Donald Trump was sworn in for a second term on January 20, 2025. Eight days later, one of Florida's members of Congress used her power to introduce legislation — the actual job we send people to Washington to do — on this:

A bill ordering the federal government to carve Trump's face into Mount Rushmore.

Anna Paulina Luna filed it on January 28, 2025. She announced it on X with two words:

"Let's get carving!"

In her own press release, Luna said the monument "deserves to reflect his towering legacy — a legacy further solidified by the powerful start to his second term." Trump had been president again for eight days. That was the "legacy" she wanted permanently blasted into a mountain.

What happened to the bill

Nothing. That's not an exaggeration — here is the complete life story of H.R. 792, according to the official congressional record:

• January 28, 2025 — Introduced in House
• January 28, 2025 — Referred to the House Committee on Natural Resources

That's it. Two lines. Eighteen months later, there is no third line.

And here's the part that says the most: the bill has zero cosponsors. In eighteen months, not one other member of Congress — not a single fellow Republican — put their name on it. Luna stood completely alone.

She still got what she was actually after. The headlines ran. The X post went out. The press release went up on her taxpayer-funded House website. The bill was never really meant to become law. It was meant to be seen by one person.

It was never physically possible

Set aside the politics for a second. The bill couldn't work.

You cannot add a fifth face to Mount Rushmore, because there isn't enough good rock. This isn't a new discovery or a partisan talking point. The mountain's own lead sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, wrote it down in May 1936 — before the carving was even finished:

"stone limitations are so serious, that I doubt if it would be possible to change the composition, which is fixed, in any way to include a fifth head."

Ninety years later, the people who actually know the mountain say the same thing. Paul Nelson, the retired engineer who ran the rock monitoring system at Mount Rushmore, told NBC News: "It comes down to the geology, the engineering. It just can't be done."

Dan Wenk, who was superintendent of the monument for more than a decade, explained why the empty-looking space beside Lincoln and Washington is a mirage. The rock there is "not suitable for carving," he said — it's "very fractured, it's very soft." Cutting into it risks cracking what's already there. His bottom line:

"It doesn't matter how worthy someone is — if the rock is not there, you can't carve them."

So Luna wrote a bill instructing the Secretary of the Interior to do something the government's own experts say is impossible. She didn't check first. Checking would have ruined the news cycle.

She is not alone in this — that's the problem

Luna's mountain bill wasn't a one-off stunt by one strange member. It's a genre. Newsweek counted up the efforts by Republicans in Congress to stick Trump's name or face on things, including bills to:

• Put Trump's face on the $100 bill (Rep. Brandon Gill of Texas)
• Create a brand-new $250 bill with his portrait (Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina)
• Print $500 bills with his face (Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona)
• Make June 14, his birthday, a national holiday (Rep. Claudia Tenney of New York)
• Rename Dulles airport after him (Rep. Guy Reschenthaler of Pennsylvania)
• Rename the D.C. Metro and rebrand the trains the "Trump Train" (Rep. Greg Steube of Florida)
• Rename all U.S. coastal waters the "Donald John Trump Exclusive Economic Zone" (Steube again)

Think about what that list actually is. It's a group of adults, elected to write the laws of the United States, competing to see who can flatter one man the most creatively. Congress has one real job — represent the people who sent them and hold the president accountable. This is the opposite of that. It's the branch of government that's supposed to check the president auditioning to decorate him.

Meanwhile, back in Pinellas County

Here's what makes it worse than silly.

Luna represents Florida's 13th District — Pinellas County. When she filed her Mount Rushmore bill, her district was in the middle of the worst recovery in its recent history. Hurricanes Helene and Milton had hit nearly 47,000 homes and more than 1,200 businesses in Pinellas County. The aftermath of those storms "defined much of the county's priorities" through all of the following year — more than 34,000 permits pulled, roughly 85,000 inspections, and $813.8 million in federal housing recovery money that county officials had to go out and secure.

Notice who did that work. County commissioners. County staff. Local officials chasing down HUD dollars for people whose houses flooded.

While that was going on, their congresswoman's marquee legislative move was a monument carving.

And when Pinellas residents wanted to ask her about any of it in person, they couldn't. Luna wouldn't hold a town hall — constituents say they called, emailed and rallied outside her office asking for one, were told no, and finally held a "People's Town Hall" without her and recorded it to send to her office. National Democrats put up billboards across the district reading "Rep. Luna = Coward."

She has time to carve a mountain. She does not have time to stand in a room in St. Petersburg and answer questions from the people who pay her salary.

The rest of the pattern

The Mount Rushmore bill isn't an outlier in her record. It's the record.

In April 2025, Luna introduced legislation to write DOGE's cuts permanently into law — locking in the chainsaw so it couldn't easily be undone. Her verdict: "The American people deserve no less!"

On tariffs — the thing driving up prices at the register for every family in her district — she went on television and called it "genius," claiming the tariffs "have actually lowered costs."

And in August 2025, chairing a task force on declassifying federal secrets, she went on a podcast and told the country that lawmakers had seen evidence of "interdimensional beings" that "can actually operate through the time spaces that we currently have."

Groceries. Insurance. Rebuilding after two hurricanes. Interdimensional beings.

He got his mountain moment anyway

The punchline arrived this month. Trump traveled to Mount Rushmore and gave a speech there on Friday, July 3, 2026 to usher in the country's 250th anniversary. He opened with soaring lines about American exceptionalism, then veered somewhere darker: "Communism is a mortal threat to American liberty," he said from the monument. "It is the greatest threat to our country, including World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor or even 9/11." Beforehand, he posted a video showing a gold Mount Rushmore with his own face added next to Lincoln.

So he got the picture. He didn't need Luna's bill, and he was never going to get the carving. What her bill actually accomplished was to spend a piece of the legislative power of the United States House of Representatives on flattery — at a moment when 47,000 households in her own county were trying to get their homes back.

That's the choice, and she made it in her first week. Not a bill on insurance costs. Not a bill on storm recovery. Not a bill on the price of food. A bill about a face on a mountain.

We deserve a representative who works for us.

Source

• Ashleigh Fields, "Florida Republican introduces bill to add Trump to Mount Rushmore," The Hill, January 29, 2025. Photo: AP Photo/David Zalubowski.