President Donald Trump returns to Mount Rushmore on Friday, and though the president has openly mused about adding his likeness to the storied national monument, it’s unclear if he can move the mountains necessary to make it happen.
He’s brought it up jokingly at campaign rallies, posted hints on social media and called it a “good idea.” He even raised the possibility with South Dakota’s governor during his first term, saying to then-Gov. Kristi Noem during an Oval Office meeting: “Do you know it’s my dream to have my face on Mount Rushmore?”
“I started laughing,” Noem recalled in a 2018 interview with the Argus Leader. “He wasn’t laughing, so he was totally serious. … I said, ‘Come pick out a mountain.’”
Though the president has spent much of his second term taking steps to impose his style and tastes on architecture in the nation’s capital and even has an airport now named after him in Florida, the buck might just stop in South Dakota. He would quite literally need to pick out another mountain — it’s structurally not possible to add a fifth face to the storied monument.
Mount Rushmore sculptor Gutzon Borglum wrote in 1936 that the stone had “serious” limitations.
