Inside the Scheme to Virtually Eliminate Bears Ears & Grand Staircase-Escalante
President Trump nearly wiped out two sprawling Utah monuments in an afternoon to the delight of Utah Senator Mike Lee and Governor Spencer Cox.
Yesterday afternoon, in a hastily arranged signing ceremony that got started over an hour late, President Trump signed two proclamations reducing Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments by ninety percent — far worse than the reductions he tried in his first term. Utah Governer Spencer Cox couldn't contain his smile as Trump talked about how the monument protections had locked up the land so that not even hunters or fisherman could enter — assertions that Cox knew were demonstrably false but useful lies repeated by a President who couldn’t tell you the difference between Bears Ears and Yosemite.
Standing next to Cox, watching part of his life's work finally pay out, was Mike Lee. If you've read this newsletter you know him, and if you're new here, understand that no single human being alive has done more to try to pry your public land out of your hands than the senior senator from Utah. Fifteen years he's been at it, the same fixation dressed up in a new costume every session, sold off as border security one year and fiscal responsibility the next and states' rights the year after that, and underneath every costume the identical goal, which is to take what belongs to all of us and hand it to the people who own him.
Remember, this spring Lee and Congresswoman Celeste Maloy tried the front door. They went after the Grand Staircase management plan with the Congressional Review Act, a cute little procedural knife that would've let a bare majority gut the monument's protections without ever calling it what it was, and thousands of Americans flooded Congress in opposition until the clock ran out and the effort died on the calendar last month. It looked like a win. It was a win. But if you thought Mike Lee spent fifteen years chasing this to be stopped by a missed deadline, you don't know Mike Lee. The CRA effort was never the whole plan. It was the thing he was willing to lose. Because Lee always has another scheme, and the better scheme doesn't run through Congress at all, where you get a vote and a voice and a chance to make him lose in public again. The better plan runs through one man.
And this President is the softest touch in America for a man like Lee. An egocentric halfwit who couldn’t find Utah with a map and a week to look. Who hears that the government locked this land up so tight not even a hunter or a fisherman can set foot on it and believes it instantly because he wants to believe it, because the thought of anyone, a company most of all, being told they can't go somewhere and take something offends him at a cellular level. So that’s the story they fed him, and a dozen more like it, and Trump sat at the Resolute Desk and repeated them back to the cameras as gospel, puffing himself up as the man riding in to liberate two monuments from a lockup that never existed. And when Trump got to the part about saving the land he was in fact handing to the mining companies, Cox smiled and Lee smiled, because the beauty of the con is that the con man at the podium doesn't even know he's in on it.
That's how you erase ninety percent of two of the greatest protected landscapes in North America without a single vote. Not in a backroom, not in the fine print. In broad daylight, on camera, with the President of the United States doing the talking and not one clue that the men beside him were using his mouth to move their inventory.
So Bears Ears goes from 1.36 million acres to 121,096. Grand Staircase-Escalante goes from 1.87 million to 181,541. Between the two monuments the president stripped protection from roughly 2.93 million acres and left about 302,000 standing, which is to say he erased ninety percent of two of the most significant protected landscapes in North America in the time it takes to sign your name twice.
The Minerals
For eight years these people insisted it wasn’t about extraction. They said it in 2017 and they said it again this spring, that this was about local control and federal overreach and the sacred principle of keeping Washington’s hands off Utah’s backyard. Read the proclamations they signed today. The Grand Staircase document names the minerals it wants, by name, in a single breathless list: chromium, cobalt, copper, iron, lead, manganese, molybdenum, nickel, silver, thorium, titanium, uranium, vanadium, zinc, and zirconium. The Bears Ears document does the same, calling out silver, copper, molybdenum, lead, uranium, vanadium, and zinc, and states plainly that the need to open this ground for them is “greater than it was in 2017.” The monument was the fence around the ore, and they just tore the fence down and told you what they’re coming to dig.
Look at what Grand Staircase’s own founding document says, because the administration wasn’t hiding it, it was gloating. The first sentence of Trump’s proclamation states outright that Clinton created the monument in 1996 “as part of an effort to prevent development of significant coal reserves and other resources on the Kaiparowits Plateau.” They put that there on purpose. It’s a trophy line. They wanted you to know the monument was built to keep the coal in the ground and that they’re the ones finally digging it up. Thirty years of protection over one of the largest coal deposits in the country, torn open with a signature, and the document doesn’t soften it or bury it because malice is the message. The unit they bothered to keep, the one they named “Kaiparowits Horizon,” runs 8,900 acres, a scrap of ground drawn around a dinosaur bonebed so they can wave a fossil at you while they lease the entire plateau around it.
The “Worthless Antiquities” They’ll Bulldoze
Then there's the lie at the center of both documents, the one the lawyers built to be argued in front of the Supreme Court. Each proclamation claims the president can erase a predecessor's monument by "finding that objects identified in the prior declaration either are no longer deserving of the Antiquities Act's protections, or never were." Sit with "or never were." That's the whole game. To justify it, they had to declare that the things inside these monuments aren't worth protecting, so they did. The Bears Ears proclamation dismisses the region's "lithic scatters, projectile points, prehistoric campsites, petroglyphs, and pictographs" as too "prevalent throughout the Four Corners region" to matter. Ten thousand years of human hands on that rock, more than a hundred thousand documented cultural sites, and the United States government's official position, as of today, is that there's too much of it to be special. They looked at the densest concentration of Indigenous history in America and called it too common to be worth anything.
And they came for the tribes directly. The Bears Ears Commission, the co-management partnership between the federal government and the Hopi, the Navajo, the Ute Indian Tribe, the Ute Mountain Ute, and the Zuni, the first arrangement of its kind in the history of this country, was "hereby disbanded and terminated" in a single sentence of the Bears Ears proclamation. What replaces it tells you everything. The five nations that conceived and fought for and named that monument are reduced to one advisory seat apiece on a committee, outnumbered by six seats the governor of Utah gets to fill with grazing permittees, off-highway vehicle users, and local business owners. The people whose ancestors are buried in that ground get a minority voice on a panel stacked with the industries that wanted them gone.
I wrote about my travels to Bears Ears in a dispatch on this Substack almost a year and a half ago. In it I described a place where the silence was so vast, it sweeps over you like a blanket, in the best possible way. I also predicted this very day, writing, “Bears Ears will be gutted again, and it may well be worse than last time. This administration will carve it up piece by piece, fast-tracking extraction leases and erasing its wildness with roads, noise, and industry. Because that’s the thing about a place like Bears Ears. It is too big, too beautiful, and too full of what industry calls ‘resources’ to be left alone.”
If you want to know how your own delegation has voted every time your land was on the line, we built the Congressional Public Lands Scorecard to show you in about thirty seconds.
The Ultimate Prize for Utah
None of this survives on the merits, and they know it, which is exactly why they did it this way. The Antiquities Act lets a president create monuments. It doesn’t let a president destroy them. The lawsuits are already written. Earthjustice and the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance said they'd sue the moment the ink dried, and they will, and they may well win the first rounds. But winning the early rounds is the plan. Spencer Cox built Utah's litigation strategy for years with one stated goal, to march the Antiquities Act up to a Supreme Court where Chief Justice Roberts has already written that the law's only real limit has "ceased to pose any meaningful restraint" and openly invited the right case to come test it. These two proclamations are that case, manufactured on purpose, aimed like a rifle. If it lands where they want it, this stops being about two monuments in Utah and becomes the end of the power that protected the Grand Canyon, Zion, Olympic, and two hundred other places every American assumes are permanent.
Where We Go From Here
So here’s where it actually stands today. They eviscerated ninety percent of two monuments while one of them burned, they wrote the mineral list into the law so no one could pretend it was about anything else, they told you in their own founding document that Grand Staircase existed to stop exactly what they just authorized, they called ten thousand years of Native history too common to keep, and they fired the tribes from managing their own sacred ground. They did all of it in an afternoon because they’ve convinced themselves nobody really cares in today’s news cycle, that you’re too tired or too busy to notice that a canyon held in trust for every American since before you were born just got handed to whoever holds the mining claim.
Prove them wrong. Read the proclamations. Learn the names. The men who signed this are betting the fight goes out of the rest of us, and every generation that ever kept this country’s promises was handed that same bet and refused it. Refuse it again. This ground was never theirs to sell, it isn’t now, and it won’t be when the courts are done, not if enough of us decide it isn’t.
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Thanks for reading. Until next time,
-Jim
The Republicans have left no stone unturned in their quest to destroy America. They are at war with the country and they have been nothing short of brilliant when it comes to deconstructing 250 years of history and effort on the part of every single individual who has lived, toiled and paid for what we had built.
I've been to Cedar Mesa, Grand Gulch, Comb Wash, and Arch Canyon. These are all close the Bears Ears and within the monument. The one thing I experienced there, along with the natural beauty, was a tangible, palpable spiritual peace.
These people have absolutely know clue of the extent of what they're doing.