Opinion: Arizona hunters aren't buying Trump's conservation pitch

In introducing the "Reinvigorating America's Hunting Heritage" Executive Order to a handpicked audience of MAGA sportsmen last week, President Trump veered off script to indulge in some self-congratulatory speculation about his support among hunters and anglers: "I think I got 99.9% of your votes. And why the hell wouldn't I? Are you going to vote for Kamala? I don’t think so."

Trump's claim that nearly all of our country's roughly 14.4 million hunters count themselves among the MAGA faithful is, unsurprisingly, false. While the party affiliation of hunters skews Republican, the truth about their politics is far more complex than Trump assumes. A 2025 YouGov poll found that 44% of Trump voters reported having been hunting, compared with 21% of Harris voters.

The substance and timing of Trump's executive order belie the confidence he projected from the podium about his popularity with this constituency.

Hunting would be impossible without ongoing efforts to conserve the millions of acres of public lands that sustain our wildlife in states like Arizona. Trump's order enacts policy changes that are ineffectual at best and counterproductive at worst when it comes to his stated goal of protecting hunting for future generations. Opening new areas of national wildlife refuges to hunting and overturning prohibitions on the use of lead ammunition, the order privileges immediate access and ease over long-term sustainability.

The real purpose of this order, announced six weeks ahead of the midterms, is to serve as a smokescreen. Trump hopes to distract a key constituency from the fact that, in less than two years, the second Trump administration has worked harder to undercut the long-term viability of hunting in the United States than any administration in recent memory.

Fortunately, hunters have already demonstrated that they cannot be fooled so easily. Regardless of their 2024 votes or party affiliations, hunters have proven to be an independent-minded and well-organized constituency that does not let partisan loyalty get in the way of its commitment to conserving the wild lands and waters that make hunting possible.

Outdoorsmen and -women flexed their political muscles early in Trump's second term when they shut down Utah Sen. Mike Lee's catastrophic amendment to the "Big Beautiful Bill" that would have opened 3.2 million acres of public land to sale.

This land transfer scheme, which we now know Trump's Department of the Interior was supporting from the beginning, was defeated after the outcry of a broad-based coalition of environmentalists and outdoor recreationalists. Groups like Backcountry Hunters and Anglers and the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership played a vital role in galvanizing the outcry from hunters that convinced many Republican lawmakers that supporting the liquidation of public lands would risk fracturing their own base.

Arizona hunters have often led public-lands conservation efforts, making Trump's latest hunting order a harder sell than he assumes.

Sen. Lee's opening gambit set the tone for Trump's relentless attacks on public lands conservation that have followed. In the fights over rescinding the mining moratorium in the Boundary Waters, the cancellation of the Bureau of Land Management's Public Lands Rule, the attempted lifting of protections for essential waterfowl habitat in the Prairie Pothole region, the radical reduction of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments and, most recently, Trump’s threat to rescind the Roadless Rule, which protects millions of acres of wildlife habitat on federal lands from fragmentation and degradation, hunters have led the charge for conservation.

Unfortunately, Trump's assumption about hunting's place in our cultural politics is reflected in the understanding of many liberals. No other pursuit is more associated with the form of rural, White masculine identity that the Republican Party has long made central to its brand. The widespread assumption that conservation groups associated with hunting and angling move in lockstep with MAGA has exacerbated longstanding tensions with environmental groups at a time when the two communities have never needed each other more.

That assumption needs to change. Public lands conservation is one of those rare areas of public policy in which an overwhelming majority of Americans agree, regardless of political affiliation. This is especially true here in the West, where a recent survey reveals that 80% of voters favor conservation rather than the sale of public lands to private interests. Hunters constitute a relatively small minority of American voters, but they have played an outsize role in making the voice of the conservation majority heard in Washington, and they make up a crucial and highly engaged voting block in swing states like Arizona.

Speaking at the Grand Canyon in 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt warned: "We have gotten past the stage, my fellow-citizens, when we are to be pardoned if we treat any part of our country as something to be skinned for two or three years for the use of the present generation, whether it is the forest, the water, the scenery. Whatever it is, handle it so that your children's children will get the benefit of it."

Roosevelt's admonition still resonates with America's hunters. No one should be surprised if, come November, they refuse to pardon Republican lawmakers for backing the avaricious agenda of a president who has strayed so far from our nation's conservation heritage.