Donald Trump Can’t Pronounce Yosemite. That Hasn’t Stopped Him from Defiling It.

The park is supposed to be a refuge. It’s starting to feel like the Mall of America with waterfalls.

Collage of Susan J. Demas photos of Yosemite, July 2026

“No temple made with hands can compare with Yosemite.”

— John Muir

Last week, I stood at Glacier Point and looked down into Yosemite Valley to celebrate our nation’s 250th birthday the best way I know how — Half Dome rising out of the granite, Nevada Falls tumbling into the granite basin, the whole cathedral of stone and sky laid out in front of me. And in that moment, I forgot that I had waited thirty minutes just to find a parking spot.

But the wait told me everything I needed to know about where we are right now. Yosemite is drowning.

The National Park Service’s timed entry reservation system — which required visitors to book a window in advance during peak hours — kept the park’s most congested areas from becoming gridlocked in recent years. It wasn’t perfect. But it worked. The Trump administration eliminated it this year for Yosemite, Arches, and Glacier in the name of cutting “red tape,” in the spirit of its asinine DOGE cuts. Over Memorial Day weekend, social media was filled with video of Yosemite Valley in full chaos — bumper-to-bumper traffic, queues of hikers backed up around switchbacks, parking lots that looked like Black Friday at a suburban big-box store.

The park is supposed to be a refuge. It’s starting to feel like the Mall of America with waterfalls.

I’ve been fortunate enough to hike around Yosemite more than twenty times. I know the trails where you can see Half Dome with nobody else around. I know the hidden swimming holes, the light at El Capitan in the late afternoon, the little nooks where the valley goes quiet even with people nearby. Those moments still exist — but they take more work to find every year. And the visitors who depend on a ranger to help them? Increasingly, they’re on their own.

That’s because the Trump administration fired roughly 1,000 National Park Service employees in February 2025 and has since cut about 24 percent of the agency’s permanent staff. The Supreme Court overruled a lower court order to reinstate them. So the parks are now entering summer with fewer rangers, fewer maintenance crews, and fewer people trained to handle emergencies — at exactly the moment the administration flung the gates wide open and waved everyone in.

The land itself is already stressed in ways that have nothing to do with parking. A March 2026 study found that 77 percent of U.S. national parks are highly vulnerable to climate change — threatened by wildfire, drought, pest outbreaks, and rising seas. The glaciers John Muir wrote about are mostly gone. Fire seasons run into November. The park is absorbing record visitor numbers while fighting for its ecological survival.

To be fair — and I want to be fair — the overtourism problem didn’t start with Donald Trump. Instagram has done its part. So have travel influencers, the cultural pressure to document every experience for strangers online, and the sheer growth of a country with more people and more cars than the parks were ever designed to handle. We all bear some responsibility for what 4.5 million annual visitors does to a place carved by glaciers over thousands of years.

But Trump’s approach isn’t accidental negligence. It’s malice with a strategy.

Degrade the parks — cut the staff, end the reservation systems, invite a stampede — and use the resulting damage as justification for opening federal land to logging, mining, and development. If the park is already debased, why protect it? This is how you manufacture consent for exploitation. And it’s exactly what this administration has done to public lands across the country, from opening up Arctic Wildlife Refuge to drilling to trying to deface Big Bend by erecting a 30-foot border wall along the Rio Grande. Trump isn’t failing to protect these places. He’s succeeding at ruining them.

MAGA politics are seeping into the parks themselves in ways that should make every American’s blood boil. Shannon “SJ” Joslin, a wildlife biologist and non-binary NPS employee, was fired after helping climbers hang a 66-foot transgender pride flag from El Capitan on May 20, 2025 — outside of work hours. The NPS policy banning large banners appeared in the park’s policy book on the same day the flag went up and was electronically signed the next morning. Joslin sued. A federal judge dismissed the lawsuit on procedural grounds. The message to NPS employees was clear: your rights stop at the park boundary, and this park’s priorities have changed.

So have the passes. The America the Beautiful 2026 annual pass — the $80 pass that has traditionally featured a winning nature photograph from a public contest — now displays a portrait of Donald Trump alongside George Washington. The wilderness of Glacier National Park won that contest. It isn’t on the pass. Trump is. And if you put a sticker over his face, the National Park Service has instructed rangers that your pass may be voided.

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The land that belonged to all of us is now a merchandise opportunity for a president who cannot correctly pronounce its most famous jewel. (At a 2020 press conference, Trump referred to Yosemite as “Yo-Seh-MIGHT.” Misspelling “potato” ended Dan Quayle’s presidential ambitions, but this Trump gaffe doesn’t even crack the top 100.)

Then there’s the war on foreign tourists, a lesser-known aspect of Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda. Beginning January 1, 2026, international visitors age 16 and older must pay an additional $100 per person on top of standard entry fees to visit Yosemite and ten other top parks. The annual pass for non-residents now costs $250, compared to $80 for Americans. Intrepid Travel reports international bookings down 42 percent; Canadian bookings are down 93 percent. Trump’s xenophobic policies are hurting tourism in small communities that have relied on international visitors to keep local businesses open for generations.

I have heard a dozen languages spoken at once at Glacier Point — French, Japanese, Mandarin, Portuguese, German, and more. Gazing down at the valley, surrounded by others just as mesmerized by the granite-domed grandeur as I am — this is one reason I return, season after season. That shared awe is not incidental to what Yosemite is. It is part of what Yosemite is. As Muir often quoted Shakespeare in his writing: “One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.”

The park has been an argument for the best version of America, its best idea, a place where people from around the globe can stand before something magnificent and feel that it belongs, in some essential way, to all of them.

Charging international visitors three times as much is not patriotism. It is pettiness dressed as economic policy, with the added benefit of cutting off the lifeblood of local hotels, restaurants, and shops that depend on those visitors to stay open. The tourists absorb the message. The local economies absorb the losses. Trump gets the press release.

Yosemite National Park, July 2026 | Susan J. Demas photos

National Park rangers are supposed to keep trails safe, protect wildlife, and prevent the kind of careless damage that can scar a landscape for decades. They are not supposed to be deployed as a paramilitary arm of the administration — guarding reflecting pools that were algae-covered and peeling after a botched $16 million no-bid contract and arresting people for touching the water. They are not supposed to fire employees for flying a flag outside of work hours. They are not supposed to enforce the president’s image on a piece of laminated plastic.

John Muir spent his life insisting that wilderness had a moral claim on us — that some places deserved protection not because they were useful but because they were irreplaceable. He was right. Yosemite’s mountains will outlast this administration. But the people who are supposed to steward it, and the systems that let us love it without destroying it — those are fragile. And they are being broken, deliberately, by an administration that sees wilderness the same way it sees everything: as something to extract until there is nothing left, and then blame someone else for the loss.

We need to fight for these places. This is not a soft priority or a luxury cause. Yosemite is what this country can be at its finest. We should not let anyone take that from us — especially a man who can’t even pronounce its name.

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