Donald Trump “dreams” of seeing his face carved into the stone of Mount Rushmore. He himself published a video made with AI representing him on this monumental “shrine” created as a tribute to American democracy and which attracts two million visitors to South Dakota each year.
🚨 President Trump just posted himself on Mount Rushmore
Cue the meltdowns 🤣 pic.twitter.com/HarPaRLjqB
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) May 30, 2026
I manage my choices I authorize
Failing to see his megalomaniacal project come to fruition, the American president is going on Friday July 3 to the foot of the famous cliff engraved with the figures of four of his predecessors on the occasion of the festivities of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence of the United States.
It was in 1923 that the historian Doane Robinson had the idea for such a monument. To develop local tourism in his region of origin, he wishes to highlight figures of the conquest of the West such as Buffalo Bill Cody. The sculptor Gutzon Borglum, author of a giant bas-relief celebrating the leaders of the Confederate States, is responsible for carrying out his project.
More ambitious – or more megalomaniac – the artist decided, to attract a larger audience, to honor four presidents: George Washington (1732-1799), Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) and Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865). The first represents the founding of the United States, the second the expansion of American democracy, the third the preservation of the Union, and the last the country’s rise as a world power. In Gutzon Borglum’s mind, the project became a national sanctuary dedicated to American ideals.
Mount Rushmore is chosen for the quality of its granite, in the Black Hills – these “black hills” so nicknamed by the natives in reference to the forests which cover it. The project, which began in 1927, was described by President Calvin Coolidge as “resolutely American in its conception, in its scale, in its significance, and entirely worthy of our country”.
A pop culture symbol with a dark side
Earning 35 cents to $1.50 an hour, 400 men and women work hard to achieve this feat of engineering. After extracting thousands of tons of rock with dynamite, they carry out precise drilling and chiseling for each figure in order to shape the faces. Not without difficulty: Gutzon Borglum is forced to revise his plans nine times, due to fractures and weak points running through the massif.
Little by little, the four 18 meter high statues came into being. In 1930, George Washington was the first to be completed and dedicated. In 1941, seven years late, the monument was completed. Due to lack of funds, only the faces are sculpted, whereas the original project called for statues made up to the waist.
From then on, Mount Rushmore became a symbol of American pop culture, appearing notably in the films Mars Attacks! by Tim Burton (1996) and Death by the Bags by Alfred Hitchcock (1959). Regularly, supporters of certain presidents ask that their candidate be added alongside the four men. An impossible wish to come true: “There is no sufficiently secure surface on this mountain,” decided the American National Park Service in 2020, to which the question is often asked.
Beyond its popularity, Mount Rushmore retains a dark side. Supremacist, Gutzon Borglum was known for his anti-Semitism and his ties to the Ku Klux Klan. The monument is also built on a sacred site for the Sioux tribe, called “Six Grandfathers Mountain”. If some therefore plead for its expansion, others demand its destruction, arguing that the territory had been recovered at the end of the 19th century by the American administration by flouting a peace treaty.
