A century and a half ago, the naturalist John Muir, father of our national parks, penned the immortal words: “The mountains are calling and I must go.”
And now, President Donald Trump has offered a revision: The mountains are calling — and they must go.
The man seems to be doing everything he can of late to off-load or undermine our national parks and other sacred refuges.
My Sun colleague Anna Kramer wrote about the administration’s plan to sell off a piece of California’s Yosemite National Park to developers who want to build a private road connecting a potential future resort to the park.
At Big Bend National Park in Texas, locals of all political stripes have been fighting the administration’s plans to build a 30-foot-tall border wall through the park, along with a new road, lights and vehicle barriers.
The administration has cut Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments in Utah from 3.2 million acres to 300,000 — and at least 72 mining claims have already been made on that land.
In Alaska, the administration is proposing an industrial mining road that would cut through Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve.
The Park Service lost nearly a quarter of its workforce since Trump took office, and he proposed a 25% cut to funding for national park operations for 2027. He diverted funds from the parks to pay for pet projects such as his “repair” of the Reflecting Pool and his Fourth of July fireworks.
The administration is talking about cutting off public access to Park Service land at Hains Point in the nation’s capital to build a championship golf course, and his allies have floated the idea of defacing Mount Rushmore National Monument by adding Trump’s face to it. (They already put his mug on annual park passes.)
And now, the pièce de résistance: The administration this week entertained a request from Major League Baseball to build a ballpark in Wyoming’s Grand Teton National Park.
The Washington Post reported that the NPS’s deputy director scouted locations for the baseball park at Grand Teton in recent days. The White House said MLB wanted “to host a game at a national park, similar to the Field of Dreams game.”
To give you a sense of what that means, the Field of Dreams ballpark in Dyersville, Iowa, can seat up to 8,000 people and occupies a 300-acre complex, complete with clubhouses, permanent bullpens, space for concessions and sponsors, a jumbo video board and enough lighting to turn night into day.
When it comes to squandering our inheritance, this administration is in a league of its own, blending our traditional national pastime — baseball — with our latest fad: plundering the planet.
Happily, MLB abandoned its Grand Teton plan Thursday night, though not because of Trump administration objections but because of local opposition. The league’s statement didn’t rule out building its Field of Dreams at another national park — or parks.
In fact, with the Trump administration’s blessing, MLB could build a network of national-park stadiums. We’ll call it the Corruption League. The National League will feature the Death Valley Developers, the Denali Data Centers, the Badlands Billionaires, the Canyonlands Cronies, the Grand Teton Tech Bros and the Olympic Oil Men. The American League will house the Crater Lake Cryptos, the Bryce Canyon Bribes, the Acadia AI’s, the Kenai Fjords Frackers, the Everglades Emoluments and the Mount Rainier Monopolists.
They’ll all face off in the World Series of Ecological Destruction.
The frontier AI labs tell us there’s a 10% to 20% chance their creation will destroy human civilization within a decade. But, on the positive side, AI helped me identify the optimal locations for ballparks in our national parks.
To build a round, 300-acre parcel for our ballpark complex that would give us the best views of the Tetons, Anthropic’s Claude tells me that we would have had to slice 4,000 feet of Grand Teton itself — a potentially cumbersome operation.
But at Alaska’s Denali National Park, we would only need to shave 2,000 or 3,000 feet off the South Summit to build our field of dreams, at a stunning altitude of about 18,000 feet. We can call it Three Mile High Stadium. Of course, with summer wind chills hitting 50 degrees below zero atop Denali, they’ll probably need some extra hand warmers in the dugouts.
The temperature would be much more pleasant for players and fans alike at the ballpark in the Halema‘uma‘u crater at Hawaii’s Volcanoes National Park. On the other hand, that is an active volcanic site, so fans would need to be told not to chase foul balls into lava flows, and the stands might need to be evacuated at times because of poison gas.
Similar precautions would be needed at Yellowstone, although with some engineering help, it might be possible to get Old Faithful to erupt whenever the home team hits a home run.
Ballpark construction would be considerably less expensive at Sequoia National Park in California. Claude tells me we would only need to cut down 780 of the ancient trees to clear our 300-acre baseball campus.
Probably the most promising site would be at Arizona’s Grand Canyon National Park, future home of Grand Canyon Gerrymanders. Claude tells me we would only need about 200 million cubic yards of landfill, give or take, on the floor of the canyon to build a 300-acre complex atop the Colorado River, which would be diverted for the purpose.
My home park, Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park, has an obvious spot for a ballpark in Big Meadows, which has been maintained as grassland for the last 10,000 years. Its 130 acres are home to globally rare wetland plant communities and 18% of the rare plant species in the park.
While it would be easy enough to knock down enough bordering forest to build our 300-acre baseball complex in Big Meadows, I suspect that after the initial site visits the Trump administration will find a higher use for this parcel: Cover it with tightly mowed Bermuda grass. The Trump International Golf Club Shenandoah would be a PGA championship course, complete with granite helipad where the president could arrive aboard Marine One to be awarded the Club Championship trophy each year.
It promises to be the best course on the East Coast outside of the Trump International Everglades.
***
Perhaps I shouldn’t be giving the president any ideas. As he grows ever more erratic, there seems to be nothing too outlandish — or too corrupt — for him to undertake. Now he’s running a series of campaign ads for Republicans paid for by millions of taxpayer dollars. A couple of weeks ago we learned that a Russian oligarch paid for his son’s wedding.
One might think he’d leave the national parks alone because of their popularity. They set a record for visits — 332 million — in 2024, before Trump returned to office. But if ordinary Americans love their parks, the rich aren’t getting enough out of these egalitarian havens, with their rustic campsites, mediocre lodges and pit toilets.
That is the thread that ties together most of the Trump administration’s plundering of protected lands: Making them more rewarding for his cronies. The land swap at Yosemite would give private access to the park for well-connected developers and their future guests. The ballpark at Grand Teton would reward MLB owners, most of whom are billionaires. The destruction in Utah and Alaska is entirely for mining interests.
All this proposed desecration has me rereading Muir’s 1901 essay collection, “Our National Parks.”
“The tendency nowadays to wander in wildernesses is delightful to see,” he wrote. “Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, overcivilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.”
Muir guided me on the slopes of Mt. Rainier, into “a zone of the loveliest flowers, fifty miles in circuit and nearly two miles wide, so closely planted and luxuriant that it seems as if Nature, glad to make an open space between woods so dense and ice so deep, were economizing the precious ground, and trying to see how many of her darlings she can get together in one mountain wreath.”
I went with him to Yellowstone, not far from where the Grand Teton baseball park would have been located. “The wildest geysers in the world, in bright, triumphant bands, are dancing and singing in it amid thousands of boiling springs,” he wrote. “Here, too, are hills of sparkling crystals, hills of sulphur, hills of glass, hills of cinders and ashes, mountains of every style of architecture, icy or forested, mountains covered with honey-bloom sweet as Hymettus, mountains boiled soft like potatoes and colored like a sunset sky.”
Muir took me along, as well, to Yosemite, to the part of the park near Hazel Green that the administration would give to developers to build their private road. Here he found “perhaps the best general view of the pine forests of the park,” where the trees “shine in silvery splendor, every needle and cell in bole and branch thrilling and tingling with ardent life; and the whole landscape glows with consciousness, like the face of a god.”
Such places, he wrote, “must always be wild.”
Muir, Teddy Roosevelt and others of their age believed they had protected national parks for posterity. And for a century and a quarter that was true.
But Muir never met Donald Trump, with his ballparks and border walls and resort roads and mining leases. I pray the wild places survive him.
Dana Milbank is a Washington Sun Perspectives columnist.
Correction: This story originally misstated the location of Old Faithful. It is in Yellowstone.
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