| schema:text
| - In early April 2026, a rumor spread online that sculptors were adding a fifth face to Mount Rushmore National Memorial — that of U.S. President Donald Trump.
The claim spread on multiple platforms, including X (archived) and Facebook, and several Snopes readers also wrote in regarding the claim.
Many posts pointed to an article published in the British tabloid The Daily Mail on April 1 titled, "Taking shape: The new face of Mount Rushmore." The article began:
Secured by ropes, a team of intrepid sculptors chisel away at a very famous quiff as the shock first addition to Mount Rushmore in 85 years is revealed by the Daily Mail.
The world-renowned memorial to the US's most revered presidents, in South Dakota, is having a controversial fifth face added in the form of one Donald J Trump.
The 45th and 47th US president is joining legendary predecessors George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln.
There was no truth to the claim — there are no approved plans for Trump's face to appear alongside Washington's, Jefferson's, Roosevelt's and Lincoln's, as of this writing. The Daily Mail published the story as an April Fools' joke.
The Daily Mail later updated its story to include the disclaimer "April Fool! Don't Rush to protest against Trump's move, we're only joking. Did YOU fall for it?" before removing the story entirely.
The story featured an image supposedly depicting the bust of Trump emerging out of the mountainside as a crew of sculptors worked, but the image was generated using artificial intelligence.
Using Google Gemini, we scanned the image for a watermark, called SynthID, that Google adds to images created or manipulated with its AI tools. Gemini detected a SynthID watermark, meaning "most or all of it was generated or edited using Google AI tools."
We also noted several common markers of AI generation in the image, including inconsistent shadows, objects that inexplicably blend together (such as a tool with a sculptor's arm) and an unnatural lack of texture in random places.
(The Daily Mail)
The Daily Mail story also featured two names that were anagrams: The story's author, Olaf Priol, and Rolf Paoli, supposedly the "Trump 4 Rushmore" campaign head. Both names, unscrambled, spell "April Fool."
Though the claim in April 2026 originated as a joke, the push to add Trump to Mount Rushmore has received attention in the past.
In 2020, The New York Times reported that then-South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem said Trump told her "he aspired to have his image etched on the monument."
Trump denied the rumor (archived), though he said it "sounds like a good idea to me!"
In 2025, U.S. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., introduced a bill "to arrange for the carving of the figure of President Donald J. Trump on Mount Rushmore National Memorial." The bill never made it out of committee.
According to Jeremy Paul — a professor of law and former dean of the Northeastern University School of Law who spoke with Northeastern Global News in June 2025 — the White House would likely require Congressional approval and could face lawsuits from tribal nations or environmental groups if it attempted to add Trump's face to the mountain.
The site of Mount Rushmore, which was sculpted from 1927 to 1941, has been at the center of Indigenous resistance to U.S. occupation since the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, which stipulated the South Dakota's Black Hills were reserved for the Lakota, also known as the Teton Sioux. When gold was discovered in the area, prospectors forced Indigenous communities off the land.
In 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Sioux Nation, determining that the government had illegally taken the Black Hills.
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)
![[cxml]](/fct/images/cxml_doc.png)
![[csv]](/fct/images/csv_doc.png)
![[text]](/fct/images/ntriples_doc.png)
![[turtle]](/fct/images/n3turtle_doc.png)
![[ld+json]](/fct/images/jsonld_doc.png)
![[rdf+json]](/fct/images/json_doc.png)
![[rdf+xml]](/fct/images/xml_doc.png)
![[atom+xml]](/fct/images/atom_doc.png)
![[html]](/fct/images/html_doc.png)