“Unlock life in America,” the website says, with bald eagles soaring above mountain peaks. It’s like applying to buy a timeshare at a resort, except it’s America for sale.
But back to the national parks card. What happened there is especially egregious, a case study in the Trump administration’s special knack for trampling the law in pursuit of vanity.
Every year there’s a photo contest sponsored by the National Park Foundation, a nonprofit parks support group. It’s an Americana kind of thing, with roughly 5,000 amateur photographers submitting nature shots they’ve taken during hikes and other adventures across the country’s varied public lands.
Since 2004, Congress has mandated that the winning image in this contest be featured on the front of the America the Beautiful card, which for $80 gets you into national parks and federal recreation areas year-round. The winning photo for the 2026 card, of the Many Glacier area in Glacier National Park in Montana, was announced last June from more than 7,000 entries.
A Seattle photographer, Hwei Ling Ng, earned an honorable mention, winning the Outdoors for All division with a breathtaking shot of a hiker scrambling to the top of Del Campo Peak in the Cascades.
Enter Trump. The Interior Department announced that for the main card, it was swapping out the shot of Glacier for a “bold, patriotic design” — a montage of George Washington and Trump, with signature red tie.
This “bait-and-switch” is illegal, as it does an end-around on the process Congress set up, wrote Amy Atwood, a Portland attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity. It also “betrays the expectations of the thousands of people who participate in the contest.”
She noted that the statute specifically bars any images on the parks card that are “highly controversial, inappropriate, indecent or obscene.”
The group sued, becoming the 542nd lawsuit against various actions of the second Trump administration, according to the Just Security litigation tracker. It was up to 544 on Friday.
Regardless of legality, Trump big-footing a nature photo contest with his own mug shot is about the Trumpiest thing imaginable. Yet.
Atwood’s complaint says it sets up a “Hobson’s choice” for the public — “of having to participate in unlawful partisan activity they disagree with and being subjected to a recurring aesthetic harm from buying and using an Annual Pass adorned with Trump’s visage rather than Glacial National Park … or on the other hand, forgoing entirely the monetary and other benefits of buying a pass.”
The Northwest-based Our Public Lands and Waters newsletter said no politician has ever been on the cards or should be — except maybe Teddy Roosevelt. Trump adding himself is galling because he’s “the least conservation-minded president of the last century.”
The newsletter cited Trump’s legacy as slashed park staff and budgets, diminished protections for wildlife and wilderness areas, proposed drilling in and around protected areas, and erased or censored park historical displays.
“This has all happened in the past ten months alone,” the newsletter said. “And the person squinting on next year’s public lands passes is responsible for all of it.”
Trump also announced that his birthday will now be a free admission day at national parks (it’s also Flag Day), while removing Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth. But only residents can get in free; foreign visitors still must pay on those days.
The Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks, a group of former parks employees, noted that these new “America first” policies might mean having to prove your residency or citizenship status at the park gate.