Is Donald Trump Being Added to Mount Rushmore? Here's the Truth
The National Park Service isn't rushing to add President Donald Trump's face on Mount Rushmore.
While Trump has previously floated the idea of having his own visage be carved next to those of past presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln on the South Dakota-based national monument, the government agency says it cannot be done due to the lack of stable surfaces on the rockface.
"The carved portion of Mount Rushmore has been thoroughly evaluated," the park service told the New York Times in a statement published June 27, "and there are no viable locations left for additional carvings."
Paul Nelson—a geomechanical engineer who oversaw the Rock Block Monitoring System on the memorial—agreed with the assessment, telling the outlet that it would be "extremely difficult, if not impossible, to carve an additional face on Mount Rushmore" due to existing fractures in the granite.
"One of the concerns about an additional face is that you could activate these fractures," he explained. "If you remove material, you could be removing support."
Moreover, experts believe that attaching a pre-carved face to the monument would also be next to impossible. As former superintendent of Mount Rushmore National Memorial Dan Wenk put it, "They’re fighting against the reality of the rock."
But that's not for a lack of trying. After all, Florida congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna did introduce legislation in January to have Trump's face carved onto Mount Rushmore. (The proposal remains with the House Committee on Natural Resources, per the Congress' official website.)
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum also pushed to have the POTUS' face on Mount Rushmore, telling Fox News anchor and Trump's daughter-in-law Lara Trump in March without providing any backing evidence, "They certainly have room for it there."
For a complete guide on Trump's cabinet, keep reading.
Ohio native JD Vance worked in venture capitalism before penning the best-selling 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy and pivoting to politics.
The Yale-educated lawyer and former Marine was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2022 and, after less than two years in office, was picked to be Donald Trump's 2024 running mate.
As vice president, in addition to being first in line to the presidency, Vance is on hand to be a deciding vote should Senate Republicans need a tie-breaker to pass legislation.
He has been married to law school sweetheart Usha Vance since 2014 and they share three children.
Former Florida Sen. Marco Rubio was a fierce critic of Trump when they both ran for president in 2016 but has since become a supporter of his former antagonist's agenda.
The Miami native, born to Cuban immigrant parents, was the first and only nominee for Trump's second cabinet to be confirmed by the Senate with unanimous bipartisan support, 99 to 0. (Now former Ohio Sen. Vance is the one-seat vacancy. Rubio was technically still in the Senate then and so was able to vote for himself.)
Rubio (shown here with Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly) has been married to former Miami Dolphins cheerleader Jeanette Dousdebes since 1998 and they share two daughters and two sons.
Scott Bessent's four decades of experience in global investment management include his time as CEO of hedge fund Key Square Capital Management and Chief Investment Officer of Soros Fund Management (as in prominent Democratic donor George Soros).
He also taught economic history at his alma mater Yale and, with his family, established the McLeod Rehabilitation Center at the Shriners Children’s Hospital in his home state of South Carolina.
According to his government bio, he and his husband and two children split their time between Washington, D.C., and Charleston, S.C.
"In a certain geographic region at a certain economic level, being gay is not an issue," he told the Yale Alumni Magazine in 2015 ahead of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. "What’s fantastic is now, people in the rest of America, whether blue collar or white collar, have access to everything. If you had told me in 1984, when we graduated, and people were dying of AIDS, that 30 years later I’d be legally married and we would have two children via surrogacy, I wouldn’t have believed you."
Army National Guard veteran Pete Hegseth had been serving as cohost of Fox News' Fox & Friends Weekend since 2017 when Trump tapped him to be Defense Secretary.
Past controversial statements about diversity and women in the military, a 2017 sexual assault allegation (which Hegseth has vehemently denied), reports of drinking on the job (also denied) and a 2018 email from his mother (that she later disavowed) calling him "an abuser of women" threatened to derail his nomination. But he was narrowly confirmed by the Senate with no Democratic votes and three Republicans dissenting.
Hegseth shares three kids with second ex-wife Samatha Deering and has a daughter with third wife Jennifer Rauchet Hegseth, a former producer on Fox & Friends. They tied the knot at Trump National Golf Club in Colts Neck, N.J., in 2019.
After Trump's original pick, scandal-plagued former Rep. Matt Gaetz, withdrew himself from consideration, the then-president-elect went with former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi—a member of his defense team during his first impeachment trial—to lead the U.S. Department of Justice.
She spent 18 years as a prosecutor with the Hillsborough County State Attorney’s Office before becoming Florida's first female attorney general in 2011. Toward the end of her tenure she cohosted Fox News' The Five for three days in 2018, sparking questions about the ethics of doing so while still an elected official.
"She is often on national news," a spokesperson told the Tampa Bay Times, noting that she wasn't paid for her hosting gig. "The attorney general is always working. She is available 24/7 and works even when out of the state."
Twice-divorced, Bondi has been romantically linked to Varner Wakefield Equity Partners founding principal John Wakefield since 2017. He has three children from a previous relationship.
Another 2024 presidential hopeful turned Trump supporter, billionaire software entrepreneur and venture capitalist Doug Burgum served as governor of North Dakota from 2017 until he was picked to head up the Department of Interior, which is responsible for the management of roughly 480 million acres of federal land, balancing resource development and conservation.
After growing up in tiny Arthur, N.D., population 325, Burgum attended North Dakota State and started a chimney sweeping business that he credits for helping him get into Stanford's business school.
"The [college] newspaper wrote a story about me as a chimney sweep and ran a photo of me sitting on top of an icy chimney in below-freezing weather in Fargo," he told Forbes in 2017. "The story made the AP wire service. I was later told it caused quite a stir in the Stanford admissions office."
Burgum shares three children with ex-wife Karen Stoker and has been married to Kathryn Helgaas since 2016.
Glen Rose, Texas, native Brooke Rollins has a degree in agricultural development from Texas A&M and got her JD from University of Texas School of Law.
During the first Trump administration she was director of the Domestic Policy Council and Assistant to the President for Strategic Initiatives in the White House.
Before being picked to lead the Department of Agriculture, Rollins was CEO and president of the America First Policy Institute, a think tank she founded in 2021 to promote Trump's public policy agenda.
According to her government bio, she and husband Mark Rollins spend most of their free time at home in Fort Worth "taxiing their four very active children to baseball games, cattle shows, piano lessons, and Aggie football games."
Before joining Trump's cabinet, Howard Lutnick was CEO and president of financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald, where he rose through the ranks after being hired as a young broker in 1983.
The New York-headquartered company infamously lost 658 employees in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks when one of four hijacked planes hit the World Trade Center's North Tower.
"I went to 20 funerals a day for 35 days," Lutnick, whose brother Gary was among those killed, told BBC News in 2006. "So there were times I couldn't even go to my great friends' funerals. One day, my best friend's brother was being buried at the same exact time as my roommate from college's brother. So my wife went to one and I went to one."
Asked how he was able to move forward, he said, "I would describe it like being on a surf board on a giant wave, and that if you ever looked back, the wave would get you and maybe I wouldn't be able to function."
Lutnick has four children with wife Allison Lambert.
Lori Chavez-DeRemer served as mayor of Happy Valley, Ore., from 2011 to 2019 and then became the first Republican woman to be elected to Congress from her state in 2022.
She lost her bid for re-election, however, leaving the California native—and pro-union daughter of a Mexican-American Teamster dad—open to serving in Trump's second cabinet.
Chavez-DeRemer is a mom of twin daughters with her high school sweetheart husband Dr. Shawn DeRemer. Marking their 33rd wedding anniversary in 2024, she wrote on Instagram, "The years fly by because we are willing to be committed to a 'great love' that’s always worth fighting for."
Less than two weeks after she was confirmed as Labor Secretary on March 11, 2025, the DeRemers became grandparents.
Lifelong Democrat Robert F. Kennedy Jr. threw his support behind Trump after his own 2024 candidacy fizzled.
The third of Robert F. Kennedy and Ethel Kennedy's 11 children, the environmental lawyer who's now overseeing the so-called "MAHA" (make America healthy again) movement, has been known more in recent years for questioning the safety of vaccines and psychotropic drugs and prompting the ire of his own family.
While sister Kerry Kennedy slammed his "inexplicable effort" to "desecrate" their father's memory by endorsing Trump, cousin Caroline Kennedy called him a "predator" in a January 2025 open letter urging the Senate to not confirm him as HHS secretary.
On the personal front, Kennedy is a father of six: Two kids from his first marriage, to Emily Black, and four children with late second wife Mary Richardson, who died by suicide in 2012. He has been married to Curb Your Enthusiasm alum Cheryl Hines since 2014.
Former NFL player Scott Turner represented Texas' 33rd district in Congress from 2013 to 2017 before Trump appointed him director of the White House Opportunity and Revitalization Council in 2019.
“My mom and dad and my godparents always taught me to serve others,” he said in a 2016 NFL Player Engagement interview. “They always instilled in me to look out for other people and to work hard and to have a tremendous faith...It’s not easy; you just have to make up in your mind that’s what you’re going to do.”
Also an entrepreneur and Baptist pastor, he has been married to wife and fellow University of Illinois alum Robin Turner since 1995. In 2009 the couple adopted Scott's nephew Solomon, who played football at Baylor and Hawaii before walking on at Illinois.
“Had it not been for my uncle and my aunt, I don’t know where I would be,” Solomon told Big Ten news site Saturday Tradition in 2022. “Personally, it just means the world to me, not only for him to be my father figure, but to come here and do this part, it’s almost like I’m giving back to him like a thank you."
Sean Duffy first made a name for himself in 1997 as a housemate on The Real World: Boston.
He shares nine children with The Real World: San Francisco alum Rachel Campos-Duffy, whom he met competing on Road Rules: All Stars in 1998 and married the following year.
Duffy spent eight years as Ashland County District Attorney in his home state of Wisconsin before serving in Congress from 2011 to 2019. He resigned from office that August, citing his yet-to-be-born ninth child's health issues.
"After she’s born, whether it’s two to six months after life, she’s going to need open-heart surgery," he explained on Fox & Friends. "They gotta crack her open and fix the heart."
Duffy added, "I love politics, but I love my family, and I think it’s always a balance. The schedules are grueling. I’m out in D.C. four days a week, and then I’m back with Rachel." Traveling around his district meeting people, he said, "we get beat up a little bit as members of Congress. We’re a favorite punching bag."
On The Real World, "I was forced to live with people who were so different than me," he told NCTA in May 2019. "When I first got there, I saw the stark differences I had with my roommates. But when I left, I realized I had way more in common with them than I ever imagined."
He compared the experience to crossing the aisle in Congress: "It's amazing the kind of legislation you can work on together and how many points of agreement you actually have."
Self-described "energy nerd" Chris Wright is the founder of Pinnacle Technologies, which, according to his Energy Department bio, "created the hydraulic fracture [a.k.a. fracking] mapping industry."
Before his cabinet nomination, he served as CEO of Liberty Energy, the United States' second-largest fracking company.
Wright—"a passionate father, grandfather, skier, cyclist, climber, and outdoor enthusiast," per his bio—and wife Liz Wright lived in Colorado before relocating to D.C.
Linda McMahon (née Edwards) was 17 when she married 21-year-old husband Vince McMahon in 1966, after she finished high school. She studied to be a French teacher but ended up co-running the family business, World Wrestling Entertainment, from 1980 until 2009.
McMahon served as Administrator of the Small Business Administration from 2017 to 2019 during Trump's first term. After he was elected again in 2024, the grandmother of six co-chaired his transition team and was picked to head up the U.S. Department of Education—which Trump wants to dismantle.
"I'm really all for the president’s mission, which is to return education to the states,” McMahon told the New York Times. “I believe, as he does, that the best education is closest to the child."
While they're still married, McMahon's attorney confirmed in November 2024 that the former WWE executive and her husband are separated, according to the Washington Post. Their son Shane McMahon and daughter Stephanie McMahon are both former professional wrestlers and son-in-law Paul "Triple H" Levesque is chief content officer of WWE.
U.S. Air Force Reserve Col. Doug Collins is a lawyer and former Georgia State House representative, congressman and military chaplain.
But, according to his VA bio, he's "foremost a husband to Lisa and father to daughter Jordan and sons Copelan and Cameron."
Governor of South Dakota since 2019, Kristi Noem was rumored to be on the short list of possible running mates for Trump in 2024, until she wrote about shooting her family's unruly dog in her memoir No Going Back.
Unfazed by controversy, Trump picked Noem, who also served in Congress from 2011 to 2019 and sat on the House Armed Services Committee, to head up the Department of Homeland Security, which is responsible for protecting the United States from internal and external threats.
The onetime South Dakota Snow Queen married husband Bryon Noem in 1992 and they share three children.
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