Doug Burgum, the Secretary of the Interior, is not simply a member of Donald Trump’s Red State, defined by resentment, prejudice, and Fox News.
Burgum has spent days backing President Trump’s claim that the peeling lining of the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall was the work of vandals.
But he must know that the Reflecting Pool was no more vandalized than the 2020 election was rigged. He rode in the motorcade with Trump that sped up the middle of the emptied Reflecting Pool that may well have caused some of the damage in question.
But he continues to parrot his boss’s false accusations, seeming to have lost all sense of his former self as he declares, “We won’t back down.” He thereby becomes a vandal of another kind, desecrating a basic principle of justice in the country whose 250th birthday we are supposed to be celebrating.
“He cannot follow his own instincts, because Trump won’t tolerate it,” a close observer who has known Burgum for years told the Daily Beast on the condition he would not be named.
The observer added, “He has a Faustian bargain with Trump, and it would not surprise me to see, with the passage of time, he will come to regret some of the things he’s done.”
But Faust bargained for supreme knowledge, power and pleasure. The Burgumian bargain can be expressed in scriptural terms as “What will it profit a man if he gains the chance to shamelessly suck up to Donald Trump and forfeits his soul?”
Burgum is a 70-year-old graduate of the Stanford School of Business who sold a software startup to Microsoft for $1.1 billion and served two terms as a moderate Republican governor of North Dakota.
Back when he was a widely respected governor and still seemed to have a soul to sell, Burgum kicked in $1 million of his own money towards the building of the President Theodore Roosevelt Library in the state’s rugged Badlands.
By the time he neared the end of his second term in 2024, Burgum had made himself the lead champion of the TR library project. He seemed singularly determined to honor the hard-charging president who assumed office in 1901 and led America from the Gilded Age of unbridled corporate greed and the plundering of our natural resources into the Progressive Era of monopoly busting and conservation of public lands.
But North Dakota term limits barred Burgum from seeking a third term even if he wanted one. He faced the question of what to do next. He decided that he himself would run for president.
On June 7, 2023, Burgum announced that he was seeking the Republican nomination with the soggy campaign slogan ”A New Leader for A Changing Economy.” He appeared in two debates, but failed to qualify for the third and dropped out that December.
There remained a chance that Trump might pick him as a running mate. Burgum made repeated appearances, minus his self-respect, in the spring of 2024 at the Manhattan courthouse where Trump was on trial for seeking to hide hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels.
Each day, Trump would appear before the cameras outside the 15th-floor courtroom with his then-criminal defense attorney, Todd Blanche, at his side. Burgum stood among the solemn supporters arrayed behind Trump as if they were witnesses to a grave injustice.
“Election interference,” Burgum said of the proceedings. ”It’s tying up the president from being out on the campaign trail. And of course, we know from the polls that have come out…President Trump is leading all over the country.”
He kept to the Trump script as he continued, “The American people have already acquitted Donald Trump. The sooner that this scam trial can be concluded, the sooner the president can get back to getting out and campaigning and talking to the American people about the issues that matter.”
On May 30, Trump was found guilty of 34 felonies. Burgum shamelessly questioned the jurors’ integrity.
“If those 12 voted for president today, it would be 12 for Biden and zero for President Trump,” he told the press as if their individual politics had determined the verdict.
Two weeks later, Trump announced that he had picked JD Vance as his running mate. All Burgum had gained in servile exchange for his soul was a cabinet post. He became a hollowed-out Secretary of the Interior.
The onetime champion of the president who ended the Gilded Age became a blind follower of a president who declared a Golden Age where corporations were given free rein and everything from the Oval Office to statues have been literally gilded.
Trump declared “drill, baby, drill” and spoke of “beautiful coal.” Burgum turned his back on Roosevelt and went along with opening up huge tracts of public land for drilling and mining.
Burgum also joined Trump in scoffing at alternative sources of energy.
”When the sun goes down, solar produces zero electricity,” Burgum said at a House Natural Resources Committee hearing in May.
“I want to enter into the record this amazing new technology that apparently the secretary is unaware of,” Rep. Jared Huffman (D-CA) replied. “It’s a battery.”
Prior to Burgum, passes for U.S. residents to national parks bore an image taken by the winner of a contest for the best photos of public lands.
The passes now have portraits of Trump and George Washington. The Trump image in the style of the mugshot taken in Fulton County, Georgia, when he faced charges of actual election interference that were subsequently dropped. The passes are deemed invalid if a sticker covers his glowering face.
And some $90 million of National Park entrance fees are going toward Trump’s “auramaxxing” of Washington, D.C., which included the literal re-gilding of the statues of the Arts of War and the Arts of Peace on the Arlington Memorial Bridge. Gold leaf is also planned for the lettering at the summit of the 250-foot Triumphal Arch that Trump has detailed Burgum to build brutishly between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery. The gilded words are to include “LIBERTY AND JUSTICE FOR ALL.”
There was also the now-infamous relining of the Reflecting Pool.
Burgum continues to echo Trump’s bogus claims as if justice does not in fact apply to those who have been unfairly accused of vandalism. Even the normally dutiful U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, Jeannine Pirro, worked up the courage to say that the evidence indicated the damage to the lining was the result of a botched installation.
Pirro has dropped the charges against the four accused vandals, including 67-year-old Olympian canoeist David Hearn, who had been indicted for a felony. Her office contends in a 20-page court filing that Burgam’s department had failed to disclose exculpatory material. The other alleged, but nonetheless innocent vandals include Justin Carreno, Cameron Thiers and Sophie Dennison-Gibby.
“Had [The Department of the Interior] been forthcoming with the information clearly in its possession, the government would not have sought a grand jury indictment,” the filing says.
As always, Burgum stuck to the Trump script, insisting that Pirro had been provided with corroborating witness accounts and expert opinions.
“We won’t back down to deranged people who want to destroy, deface, or degrade our monuments,” Burgum declared on X.
Burgum and Pirro were summoned to the Oval Office on Monday. She reportedly accused Burgum of lying and trying to shift the blame to her for his own screw-ups.
Trump made it known that he was “not happy” with Pirro. He did not publicly express displeasure with Burgum, who stuck to the fiction about vandals.
While the Reflecting Pool and the Triumphal Arch have received considerable media attention, Burgum is also party to a comparatively little-noticed, but monumental betrayal of the Progressive Era president he once championed. Trump has moved to open more than 86 million acres of public lands to drilling, mining and other “resource extraction.”
And nobody is more disturbed by that than Ted Roosevelt IV, great-grandson of Teddy and a member of the Wilderness Society’s governing council.
“We are on the point of seeing a massive, intergenerational theft because these public lands don’t belong to us,” he told the Daily Beast this week. “They belong to all future generations.”
Of his great-grandfather, Ted IV said, “I think that without question, the Old Lion would be utterly appalled and outraged by what is happening. He fought desperately to see our public lands preserved, and he several times said they must be passed down to children ‘in the womb of time.’”
Ted IV was not in attendance on July 1, when Trump and Burgum together cut the ribbon at the dedication of the new Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library.
The great-grandson and his own son, Ted V were present at the library’s official opening on July 4 while Trump was in Washington, D.C. to deliver an address marking the nation’s 250th birthday.
Burgum was also there to witness the culmination of what had been his big project back when he was more the person people thought they knew. Then he resumed doing Trump’s bidding as the person he has become.
