What will President Donald Trump's plans mean for public lands? (Brian Calvert)

On April 26, 2017, when Donald Trump signed an executive order calling for his Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke to review 27 national monuments  designated by the three previous Presidents, he made it clear that he already had a plan on how to proceed. Specifically calling out his predecessor Barack Obama for federal overreach, President Trump pledged to "return" significant parts of the land included in these monuments to  the states, despite the fact that these areas have been federally run since being seized from indigenous peoples in the early history of the American West. With Zinke submitting his report (which predictably recommended scaling back federal control over several of the tracts of public land on the list) to the White House on Aug. 24, the future of these national monuments is uncertain. In this week's TrumpWatch, Jesse talks to Brian Calvert, the editor-in-chief of High Country News, a Colorado-based magazine that covers the American West, about the nationally preserved lands the Trump  administration is poised to hand over to the states. His editorial, “The Trump administration's national monuments 'review' is a sham,” was published in the Guardian last week.