He’s posted images of his face on the monument. He’s called it a “good idea.” And the White House says there would be “no better addition.”
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He hasn’t explicitly said that he wants to be added — at least not in public.
But on the eve of the nation’s 250th anniversary, President Donald Trump is returning to Mount Rushmore after nine years of flirting with the idea of having one more face join the four presidents: his own.
Ahead of his visit to the national memorial on Friday, his White House said that adding Trump’s face would be a welcome development — even though officials at Mount Rushmore have long said the monument cannot be carved further.
“There would be no better addition to the iconic Mount Rushmore than the 45th and 47th President of the United States, Donald Trump,” said Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, in a statement to The Washington Post.
For a president who has had a golden statue of himself erected at his golf resort and his name and image affixed to buildings, government programs, U.S. passports, digital and physical coins, roads, and an airport, the landmark represents a rare limit: No presidential order or act of Congress can create more carvable rock.
It has been on his mind. As recently as five weeks ago, the president — twice in one evening — posted to Truth Social digital mock-ups of his face next to the mountainside carvings of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln.
Soon after he first took office, Trump told a congresswoman in private that joining them was his dream. When that Republican congresswoman, Kristi L. Noem, became South Dakota governor and gave Trump a sculpture depicting his face on Mount Rushmore next to Lincoln’s, he put it on display at his Mar-a-Lago office.
He last visited the monument six years ago, delivering a speech on July 3, 2020, that sought to rally supporters around a law-and-order message central to his unsuccessful reelection campaign.
On Friday, “beneath the towering faces of four of America’s greatest presidents, President Trump will deliver a historic address commemorating the nation’s 250th anniversary and charting a course for America’s next chapter,” Freedom 250, the White House-created organization heading up the semiquincentennial celebrations, wrote in an announcement of Trump’s Mount Rushmore appearance.
Two people with knowledge of the event planning, including a senior White House official, said there would not be a projection of Trump’s face on Rushmore during the Friday night celebration.
Trump, as he has danced around the idea of being added to Mount Rushmore since first taking office, has never batted it down.
“Never suggested it,” he wrote on Twitter in 2020 in response to a New York Times report that said a White House aide had inquired with Noem’s office about the process of carving additional presidents. But Trump continued: “Although, based on all of the many things accomplished during the first 3 1/2 years, perhaps more than any other Presidency, sounds like a good idea to me!”
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A year earlier, when asked by the Hill if he’d like to see his face carved there, Trump replied that he didn’t want to say: “If I answer that question, ‘Yes,’ I will end up with such bad publicity.”
At a 2017 rally in Youngstown, Ohio, Trump declared that each of the presidents on Mount Rushmore “believed in protecting American industry.” He told the audience that he should “ask whether or not you think I will someday be on Mount Rushmore,” but that he would face blowback for positing such a question.
“If I did it joking, totally joking, having fun, the fake news media will say, ‘He believes he should be on Mount Rushmore,’” Trump said. “So I won’t say it, okay? I won’t say it.”
Trump’s allies have kept hope alive, however, even as Mount Rushmore officials and engineers who have long monitored the rocks there say it isn’t possible.
Days after he was sworn in for a second time, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Florida) in January 2025 filed a bill directing the Interior Department to begin the process of having Trump’s face carved onto Mount Rushmore. Around the same time, a Fox News panel, including former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany and former representative Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), cheered on the idea. McEnany said it would be “epic” to have Trump’s face added for the country’s 250th anniversary — which would have left a year and a half to do so.
Last July, Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tennessee) sent a letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum asking him to “explore” adding Trump, saying that “past bureaucratic resistance or political discomfort” should not stop the process.
And Burgum himself, contradicting what past National Park Service officials had said, last year told Trump’s daughter-in-law and Fox News host Lara Trump that it wasn’t out of the question.
“Well, they certainly have room for it there,” Burgum replied when she asked if the United States would ever see Trump added to Mount Rushmore.
In 2018, the public information officer at Mount Rushmore, Maureen McGee-Ballinger, told the Sioux Falls Argus Leader that “there is no more carvable space up on the sculpture,” adding that the rock to the left of Washington can’t be carved into, and what appears to be space next to Lincoln is “beyond the sculpture” and an “optical illusion.”
Staff at Mount Rushmore and the National Park Service did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether the memorial’s geology had changed since.
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