Attribution: NASA Earth Observatory images by Joshua Stevens, using GEOS data from the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office at NASA GSFC. Story by Adam Voiland., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
By Geoff Carter
As malignant, cruel, narcissistic, greedy, criminal, vindictive, juvenile, misogynistic, incompetent, racist, destructive, deceitful, power-hungry, stupid, and un-American he is, Donald Trump is not the primary source of the serious trouble in which our democracy is embroiled—and make no mistake, we are in trouble.
He’s done his part. Our military forces, once the strongest in the world, have been seriously depleted by Trump’s insane war on Iran, a war which he has—despite all his braying and chest-thumping—lost. That’s on him. Insanely arbitrary tariffs and now a trade war with our closest ally Canada is also—mostly—on him. These two stupid and petulant decisions are mainly Trump’s doing, but his administration is religiously following Project 2025, the blueprint of ultra-right conservatives.
Project 2025 calls for complete White House control of the executive branch of government, including the FBI, the Department of Justice, and other departments. Trump has gone ahead and illegally abused his power as outlined in the Project 2025 blueprint (and fecklessly protected by the Supreme Court) to destroy the East Wing of the White House, deface the Reflecting Pool, and assign his minion Elon Musk to create DOGE, which wantonly ravaged and destroyed entire government programs, including Social Security and the VA.
One objective of this un-American Project 2025 in the spotlight recently is to open federal lands and parks to private development. According to a report by The Sierra Club, “This blueprint for right-wing governance is a veritable wish list for any industry seeking to privatize public lands and ignore wildlife protections. According to the authors of Project 2025, a.k.a. Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, our public lands are for resource extraction—not people, not conservation, and certainly not for climate change mitigation. And apparently nothing belonging to the American people is sacred to these robber barons.
According to a report by Shawn Hubler and Maxine Joselaw in The New York Times, the Trump administration is attempting to trade a portion of Yosemite National Park to a private developer to build upscale “cabins”, homes, retail space, and a road inside the park for other lands outside the park, incurring the wrath of environmentalists, former Park Service officials, and California senators Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff. Trump officials have proposed paying for the exchange through The Land and Water Conservation Fund, which was designed to protect and safeguard natural areas, not to finance corrupt real estate deals.
Hard on the heels of this news was a report in the Times by Dave Phillips exposing a scheme to sell wild mustangs for slaughter. Apparently, through a loophole, Trump’s Bureau of Land Management is quietly selling these magnificent animals to livestock brokers. According to Phillips, “Slaughtering wild horses is illegal, but the bureau’s actions create a loophole that enables people to get mustangs on the cheap and then quickly resell them to be exported alive, processed into cuts of meat and sold abroad.” Reports showed that one batch of mustangs was ultimately sent to Canada for slaughter.
While wild horse overpopulation has been a problem, the BLM has utilized humane methods in the past to relocate or possibly rehome them, but now, Project 2025 explicitly states “Congress must enact laws permitting the BLM to dispose humanely of these animals.” (Project 2025-Department of the Interior—Annotated). But who has time to wait for Congress?
Trump has also initiated the process of opening public lands in the New Mexico’s breathtaking Chaco Canyon to oil and gas drilling, a project that would infringe directly on the park’s boundaries. Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument is also under attack. Last July, Trump reduced the size of the monument from 1.36 million to about 121,096 acres, a 91% reduction in order to open up public lands to private mining interests.
Not only are Chaco Canyon and Bears Ears National Parks the property of the American people, but they also hold important cultural and historical significance for indigenous peoples of those areas. “These places are more than collections of archaeological sites—they hold enduring cultural, spiritual, and historical significance for Indigenous communities today” (Crow Center Archeological Center). At Chaco Canyon, “archaeologists estimate that as many as 12,000 cultural sites and traditional cultural places lie within the 5-10-mile zone, all of which would be exposed to harmful drilling under this second option” (NPCA).
Also, a federal judge recently ruled that construction of Trump’s border wall in Big Bend National Park must cease because it violates the Antiquities Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and others.
Conservation groups are also protesting the proposed construction of a multi-use pathway through Grand Teton National Park, citing concerns for wildlife protection and archeological preservation since President Trump signed an executive order allowing it. (Wyo File)
These proposals to sell our public lands to the highest bidder come straight out of the Project 2025 playbook, and—if we pay attention to history—should come as no surprise. In her Substack posts, historian Heather Cox Richardson has pointed out how, all throughout the course of American history, the interests of the many have been undermined by the greed and ruthlessness of the few. The slaveowners of the antebellum South fought a war rather than let go of the institution of slavery—along with their fortunes.
The robber barons of the Gilded Age formed trusts and exploited workers in their collective quests for fortune and power before Teddy Roosevelt threw the brakes on.
And now, in a period that can be marked as beginning with the passage of President Johnson’s Great Society legislation of 1964, the wealthy elite has fought to regain and consolidate its power through deregulation, lowering taxes, and breaking unions. And it looks as if they’ve succeeded.
These men have never cared about democracy, individual rights, the law, or equality. They have worked for decades on regaining control through think tanks like The Heritage Foundation and financial support from billionaires like the Koch Brothers, Elon Musk, Jeffrey Bezos, and more. The do not care for America, only their wallets. The fruit of their labors is Project 2025 and the money taken from our pockets.
Chaco Canyon and Bears Ears are only a few of the pristine public areas he wants to sell to the highest bidder. There are dozens of public lands across the nation presently at risk. The Enbridge pipeline spanning thousands of acres of prisine woodland in the upper Midwest has gone through in spite of protests from indigenous peoples and the conservation lobby. Trump’s special pet seems to be the fossil fuel industry. Again and again, he has protected them from government regulation. Remember “Drill, baby, drill!” He has also made it a habit to stop to federal funding for a variety renewable energy projects.
The one-percenters behind Project 2025 are blind to what’s going on around them. They are blinded by gold and their souls are crippled by greed. They cannot—or will not—see that they are killing the Earth drop by drop, grain by grain, and breath by breath. Their wants and needs should not, and cannot, surmount the lives of everyone else on planet Earth.Climate change is here. The recent collapse of a glacier in Nepal caused flooding that resulted in the depths of hundreds, perhaps of thousands of people. This summer dozens of intense tornadoes and thunderstorms have resulted in billions of dollars in property damage. Wildfires are increasing in number and intensity. Record heat waves and drought have adversely affected crops in the Midwest and beyond. They don’t care. They are the ones behind Project 2025’s scorched earth policy.
This is our planet, our public lands, our quality of life, and our rights that they are trampling on. These selfish plunderers must be stopped before they do any more damage, before they kill us all and destroy everything we love.
Notes
- https://www.americanprogress.org/article/disappearing-parks-how-project-2025-would-decrease-protections-for-nature/
- https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/conservation-groups-say-project-2025-would-gut-wildlife-and-public-land-protections
- https://envirodatagov.org/project-2025-department-of-the-interior-annotated/
- https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/28/us/trump-administration-yosemite-private-developer.html
- https://www.npca.org/articles/11465-trump-administration-moves-closer-to-revoking-chaco-canyon-protections
- https://crowcanyon.org/news/whats-at-stake-for-bears-ears-greater-chaco-and-cultural-heritage/
- https://www.nbcnews.com/video/federal-judge-orders-dhs-to-pause-construction-of-border-wall-in-big-bend-national-park-269034565867
- https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/20/us/trump-wild-horses-legal-loophole-slaughter.html?eafs_enabled=false
- https://wyofile.com/old-rift-reopens-as-trump-administration-amends-grand-teton-pathway-decision/
- https://www.aclu.org/project-2025-explained
- https://democracyforward.org/work/research/the-peoples-guide-to-project-2025/
- https://democracyforward.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/2024-05_Peoples-Guide-Pro-2025.pdf
- https://ourpubliclandsandwaters.substack.com/p/bears-ears-commission-developed-americas
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