If you visit a National Park on MLK Day next month or Juneteenth in June, you’ll have to pay an entry fee beginning next year. It wasn’t always that way. The Trump administration has made sweeping revisions to the National Park Service’s fee-free calendar day, emphasizing patriotism over history.
With its focus on Patriotism, it has added Flag Day to the list, and parenthetically noted that Flag Day is also President Donald Trump’s Birthday.
The Park Service offered no explanation for the removal of MLK and Juneteenth, or why it felt compelled to note that Flag Day and Trump’s birthday are coincidental.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum explained that these policies are designed to ensure that “U.S. taxpayers, who already support the National Park System, continue to enjoy affordable access, while international visitors contribute their fair share to maintaining and improving our parks.”
This focus on taxpayer benefit and foreign visitor fees—which includes a significant fee hike for non-residents—is the sole rationale offered for the dates selected, which are overwhelmingly tied to traditional civic holidays and presidential legacies: Presidents Day, Memorial Day, Constitution Day, and Theodore Roosevelt’s birthday.
The Egotistical Insertion
This declared patriotic modernization is overshadowed by the single most controversial addition: Flag Day (June 14). While celebrating the American flag is a clear patriotic theme, the official announcement undermines this broader focus by explicitly attaching the parenthetical note: “President Donald Trump’s birthday.”
The administration offered no public statement as to why this highly personalized note was necessary. Critics immediately condemned it as a self-serving, deliberate, egotistical insertion that elevates the President’s personal date of birth to the status of a national civic holiday.
The Unanswered Question of Erasure
While the reasons for the included dates are couched in financial and “America-first” rhetoric, the administration has maintained total silence regarding the elimination of MLK Day and Juneteenth.
Advocacy groups and civil rights leaders have seized on this silence, arguing the removal of the only two fee-free days tied to Black civil rights and freedom is a calculated effort to erase meaningful history and diminish the visibility of Black Americans on federal lands. The National Parks Conservation Association noted that, “For some reason, Black history has repeatedly been targeted by this administration, and it shouldn’t be.”
The new calendar is not just a list of free days; it is a statement on whose history the government chooses to celebrate.
The Park Service’s silence on its removal of holidays that focus on the African-American struggle speaks louder than anything else.
We hear the reason clearly: it’s an attempt to hide America’s historic quest to right wrongs done to Black Americans through slavery and bias. The fact that the nation is moving in the right direction, symbolized by MLK and Juneteenth, should be saluted and highlighted.
That’s very patriotic, more patriotic than saluting Donald Trump’s Birthday.
It should be unconstitutional.