The media are wetting themselves today because President Trump is "shrinking federal monuments." You'd think he was taking an axe to the Washington Monument and chopping it down.
But there are real monuments and then there are shameless federal land-grabs that get labeled "monuments" before a gullible news media that gladly adopt whatever language a Democratic president uses to spin his actions. The Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante monuments were just that. There are elements of these pieces of land that have some historical value, but Bill Clinton and Barack Obama exploited that to declare massive swaths of land part of the "monuments," which put them almost completely under federal control over the objection of the State of Utah and all of Utah's congressional delegation.