmore National Memorial, Donald Trump is the only US president who has spoken there twice. His speeches, given six years apart to celebrate Independence Day, used it as a backdrop to offer his vision of American history and exceptionalism.
The sculpture of four presidents carved into the billion-year-old granite of South Dakota’s Black Hills has become a symbol of President Trump’s America. If the Make America Great Again movement had a totem, it could certainly be Mount Rushmore. Though there is not the space, Trump has repeatedly raised the idea of adding his own face.
But it is also a deeply contested site, carved into land sacred to the Lakota Nation and guaranteed as their territory under an 1868 treaty with the US.
Trump’s embrace of the memorial is only the latest iteration of its meaning, which has been cast as everything from a “shrine of democracy” to a symbol of freedom to a representation of genocide and place of protest.
With each evolution, Rushmore has continued to claim the status of “national” memorial. But after Trump’s second speech, it is becoming more closely identified with just one narrative, weakening its potential to reflect America’s complicated history.
Despite its political associations, Mount Rushmore was conceived as an economic project. South Dakota’s commodities markets had collapsed in the 1920s. Seeking to diversify the economy, state historian Doane Robinson originally proposed a carving of figures associated with the American West — Lakota leader Red Cloud, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, who led an expedition to explore the American West, and Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer.
Robinson hoped to attract tourists and boost the state economy. Yet when he hired sculptor Gutzon Borglum, Rushmore transformed from an economic to a political project.
Borglum was a talented sculptor with a huge ego and controversial politics. He had come to South Dakota after working as lead sculptor of the Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial outside Atlanta. The Ku Klux Klan had been re-founded at Stone Mountain in November 1915, and Borglum’s work and politics were deeply enmeshed with the organisation.
In early 1925, however, the Klan fired Borglum because of money disputes. Six months later, on October 1, he stood on Mount Rushmore for its initial dedication, devoting it to the idea of American empire. Borglum wanted his work to be a homage to American expansion, believing the US political system to be the apotheosis of western civilisation.
It is this meaning of Mount Rushmore that Trump responds to: the righteousness of “manifest destiny” and the American political project. Both of his speeches at the site presented a sanitised version of American history that reflects this vision. Every country has monuments devoted to patriotism and our idealised selves. But where these are placed is often just as important as what they represent, and Trump’s speeches have ignored the fraught history of the Black Hills.
The Lakota call the Black Hills “the heart of everything that is”, reflecting their centrality to Lakota cosmology and identity. The Lakota believe that nearby Wind Cave is the site of their emergence into the world, and the Black Hills are full of places with spiritual and historical resonance.
But they are also central to Lakota politics. The 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, signed between the US and the Lakota Nation, gave present-day western South Dakota, including the Black Hills, to the Lakota. The treaty was violently broken less than a decade later, with the US seizing the hills following the discovery of gold there in 1874 and the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876.
This launched a devastating period for the Lakota: the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890, the theft of land and creation of reservations, the creation of boarding schools and attempted eradication of their culture and identity. All of this took place in the shadow of Mount Rushmore, and the Black Hills remain central to Lakota demands that their stolen land be returned. This history, the dark side of American expansion and exceptionalism, went unacknowledged in Trump’s two speeches.
It may seem Mount Rushmore has come full circle, from Borglum’s initial dedication in 1925 to Trump in 2026, but what monuments represent is rarely static. What seems a symbol of Trump’s America as it celebrates 250 years since the Declaration of Independence may mean something entirely different at the 300th anniversary.
