05/14/2026
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Imagine taking your kid into a national park restroom and finding a hunter gutting a deer in the sink. Trump just made that legal. America's national parks are now open to trophy hunters, turning the last places we held sacred into killing grounds.
In January, Trump's Interior Secretary Doug Burgum quietly signed an order gutting hunting restrictions across 55 sites in the lower 48 states under National Park Service jurisdiction.
No public hearings. No real notice. Just a directive telling park managers to either justify every safety rule on the books, or scrap it.
The results are already grotesque. At Lake Meredith in Texas, hunters will now be allowed to clean their kills in public restrooms. At Cape Cod National Seashore, hunting season would be stretched into spring and summer.
At Jean Lafitte in Louisiana, alligator killing is now on the table. Tree-damaging hunting stands? Approved. Vehicles driving in to drag carcasses out? Approved. Hunting alongside trails where your kid is riding a bike? Approved.
Only about 4.2% of the U.S. population identified as a hunter in 2024. We are degrading shared public land, land that belongs to all of us, to indulge a shrinking minority.
Hunting, done responsibly, can serve conservation, biologists have said so for decades. But this order isn't coming from biologists. It's coming from a family whose idea of wildlife management is posing next to a dead elephant.
Trump's two adult sons are trophy hunters. Don Jr. and Eric flew to Zimbabwe and posed grinning beside dead leopards, elephants, buffalo, and a crocodile that had been strung up by its neck in a tree.
In one photo, Don Jr. holds a severed elephant tail like a war trophy. In 2019 Don Jr. flew to Mongolia and shot an endangered argali sheep, and was handed a hunting permit RETROACTIVELY , after privately meeting the country's president.
Special treatment for the special boy.
That's the trophy-room set now writing the rules for your national parks. Not biologists. Not the rangers who spent decades building safety regulations alongside local communities.
Elaine Leslie, who used to head the Park Service's biological resources department, put it bluntly: she doesn't want to take her grandkids to a park unit and walk past a gutted elk being dragged across a visitor center parking lot. Or step into a restroom where hunters are cleaning their game.
These places were supposed to be the one thing Americans still held in common.
Protected. Peaceful. Ours.
This is what it looks like when the people who run the country see public land the way they see everything else, as theirs to take.
