Melania Trump celebrated the 102nd birthday of the National Park Service at the White House Saturday with representatives of America’s spectacular public lands, and marked the event on Twitter.
Once again, similar to her appearance at a conference against cyberbullying, the first lady highlighted an issue on which her husband has a less than stellar record.
President Donald Trump clashed with the National Park Service right from his start in office over its photos of his inaugural crowd. Trump insisted the attendance was historically large, but even extra photographs he reportedly ordered the park service to provide failed to inflate the crowd to the president’s view of reality. When the NPS retweeted side-by-side photos of Trump and Barack Obama’s clearly much larger 2009 inaugural crowd, it was ordered to stop tweeting.
The episode spawned a series of “alt government” Twitter accounts.
On policy matters, the Trump administration has incurred the wrath of those opposing the diminishment of public lands. Last year, Trump gutted the size of the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments in Utah to open up much of those public lands to private logging, drilling and mining operations.
Early this year almost every member the federally chartered National Park System Advisory Board quit because Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke refused to meet with them.
Twitter users felt compelled to remind Melania Trump of her husband’s history with public lands.