Week of Dec. 18, 2025

From the editor’s desk

The Trump administration’s political-symbolism game remains strong, albeit nauseating, this season.

In November, when the Department of the Interior announced “America-first” pricing for national park admission, it also announced that Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth would no longer be free-admission days. You’ll be able to skip the entry fee on Trump’s birthday, though. Among this bundle of related announcements, the one that made me double-check whether I was reading The Onion was the news that some 2026 annual passes would feature a rendering of Trump’s face.

Yesterday, the White House unveiled new plaques under portraits of U.S. presidents. Just one example: Instead of a picture of President Joe Biden, there’s a photo of an autopen. The description calls him “Sleepy Joe Biden” and “the worst President in American History.”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called the text on these plaques “eloquently written descriptions of each president and the legacy they left behind.” The New York Times saw it differently, saying they “mock President Trump’s recent Democratic predecessors in the style of his hyperbolic social media posts.”

And today, the new board of the Kennedy Center—handpicked by Trump—voted to rename our national performing arts center in Washington, D.C., the “Trump-Kennedy Center.”

Amidst all of this Trumpian reallocating, rebranding and renaming of images and symbols that help define our nation’s character, I’ve also noticed some interesting pushback.

The Associated Press reported this week: 

The U.S. Capitol on Tuesday began displaying a statue of a teenaged Barbara Rose Johns as she protested poor conditions at her segregated Virginia high school, a pointed replacement for a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee that was removed several years ago.

The idea of replacing the likeness of Lee in the National Statuary Hall (where each state may have up to two of its own heroes enshrined) with the likeness of a Black teenager originated with the Commonwealth of Virginia—obviously not with the Trump administration. In any case, there’s one more civil rights hero in the Capitol as of this week. Nice work, Virginia.

In West Coast clapback news, the office of California Gov. Gavin Newsom released an announcement last week headlined, “​​California state parks are for everyone, while Trump turns national parks into his vanity project.” The announcement says, “California is holding the line: keeping parks accessible, celebrating the state’s diversity, and honoring—not erasing—history.” Well done, California.

Back to that issue of Trump’s face appearing on national parks passes: Whether we will actually see Trump’s visage on the pass is not entirely clear. For one, there’s a lawsuit in the works to oppose it. Also, the park service is emphasizing digital passes. It is selling some physical passes, but there is no mention on the webstore of the Trump artwork, at least as of this writing.

However, if you do eventually find yourself in possession of a Trump national park pass, and you would like to re-re-brand it, Colorado watercolorist Jenny McCarty is selling stickers featuring a pika, a wolf or a bear, shaped with precision to cover the official artwork.

Take care,

—Kris Vagner, managing editor

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Schedule note

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