Vern Evans
Editor’s Note: This is the third of a three-part series covering the presidential election and how each administration’s policies might impact outdoorsmen and gun owners. Part one focused on how (and why) Outdoor Life covers politics. Part Two examines a potential Harris-Walz administration.
There’s a long and ragged fissure running through rural America that splits hunters and outdoorsfolk between those who consider gun rights their animating issue, and those who prioritize access to intact wildlife habitat.
By most measures, it’s a false dichotomy that a hunter or shooter must vote either for guns or for the place to use guns. But ahead of next week’s election many gun owners are convinced that the Democrat, Vice-President Kamala Harris, will either grab or ban certain firearms, and conservationists are equally certain that the Republican, former president Donald Trump, will industrialize entire landscapes and pollute the environment.
The contrast is a useful lens through which to consider Trump’s candidacy, which has magnified these and other differences but which has also been largely silent on issues of hunting, angling, shooting, and firearms policy.
Trump is an unconventional candidate by almost every measure, and determining how his administration might manage public lands, value clean water and wildlife habitat, and promote recreational access is more speculative than for most candidates. It’s reasonable to consider his first administration, from 2017 to 2021, as a guide to future action, but even that standard assessment is contradicted by Trump’s erraticism.
“I’d expect that we’ll have a return to core hunt and fish policies under a second Trump administration,” says the CEO of a wildlife-conservation organization who offered his perspectives with the agreement that Outdoor Life wouldn’t use his name or the name of his organization. As a non-profit, the CEO’s group is constrained from appearing to influence political candidates. “But Trump has been the most transactional presidential candidate in my memory, and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn, for instance, that he is trading cabinet positions for campaign contributions. So it’s hard to anticipate the priorities of a [second] Trump administration.”
The unknowns are further exaggerated because Donald Trump and vice-president nominee Ohio senator JD Vance haven’t released details, or even general overviews of, their plans to manage hunting, fishing, recreational access, and firearms policy. To be fair, neither have their opponents, Harris and her running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz. The uncertainties of even broad platforms regarding public-land management or firearms policies mean voters have to glean details from campaign statements, from sources who are closely watching both campaigns, from an Outdoor Life interview last week with Walz, and — in Trump’s case — his first administration and from an Outdoor Life interview with his son, Donald Trump, Jr., who is serving a Trump campaign as an advisor.
Trump’s First Administration
“Generally speaking, Trump’s first administration was good for sportsmen,” says another conservation leader who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “Access, especially to national wildlife refuges, was greatly expanded, gun restrictions were generally relaxed, and his Interior Department created the first Hunting and Shooting Sports Conservation Council to advise the administration on wildlife and conservation issues.”
Trump signed the Great American Outdoors Act, which earmarked about $10 billion for public-land infrastructure projects. The law also permanently authorized the Land and Water Conservation Fund, a perennial goal of public-land advocates.
Ryan Zinke, Trump’s first Interior Secretary, signed Secretarial Order 3362, which for the first time focused state and federal agency resources and attention on identifying and conserving Western big-game migration corridors and winter ranges.
But conservation gains in the Trump administration were largely offset by policies that commodified natural resources. The first Trump administration ramped up the pace and scale of energy development, especially on public lands in the West. America’s oil and gas production hit then-historic highs during Trump’s first administration, as he pursued a policy of “energy dominance.”
Some critics think he went too far, and that a subsequent Trump administration would favor energy development over other multiple uses of public land, including recreation. His “drill-baby-drill” drumbeat combined with rollbacks of environmental standards ignored market preferences for renewable energy and electric vehicles, as well as public support for world-leading environmental standards — especially those that reduce the impacts of climate change.
Trump isn’t the only extraction-focused president. Industry watchers have noted that U.S. oil and gas production also hit a record high under the Biden administration. The Biden administration has also accelerated renewable energy development on Western public lands. But in most campaign events, Trump promises his “energy dominance” policy will shrink inflation, starting with halving consumers’ energy costs.
Every administration’s public-land policy necessarily balances conservation of the public estate with development for an increasingly resource-hungry nation, says Patrick Berry, CEO of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers. Promises made during campaign season are often undone once a president takes office.
“Trump, in his first term, made a commitment to not sell off any public land and in large part he kept that commitment,” observes Berry. “But he also repealed the Roadless Rule, [would have] allowed mining near the protected Boundary Waters, and approved oil and gas development on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. He attacked national monuments and the Antiquities Act, and undermined collaborative sage grouse restoration plans.
“So, yes, he maintained public lands in public hands, but at what expense and expense to whom?” says Berry. “I think there could be a way forward [in the next administration] that meets some of those commitments without creating policy positions that feel like an all-or-nothing proposition.”
Lukas Leaf, executive director of Sportsmen for the Boundary Waters, worked to maintain protections of the most visited wilderness area in America when the BWCA was under threat during the Trump administration.
“Former President Donald Trump has been outspoken about increasing domestic energy and raw material production in the United States, which is an initiative that we can support, but certainly not at the cost of endangering the immaculate ecosystem of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness,” Leaf said in an emailed statement. “Vice President Harris’ intent to uphold President Biden’s moratorium in Superior National Forest is not yet something we can be sure of. We must work collectively to ensure protections for the Boundary Waters remain intact, regardless of who wins the upcoming election.”
The first Trump administration generally expanded recreational access to public lands, with new opportunities to hunt and fish on some 4 million acres. That includes 2.3 million acres opened to hunting and fishing on national wildlife refuges, though in some cases for fairly narrow opportunities.
One conservation leader who asked not to be named because of their organization’s expectation to work with the next administration took a jaundiced view of the appointment of conservation leaders to the Interior Department advisory council.
“The Hunting and Shooting Sports Council looks great on paper, but its members weren’t given meaningful opportunities for policy input,” they say. “I hasten to add that the follow-up in the Biden administration [the Hunting and Wildlife Conservation Council] was equally ineffectual. But, again, both are net positive. I’d rather have those relationships and formal conduits for communication with either administration than not.”
Trump on Firearms and the Second Amendment
While the Trump campaign is now vocal about its support of the Second Amendment, Donald Trump has had his own gun-policy inconsistencies.
He started his political career supporting “strong background checks” for gun buyers and in his 2000 book, “The America We Deserve,” he supported a ban on “assault weapons.” But since his first presidential candidacy in 2016, he has consistently supported a laissez-faire approach to guns, adamantly supporting the Second Amendment and generally resisting any restrictions on governmental restrictions on gun sales, distributions, or design and functionality.
Gun policy extends beyond firearms themselves. On his first day in office, Trump’s Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke repealed last-minute Obama-administration rules that would have outlawed lead-based ammunition and fishing tackle on national wildlife refuges.
Voluntary use of lead-free ammunition has been promoted in the Biden administration’s Interior Department, though in what some critics have called a “bait-and-switch” the USFWS this summer recommended a prohibition of lead ammo and fishing tackle on more than 200,000 acres of new recreational access on 12 national wildlife refuges.
“If you’re looking for fairly clear points of departure between the [2024 presidential] candidates, I think how they deal with lead ammunition is a good one,” says another unnamed conservation leader. “Under Harris, I could see a scenario where bans on lead ammo move beyond hunting and start being applied to recreational shooting. Under Trump, I think lead bans and phase-outs would be eliminated and there would be a voluntary approach to lead.”
Larry Keane is even more emphatic as he parses differences between the candidates’ firearms policy.
“A second Trump administration would be clearly better on guns,” says Keane, vice-president of governmental affairs for the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the firearms industry trade association. Under Trump “I think we’d see a repeal of [the Biden administration’s] whole-of-government attack on guns. I think we’d see an ATF [Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms] director who isn’t blatantly political. I think you’d see the White House’s Office of Gun Violence Prevention shut down,” and, he laughs, “maybe replaced with an Office for the Advancement of the Second Amendment.”
Insiders say that a second Trump administration would likely support nationwide “constitutional carry” (the removal of regulations and permits on either concealed or open carry of firearms), relax rules on background checks, and generally make gun purchases more permissive while tightening rules and laws on criminal use of firearms.
Because so much effort around gun policy in America is based on preventing firearm-related violence and high-profile mass shootings, how might Trump make America safer when it comes to guns? Keane says it’s not through restricting certain styles of firearms.
“The perception in America is that people don’t feel safe, and when people don’t feel safe in America, they purchase firearms,” he says. “The answer to reducing violence is making people feel safe again, not restricting guns or access to guns. Law-abiding gun owners aren’t the cause of the problem. The problem is criminals, and the cause of crime is multifaceted.”
Gun-rights advocates note that another Trump term would cement the current conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court, ensuring that future Second Amendment cases would receive a favorable hearing. The current court struck down a Trump administration ban on bump stocks, and turned down challenges to other Second Amendment cases, though many court-watchers note that the Court is waiting for the right gun case to establish a modern precedent on firearms rights.
Firearms and Political Radicalism
The rise of a radical political movement that was on display at the January 6 Capitol riots uses guns, and especially the AR-15 platform, as symbols of individual rights, resistance of authority, and proponents of political violence. And deep support for Trump.
That radical right-wing imagery is problematic, say some hunting and conservation industry insiders, because it will erode public support for traditional gun ownership.
“These self-appointed ‘patriots’ whose central mobilizing issue is guns have made it nearly impossible to have a sensible conversation about guns,” says one conservation group leader. “You have to be either all in on extreme positions or you’re labeled ‘anti-gun’ and [pro-gun] networks amplify that message to your customers. Strictly from a business standpoint, there’s a risk of overplaying our hand” with anything-goes positions on guns.
Trump on Public Lands Management
Management of public land is another clear point of differentiation between Harris and Trump. It’s reasonable to predict that Harris would continue to consider America’s public lands as opportunities for climate resiliency, rewilding, and tribal co-management. A Harris administration would likely keep the United States in the global climate accord known as the Paris Agreement, and continue to pursue the goals of the 30×30 initiative, which aims to protect biodiversity on 30 percent of cooperating nations’ land by the year 2030 in order to promote biodiversity.
As he did in his first administration, Trump would likely pull America out of the Paris Agreement and accelerate energy development on public land, relaxing permitting rules and lowering regulatory guardrails.
Both candidates have suggested one remedy for the nation’s affordable housing crisis is to sell parcels of federal land for housing development. To public-land advocates, one of the most troubling recent trends in the West is a resurgent effort to transfer federal lands to state management.
Many Western Republicans have called for wholesale transfer of federal lands in their states. While the Trump campaign has distanced itself from this new type of sagebrush rebel, the GOP’s party platform in Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho are clear: Republicans there would get rid of federal land in their states. Across the West, the Republican Party is squarely the party of Trump, giving these platforms added emphasis. Adding to the emergence of this issue, the Supreme Court in its next term may agree to hear a landmark case on who owns Western public lands.
But divestment of federal land holdings needn’t be wholesale nor end in privatization, says Donald Trump, Jr.
“We want the states to be involved in active management of this land, but we don’t want the states to sell them any time they have a budgetary shortfall,” says the president’s son. “We think there’s a happy medium where you make sure these lands stay public but where the states, and not Washington, D.C. — where nobody knows anything about land management — are involved in how they’re managed.”
Conservation leaders overwhelmingly agree that’s not a sustainable solution.
“The reality is that states can’t afford it,” says BHA’s Berry. “Stewardship, maintenance, infrastructure, fire suppression — they’re all expensive [with costs covered by federal budgets.] In the case of Utah, as they’ve proven with their state trust lands, the expense is such that they’d have no choice but to sell it off to the highest bidder or lease it for private extractive uses at the expense of the rest of us.”
As mentioned above, in Trump’s first administration, federal agencies rolled back more than 100 environmental standards, and in his current campaign the former president has stressed mining and drilling in the name of economic development. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has overturned environmental rules on everything from water to air to the ability of agencies to enforce regulations not explicitly authorized by Congress.
The presidential candidates also differ on private-land conservation priorities.
Under a second Trump administration, programs like conservation easements might slow or stop. The first Trump administration “did not want to do anything on private-lands conservation as they wanted as many acres in crop production as they could get,” says a conservation leader active in agricultural policy. “Farmers are experiencing some of the toughest market conditions we’ve seen in decades, and a Farm Bill is critical to providing some degree of certainty to producers. It will be interesting to see how various conservation programs, such as CRP, would be implemented in a second Trump administration.”
Cutting CRP and other conservation programs, including those that fund popular Walk-In Hunting Areas, is one of the many prescriptions for the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Project 2025, a briefing book prepared by conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation, which calls its document a “mandate for leadership” for the next administration. While Trump has distanced himself from the document and says it doesn’t represent his viewpoints, more than half its authors served in his first administration or campaigns.
Under the Department of the Interior section of Project 2025, Trump’s former BLM director William Perry Pendley calls for (among other initiatives) reinstating secretarial orders to ramp up energy extraction, delisting wolves and grizzly bears, moving BLM headquarters from D.C. to the West, and allowing BLM agents to “dispose humanely” of feral burros and horses on federal lands.
Donald Trump Jr. on the Record
Donald Trump, Jr. might not be in his father’s administration, but he is a close advisor to the senior Trump and an influential voice in conservative politics. He’s also an avid hunter and angler, owner of a big-game outfit in the Yukon, and publisher of Field Ethos, a magazine devoted to outdoor adventure. Outdoor Life talked with the younger Trump as he was arriving in Pennsylvania for a campaign rally, but his main interest was visiting a family cabin in the Catskills, where a neighbor had called him with news that a trophy-class whitetail buck was standing on his lawn.
“I wish elections were outside of hunting season — it’d be a lot more fun,” he says as he considered the question at hand: Why should hunters and anglers vote for his father?
“The reality is the actions speak for themselves,” he says. “My father opened up a lot of public land, he created access, he got rid of a lot of the draconian nonsense” by removing or relaxing regulations.
Trump, Jr. says that Democrats are relentlessly limiting hunting opportunity and access in an attempt to end hunting.
“Our whole thing was creating access for everyone, to let hunting and fishing thrive,” says Trump, Jr. “It can’t just be for those who are like me who do it all the time. You’ve got to get young people in the game, you’ve got to get people [access] who can’t afford to do the crazy stuff like I do. You’ve got to make new hunters. It feels like so much of the Left is about making it so prohibitive that it becomes hard to hunt or they introduce so many wolves that the elk herd gets diminished and people go on elk hunts and never even hear a bugle and instead of going back and hunting again, they take up golf.”
Trump, Jr. says intensifying energy development in a second Trump administration needn’t compromise either access or wildlife habitat.
“The reality is that you can do both, have growth and take care of things,” he says. “When you talk about the size and scope of our public lands, a thirty-by-thirty-yard drilling platform” isn’t a significant impact. “In reality, where most of the drilling is taking place isn’t exactly pristine. I think you could put aside reserves with better habitat than is happening in some of these places.”
But Trump Jr. says there are places that shouldn’t be developed. He takes credit for killing the Pebble Mine during the first Trump administration, which would have permitted a copper and gold mine in the headwaters of Alaska’s Nushagak River that sustains the Bristol Bay salmon fishery.
“I went to bat on an issue for which I believe,” he says. “I’ll always be that voice in the ear [of my father] on those major issues. Whether I’m in the administration or not, I can move a lot of needles, as I did on Pebble Mine.”
How would a second Trump administration resolve hot-button issues like corner-crossing, Endangered Species Act protections for grizzly bears and Midwestern wolves?
Trump Jr.’s take on corner-crossing tends to favor landowners whose mix of public-and-private checkerboarded ground has been difficult for sportsmen to access. He says landowners are eager to resolve the issue in order to solidify their private-land holdings.
“Every corner is a little different,” he says. “I’ve seen the disasters. I’ve seen these [landowners] have to hire people to prevent corner-crossing from happening. If you trade one piece of landlocked land for an area on a corner, you could square up a property, delineate the [property] lines more effectively, and eliminate these conflicts. I guarantee you that the landowners who deal with these issues would give up more acres than they would take back to be able to not have to deal with these headaches and that would be a net benefit to these public-land hunters who don’t have the ability to own ten- to twenty-thousand acres.”
Trump, Jr. says grizzly bear and wolf management needs to be returned to states and is generally supportive of reducing predator numbers. Protections for predators like mountain lions, bears, and wolves are a tool of the left to end traditional hunting, he says.
The Colorado ballot initiative that would prohibit hunting of mountain lions is “frankly designed to thin the elk herds so that people have less success,” says Trump, Jr. “When you have less success you have fewer hunters, when you have fewer hunters you have less political capital to lobby for the issues that matter, and I think that’s the end game for the left.”
The Administrative State
This is the most consequential presidential election in a generation, sources agree. But the real impact of an administration isn’t at the top, but rather down the ranks, deep in the civil service that implements executive-branch priorities.
“Most of the good work that’s done on the ground is done by career civil servants,” says another conservation leader who also asked not to be named. “Politicos come and go, but a large portion of the actual work gets done by people whose names you’ll never know. And those people down the ranks are worried about a Trump 2.0 administration, because of budget cuts and layoffs and political-patronage appointments.
“Part of the problem with a prospective Trump administration is that it’s a blank slate,” they say. “I cannot point to one thing that Trump says he wants to do in his second term that would benefit conservation and sportsmen and women. I think there’s a foregone conclusion [in the Trump campaign] that if you’re a hunter, you have to pick Trump. But why? I actually think it’s an open question.”
But rather than lofty policy priorities, the next administration will be defined by more granular governance decisions.
“I don’t think either campaign really knows the reduced state of our agencies,” says the CEO of another wildlife-conservation group. “We are asking the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to do more with less every year. That agency is down 800 to 900 FTEs [full-time equivalent employees]. We have national wildlife refuges all around the country that are ‘complexed,’ meaning that a number of different refuges that might span tens of thousands of acres are being managed by a single complex manager. This comes at a time when the National Refuge System is increasingly important for hunting access and species management. It’s a slow-motion car crash.”
Another conservation leader notes that neither Harris nor Trump is a hunter or a conservationist.
“Given that, whoever they select in their administration for Interior Secretary or Agriculture Secretary will be the true decision makers. And we generally have no idea who those people will be.”
Because of demographics — Baby Boomers are retiring at an accelerated rate — senior career natural resource professionals are leaving civil service. This is creating leadership vacuums both in D.C. and in the field.
Departing administrators are “the last of leadership who still have a connection to the hunting community, so while I’m concerned about the president, I’m most concerned about who they pick to lead those areas that control our destiny as hunters and conservationists. None of us really know who is going to be” in either a Harris or a Trump presidency, says the conservation leader. “Think about a Secretary of the Interior who says we need to create national sacrifice zones for energy development. That could change everything in the West” in terms of public lands-management and wildlife habitat.
Apart from administrative aptitude, larger demographic changes are likely to affect natural-resource management in the next administration.
“I think what’s at stake in the next administration is a battle between the rise of animal-rights activists, who are already finding success in ballot measures, state legislatures, and wildlife commissions,” says the conservation-group CEO. On the other side are “traditionalists who refuse to see the change all around them, from our changing climate to loss of wildlife habitat and who are unable to engage with younger, ethnically diverse Americans who don’t share their background or viewpoints.”
But given the drum-tight election, Donald Trump, Jr. is counting on hunters and anglers in swing states to decide the next president.
“Hunters generally lean to our side, 60 to 70 percent Republican, but traditionally they haven’t been all that mobilized or all that active on the voter rolls. We’re out there actively working those groups,” says Trump, Jr. “Last time we effectuated those outcomes and I think we will again.”
Read the full article here