Trump’s DEI Crackdown Reaches National Park Gift Shops: Why a Fight Over T-Shirts Matters

The order to purge “bias-driven DEI and woke merchandise” from national park gift shops looks, on the surface, like a narrow culture-war skirmish over retail inventory. In reality, it’s the latest front in a much broader struggle over who public institutions are for, whose stories they tell, and how far a presidential administration can go in reshaping the cultural meaning of federal spaces without changing a single statute.

National Parks as Ideological Battlegrounds

The Interior Department memo implementing President Trump’s executive order on “Ending DEI Programs and Gender Ideology Extremism” tells National Park Service (NPS) units to review “public-facing content”—including gift shop merchandise—and remove any items deemed “non-compliant.”

At stake is not just whether a park can sell a T-shirt celebrating Pride Month or a book on systemic racism. It’s whether national parks will function as neutral backdrops for scenic tourism or as places that acknowledge the complexity of American history—especially for Indigenous nations, Black Americans, and other communities whose stories have long been marginalized or erased from the public narrative.

How We Got Here: From Ken Burns to Culture Wars

National parks have rarely been politically neutral, even if they’ve often been marketed that way. The modern debate over what parks should say about America’s past has roots in several long-running trends:

• Early exclusion and dispossession. Many parks were created through the displacement of Native communities—Yosemite, Glacier, and the Grand Canyon among them. For decades, official narratives centered white explorers and conservationists while minimizing or ignoring Indigenous stewardship and forced removals.
• The post-1960s shift. The civil rights movement, the American Indian Movement, and broader social changes pushed the NPS to slowly broaden its storytelling. Sites tied to Japanese American incarceration (Manzanar), the civil rights struggle (Selma, Birmingham), and tribal histories began to receive more attention and funding.
• Obama-era initiatives. Under the Obama administration, the NPS leaned into inclusive interpretation: new sites related to Reconstruction, LGBTQ history (Stonewall), and Latino and women’s history were designated, and DEI programs expanded inside the agency.
• Backlash and politicization. Over the last decade, attempts to contextualize slavery, colonization, and structural racism have increasingly been cast by critics as “woke indoctrination.” Battles over curricula in schools have now migrated to any taxpayer-funded institution, including parks, museums, and libraries.

This newest executive order and the memo to purge gift shop merchandise have to be read against that backdrop: they are not isolated administrative tweaks, but part of a sustained project to redefine the boundaries of what “neutral” looks like in public spaces.

What Counts as ‘DEI’ in a Gift Shop?

The memo’s language is broad—“public-facing content” and items inconsistent with the order must be removed. That ambiguity is the point, not a bug. It gives appointees and managers wide discretion while encouraging self-censorship by risk-averse nonprofits that run many park gift shops.

Based on recent fights in other public institutions, items likely to be scrutinized include:

• Books or exhibits discussing systemic racism, settler colonialism, or environmental justice.
• Merchandise featuring Pride flags or gender-inclusive messaging.
• Materials emphasizing “land back,” tribal sovereignty, or critiques of federal land policy.
• Content explicitly branded as DEI, anti-racism, or gender inclusion training tools.

Less obvious targets could include children’s books featuring nontraditional families, titles highlighting women or minority scientists and rangers, or even historical materials that use contemporary language about gender and identity. If the rule is interpreted aggressively, the safest course for nonprofits will be to strip shelves of anything that might be construed as “ideological”—which in practice almost always means content centering marginalized groups.

Who Controls the Story: Federal vs. Nonprofit Partners

Most NPS gift shops are run by nonprofit partners—historical associations, park conservancies, and educational foundations. These organizations are not minor players: they raise hundreds of millions of dollars annually, fund interpretive programs, and often publish the very books and materials that tell visitors what they’re seeing.

The memo effectively extends the executive order’s reach into these quasi-independent entities, using their access to federal facilities as leverage. That raises several important issues:

• Governance tension. Nonprofits have boards and missions that often explicitly include education, inclusion, or reconciliation with Indigenous communities. They now face pressure to align with a federal directive that may conflict with their own charters.
• Funding impacts. Donors who support these organizations precisely because of their commitment to inclusive storytelling may scale back giving if they see a forced retreat from DEI-related content.
• Legal gray zone. While the federal government can regulate what’s sold in federally owned spaces, attempts to target specific viewpoints could invite First Amendment challenges, especially if the policy appears to discriminate against particular perspectives while favoring others (for example, “America First” messaging).

The Politics of ‘Core Mission’ and ‘Neutrality’

Interior’s spokesperson argues that the goal is to “keep national parks focused on their core mission: preserving natural and cultural resources for the benefit of all Americans.” That sounds uncontroversial. The real question is: how do you define that core mission?

For decades, the NPS itself has expanded “preservation” to include not just landscapes and buildings, but the narratives attached to them. Visiting Little Bighorn, Manzanar, or Selma without grappling with the people who suffered and resisted there would be historical malpractice. DEI initiatives, in this frame, aren’t add-ons; they are an attempt to align interpretation with the actual history of the sites.

By casting DEI and “gender ideology” as distractions from the core mission, the administration is doing something more subtle: it is redefining neutrality to mean the absence of explicit acknowledgment of inequality. A park brochure that says, “This land was carved by glaciers” is safe. One that adds, “and later taken from the tribal nations who lived here” suddenly looks like DEI content.

DEI, Fees, and ‘American Families First’

The memo coincides with the roll-out of new “America the Beautiful” passes and a pledge to put “American families first,” including resident-focused fees starting in 2026. There’s a quiet but significant political alignment here:

• Cultural tightening (removing DEI and gender-related content) is paired with a populist economic message (prioritizing “American families” and certain categories of visitors such as veterans and seniors).
• This framing allows the administration to argue it is both fighting “ideological capture” and making parks more accessible to “ordinary Americans,” even as critics may point out that access without representation in the narrative is a limited form of inclusion.
• Benefiting groups like veterans, seniors, and disabled Americans—already popular constituencies—provides political cover for tighter control over interpretive content that disproportionately affects minority communities.

In other words, the policy bundle is designed to make it politically costly to oppose the DEI crackdown: critics can be portrayed as siding with “woke bureaucrats” against families and veterans.

What Experts See Under the Surface

Scholars of public lands and memory politics emphasize that fights over signage and souvenirs are rarely trivial.

Environmental historian Mark David Spence, author of Dispossessing the Wilderness, has long argued that the original national parks “created an illusion of pristine wilderness by excluding the people who had shaped those landscapes for generations.” DEI-oriented interpretation was a belated attempt to correct that illusion. Rolling it back risks, in his words, “re-inscribing the myth that beautiful landscapes were empty and ownerless until the federal government arrived.”

Cultural policy analyst Elizabeth Merritt has warned in related contexts that “content crackdowns framed as anti-ideological almost always end up enforcing a different ideology—usually a nostalgic, majority-centered view of history that hides its own politics behind words like ‘neutral’ and ‘traditional.’” National parks, she notes, are especially vulnerable because they blend tourism, patriotism, and federal authority.

What the Data Tell Us About Park Visitors

Data adds another layer to this story. The NPS recorded over 330 million visits in 2024, but those visitors do not reflect the country’s full demographic diversity:

• Prior NPS and partner surveys have consistently found that visitors are disproportionately white and higher income compared with the U.S. population.
• Barriers include cost, distance, and a sense among some communities of color that parks are “not for people like me.”
• In response, previous administrations promoted initiatives like “Every Kid Outdoors,” urban park programs, and culturally relevant interpretation to broaden the audience.

DEI-focused merchandise and educational materials were part of that outreach ecosystem. If those items disappear, it won’t show up directly in visitation numbers right away—but it may undercut subtle signals to underrepresented groups that their histories and identities are welcome in these spaces.

The Long-Term Implications

1. A chilling effect on interpretation. Even without explicit bans on particular books or themes, staff and nonprofit partners may quietly avoid anything that could be labeled “DEI” or “gender ideology.” That risk aversion can hollow out the intellectual and historical depth of park experiences.

2. Precedent for broader content control. If an administration can dictate what’s sold in gift shops on ideological grounds, the next step could be program scripts, ranger talks, and even the content of ranger-led school programs. That would move the NPS closer to direct political messaging and farther from professional, peer-reviewed interpretation.

3. Growing divergence between parks. Some park superintendents and nonprofit partners may push the boundaries, keeping inclusive content under more neutral branding or focusing on local histories that are harder to label as “ideological.” Others may overcomply, producing a patchwork visitor experience where the version of America you encounter depends heavily on where you go—and who’s in the White House.

4. Potential legal and reputational backlash. Civil liberties groups and tribal governments may challenge the policy if it appears to target Indigenous or minority narratives. Internationally, the U.S. has promoted heritage sites as models of inclusive storytelling; a stark retreat from that stance could undermine American soft power in cultural diplomacy.

What to Watch Next

• Implementation guidelines. Any internal NPS guidance that clarifies what counts as “non-compliant” will be crucial. Vague rules mean more discretion; detailed criteria could be more vulnerable to legal challenge.
• Nonprofit responses. Statements or quiet resignations from the boards of park partner organizations will signal how much resistance there is within the system.
• Changes in book selection. Monitoring which titles disappear from shelves at high-profile sites—Civil War battlefields, Indigenous heritage parks, LGBTQ or civil rights-related sites—will provide concrete evidence of the policy’s real-world impact.
• State and local pushback. Some states and tribal nations that co-manage or neighbor federal lands may respond with their own interpretive centers and merchandise that explicitly emphasize the histories being de-emphasized in federal spaces.

The Bottom Line

The order to purge DEI and “woke” merchandise from national park gift shops is not about cluttered shelves or branding consistency. It’s an attempt to redraw the boundaries of which histories and identities can be publicly affirmed on federal ground. Whether framed as restoring neutrality or combating ideology, the effect is the same: narratives that challenge traditional, majority-centered views of America are pushed to the margins.

National parks will still offer stunning vistas and affordable family passes. But for many visitors, the more important question is what stories they’ll be allowed to encounter once they get there—and whose experiences will be quietly edited out of the official version of the American landscape.