A club too exclusive for Trump — or anyone else who applies.
People have long wanted to add presidents to Mount Rushmore.
But there’s two big reasons that’s unlikely, if not impossible.
GREENWIRE | Even in the years before work on the Mount Rushmore National Memorial finally wrapped up in late 1941, the requests rolled in from Congress: What about adding a fifth face to the massive sculpture being carved with dynamite in the Black Hills of South Dakota? Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor creating the memorial with scores of workers — who at the time had completed George Washington’s visage and were nearly finished with Thomas Jefferson’s face — offered a resounding “No.”
But the artist’s answer has never quite penetrated the American imagination, and nearly 100 years after drilling began, proposals to add to the sculpture keep coming. Now at least one congressional lawmaker is calling for President Donald Trump’s countenance to join the other 60-foot-tall faces, an effort that longtime memorial advocates say is unlikely to succeed for reasons both artistic and practical. “People have personal heroes who they would like to see memorialized or commemorated. This is obviously a place where you can do that on a huge scale,” said David Barna, who spent a decade as the National Park Service’s spokesperson. Barna said these requests must be denied because of two basic facts. “They’re not aware of the two issues, one of which is the rock itself,” said Barna, referring to the structural integrity of the site. There isn’t sufficiently stable rock that could be carved without putting the rest of the memorial at risk of damage.
Even Borglum himself had to pare back plans to sculpt the shoulders of the four presidents — Washington, Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt — as work progressed over 14 years. The other impediment, one repeatedly cited by NPS officials over the years, is that Mount Rushmore is a completed work of art. “Adding an additional face to an existing piece of art is just not what the artist had in their own conception,” said Barna, who also worked as a geologist for the U.S. Bureau of Mines, Energy Department and Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
‘A brief, definite statement’
During his first term, Trump made clear he would embrace the idea of joining four of his predecessors on Mount Rushmore. A week into Trump’s second term, Florida Republican Rep. Anna Paulina Luna introduced H.R. 792, a bill to direct the Interior Department secretary to do just that. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum himself has suggested it is possible, saying in a Fox News interview with Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law, that “they certainly have room for it there.”
The artist, however, had a different conception of his work, fending off would-be editors of the in-progress piece and forcefully articulating the ideas behind the chosen presidents. In a 1936 letter to then-first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, Borglum explained that “the sole purpose of the memorial [is] to create on a mountain a brief, definite statement of the conception, the founding, growth and the preservation of the union.” Only Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt would be chiseled into granite with dynamite and jackhammers, he insisted. “The stone limitations are so serious, that I doubt if it would be possible to change the composition, which is fixed, in any way to include a fifth head,” he added. Borglum was responding to the first lady’s request to add women’s rights activist and suffragist Susan B. Anthony to the memorial, noting that he had been similarly lobbied by others, including a bipartisan pair of senators. Kansas Republican Sen. Arthur Capper and New York Democratic Sen. Royal Copeland wrote a bill that same year to add Anthony’s “head and figure” to the memorial. “If Mount Rushmore were simply a gallery of the immortals, I would have selected a mountain range that would have admitted twice as many of our great outside of politics, who have given more, who services will endure longer than the bulk of our official world,” Borglum wrote, noting he would have opted to include Benjamin Franklin, Nebraska Republican Sen. George Norris and President Woodrow Wilson, among other unnamed inventors, “men of letters” and artists. But the failed campaign to add Anthony would not deter others. In 1960, New York Republican Sen. Kenneth Keating proposed adding both then-President Dwight Eisenhower and former President Franklin D. Roosevelt to the monument, the Associated Press reported at the time. Later, many advocates would seek to add former President Ronald Reagan to Mount Rushmore, beginning after he departed the White House in 1989 and again following his death in 2004.
Former California Republican Rep. Doug Ose led the campaign for Reagan’s posthumous recognition, telling the Sacramento Bee: “The president who finished the Cold War should be recognized. This would be an appropriate recognition.” The legislation ultimately stalled out in the House. In between the campaigns for Reagan, Barna said he even once fielded inquiries about a push to add the late singer Elvis Presley to the memorial. That short-lived effort appeared to have been sparked by a Los Angeles radio station DJ, who proposed the idea on air in 1991. Not all celebrated Borglum’s work — never mind wanting to see it expanded. The Lakota Sioux know the site where Mount Rushmore was carved as the Tȟuŋkášila Šákpe or “Six Grandfathers” and, along with other Native American tribes, consider the location culturally significant. They also maintain it was stolen. The Supreme Court in 1980 agreed the land on which Mount Rushmore sits was illegally seized. Although the high court ordered the federal government to pay the Sioux an “award of interest” on the value of the land — or 5 percent on a principal of $17.1 million, dating to 1877 — the tribe has never accepted those funds, instead demanding the return of the lands themselves. The Lakota People’s Law Project estimates the value of that award, held in trust by the federal government, is now worth more than $1 billion.
New ideas
Since the campaigns to add Reagan to the granite rock face, NPS has also needed to address more modern ideas for tinkering with the site, such as calls to project images onto the mountain or even over the sculpted faces. “We have been requested to project images up onto the memorial in the past, and we’ve always denied that from the aspect of it really is almost an affront to Gutzon Borglum and his son Lincoln Borglum, and the 400 workers who created this sculpture,” said Cheryl Schreier, a former superintendent of Mount Rushmore National Memorial, who retired in 2019. Proposals also included deploying multicolored lighting schemes to highlight advocacy months or causes, which were similarly declined, Schreier said.
“The fear is that it’s precedent-setting,” Schreier said. “In my discussions with these individuals and organizations, if we do it with your organization, then we have to turn around and do it for this organization. We always look to what the visitor experience is going to be.” Schreier, who serves as vice chair of the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks, said that maintaining Mount Rushmore in its intended form is also important to visitors. Some 1.9 million visited the park in 2024. She noted that during her tenure, NPS made sure to issue regular notices about when active preservation and maintenance work would be taking place — requiring a “ropes access team” to repel on the memorial — and potentially surprising visitors snapping photos. “All of the sudden in your photographs you might have workers who are hanging off the memorial,” joked Schreier, who also serves on the National Parks Conservation Association’s Midwest Regional Advisory Council. The monument has also been monitored since 1998 by a “Rock Block Monitoring System” installed by the geotechnical services firm RESPEC, which measures the movements of rock areas and temperatures at more than two dozen points on the memorial. Schreier said that South Dakota’s state and federal elected officials were often instrumental in defending the memorial’s design. The late South Dakota Democratic Sen. Tim Johnson strongly objected to a bid in 1999 to add Reagan to the sculpture. “No one would ever dream of painting an additional face on the Mona Lisa, and I think the artist who sculpted Mount Rushmore deserves the same respect,” Johnson said at that time, according to the Argus Leader of Sioux Falls.