In a move the Trump administration calls “just another example of American carnage,” the National Parks Service admitted today in a press conference they had plans to add the face of former President Barack Obama to the Mount Rushmore National Monument.
Henry Murphy, a spokesman from the NPS, told reporters that the organization’s leaders had been planning to add Obama’s face for a while now.
The new construction would’ve have been classified as a “progressive renovation” of the chunk of rock next to the bust of Abraham Lincoln.
The plan was foiled when, this past week, a Trump aide was accidentally CC’ed on a NPS email about the project.
“We were hoping to have the project completed by the summer of 2018, just in time for President Trump’s impeachment,” Murphy said during the press conference. “We had everything set. Workers were hired, sketches were done and we were ready to launch the project. It’s a sad day around here.”
When asked how the NPS would pay for the project, Murphy danced around an answer. In a follow-up question, Murphy admitted that the parks service backdoored money from contributions to the Environmental Protection Agency’s global-warming research fund.
From there, he said, the NPS channeled the money to an unnamed investor who, according to sources, is the same investor who paid for protesters to block the construction of the Dakota Pipeline project.
That investor provided some 300 workers for the Mount Rushmore project; all off the books, according to the NPS. A source close to one of the project’s organizers said all but five of the workers double as pipeline protesters.
“Call it what you want, but we felt like this was the right thing to do,” Murphy said. “Barack’s face was slim enough, our artists told us, to squeeze it in right next to Lincoln.”
The NPS said they were prepared to launch a series of tweets about the matter, but decided not to post them for fear of reprisal from Trump’s administration
Hector Guthrie, one of the artists involved in the project, said he was proud of the work but that there was a lot of battling back and forth about what should and shouldn’t be added to the sculpture.
“A few people in the group were worried about the birther arguments that inevitably would come up once the project was done,” Guthrie said. “So, we decided to etch Obama’s birth certificate across his forehead in both English and Arabic. The letters would be really small, though, so you wouldn’t be able to see them unless you were up close.”
