“All across the [American Great] Plains,” wrote Dayton Duncan in 1993, “[Frank and Deborah] Popper have become as well known a couple as Donald and Ivana Trump — and about as well liked.”
That a progressive Democrat like Duncan, who worked for the failed presidential campaigns of Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis and later served two positions in President Bill Clinton’s administration, might go out of his way to ridicule Mr. Trump does not surprise. What shocks is that Duncan would believe most folks on the Great Plains knew or felt strongly about a Manhattan real estate developer and Atlantic City hotel and casino owner half a continent away.
After all, the Great Plains is as large as Spain and stretches from the Rocky Mountains east to the 100th meridian, from the Dakotas to Texas, includes part of ten largely rural states, and, except for the Colorado Front Range and Texas Panhandle, includes no major cities. In 1993, almost no one in this vast region knew about Trump and his wife. They, however, had heard of and loathed the Poppers.
They were reviled because Frank and Deborah Popper, professors at Rutgers University and New York University, respectively, were the point of the spear to realize what radical environmentalists demanded: the removal of livestock from federal lands across the West. Aided and encouraged by President Jimmy Carter, they cried “cattle free by ’93.” With an assortment of weapons in their arsenal — designating vast areas for single use, acquisitions by the the Nature Conservancy, outright purchases of private land by the federal government, regulating cattle and sheep off federal lands, and using the Endangered Species Act to lock up land — the Poppers proposed to “deprivatize” 110 counties in nine states, home to 400,000 people, to permit the buffalo to roam across what they called the “Buffalo Commons.”
The Poppers’ vision came to naught, but the fever dream of radical environmentalists dies hard, and they are anything but relentless, so their efforts continued.
In 2019, an environmental outfit in Montana, the American Prairie Reserve, filed a proposal with the Bureau of Land Management, which manages 245 million acres of federal land, mostly in the American West and Alaska. APR schemed to end livestock grazing on the federal land in Phillips County (population 4,000) and establish bison, which APR called “domestic indigenous livestock,” as a “wildlife species.”
Under President Joe Biden in 2021, the BLM hosted a single virtual meeting to hear the public’s response to APR’s plan, which was overwhelmingly negative. More than 2,600 individuals filed comments. Nonetheless, the Biden administration rubber-stamped APR’s plan. After all, it dovetailed with BLM’s management of federal lands throughout the West, which included killing statutorily mandated multiple-use management and substituting non-use or “preservation,” which Biden’s BLM perversely labeled “conservation.”
APR admitted that the bison herd it planned to let roam on seven federal grazing allotments was a “conservation” herd, was “non-production-oriented,” and was part of APR’s efforts to “rebuild wildlife populations,” none of which is anywhere to be found in decades-old federal statutes or BLM regulations governing livestock grazing on federal land. In 2022, Biden’s BLM gave its final okay to APR’s scheme.
Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen quickly appealed the Biden BLM’s decision, which lingered after the Interior Department refused to stay the ruling. Last fall, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum assumed jurisdiction of the appeal and remanded it to the BLM’s Montana State Director. In mid-January, career BLM official Sonya Germann, in consultation with department lawyers, concluded that federal law bars BLM from issuing grazing permits if the grazing animals are treated as wildlife and not managed for production.
APR’s plan, Germann quotes, is to buy 500,000 acres of private land and “stitch together three million acres of existing public lands [into an area] the size of Connecticut.” As to those lands, APR asks, “Hey, can we use [these] millions and millions of acres for absolutely nothing…?” Ms. Germann, on behalf of BLM, answered, “No.”
TRUMP VOWS TO MAKE UNION STATION GREAT AGAIN
Montanans were thrilled, of course. Knudson declared: “Canceling the American Prairie Reserve’s bison grazing permit will help to protect the livestock industry and ranching communities in Northeastern Montana from the elitists trying to push them out.”
The fear of being driven out by elitists, including college professors from back east, is what made the Buffalo Commons and its progeny “radioactive,” as Frank Poppers recently acknowledged. Trump, who put an end to it, at least on federal lands in Montana, remains immensely popular in the Great Plains, having carried more than 95% of the 560 counties that constitute the Great Plains in 2024, some by landslide margins.
Mr. Pendley, a Marine, Wyoming attorney, and Colorado-based, public-interest lawyer for three decades with victories at the Supreme Court of the United States, served in the Reagan administration, and led the Bureau of Land Management for President Donald Trump.