President Donald Trump signed a pair of executive orders on July 13, 2026, cutting Utah’s Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments by a combined 3 million acres — a roughly 90 percent reduction — reviving a fight over federal land that has bounced between presidents since his first term. Flanked by Gov. Spencer Cox, Sen. Mike Lee, Rep. Celeste Maloy, and Interior Deputy Secretary Katharine MacGregor, Trump argued the monuments had grown far beyond what the 1906 Antiquities Act allows and returned “fairness” to Utahns locked out of land they say they manage better than Washington. But the signing ceremony almost immediately turned into a wide-ranging press availability on the escalating war with Iran, where Trump claimed 52,000 protesters have been killed, that Iran’s navy has been sunk and its air force wiped out, and that inflation there has hit 300 percent — figures that go well beyond what U.S. officials, Iranian state media, and independent human-rights monitors have documented. He also addressed reports of Iranian drones stockpiled in Cuba, paid tribute to Sen. Lindsey Graham, who died two days earlier, and touted an upcoming IndyCar race down Pennsylvania Avenue. Assistance from Claude AI.
Who Was in the Room
- Donald Trump — President of the United States
- Spencer Cox — Governor of Utah
- Katharine “Kate” MacGregor — Deputy Secretary, U.S. Department of the Interior
- Mike Lee — U.S. Senator, Utah (R)
- Celeste Maloy — U.S. Representative, Utah’s 2nd Congressional District (R)
- Mike Schultz — Speaker of the Utah House of Representatives (not named directly in the transcript, but Celeste Maloy refers to “the speaker of the Utah House” as present, and outside reporting confirms Schultz attended and spoke afterward)
- Cameron Arcand — reporter, Townhall, who asked about Iranian drones in Cuba
- Several unidentified Utah officials, described in the transcript as county commissioners and members of Utah’s federal delegation
- An unidentified reporter (addressed by Trump as “Jeff”) who asked about the Iran war and land ownership
- White House aides, unnamed, who closed out the event
The transcript, published by Factbase (a CQ Roll Call/FiscalNote product), tags six distinct speakers across roughly 20 minutes of remarks.
Topic One: Shrinking Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante
What Trump signed
Trump opened by telling the room he was “terminating certain monuments,” describing two documents covering “almost three million acres” combined, each “close to a million and a half acres.” That lines up with what actually happened: reporting from the Washington Post, the Salt Lake Tribune, and Utah News Dispatch confirms Trump signed two executive orders shrinking Grand Staircase-Escalante from about 1.9 million acres down to roughly 181,000 acres, and Bears Ears from about 1.35 million acres down to about 121,000 acres — a combined reduction near 3 million acres, or about 90 percent of their designated size.
Fact check: Trump’s acreage figures track closely with independent reporting. The “almost three million acres” and “million and a half acres each” description matches the scale of the actual proclamations.
This is Trump’s second run at these same two monuments. He shrank both by similar margins during his first term in December 2017, only for President Biden to restore them to their larger boundaries in October 2021. Monday’s order essentially repeats — and by some measures exceeds — the 2017 cuts, which is why Trump told the room, “This is actually better than the first time, what we’re doing.”
Cox: “The smallest area possible”
Gov. Spencer Cox framed the move as a matter of legal fidelity to the Antiquities Act, the 1906 law that lets presidents designate federal land as national monuments. “We believe that under the Antiquities Act, it’s very clear that these monument designations are supposed to be the smallest area possible to protect the antiquities,” Cox said, arguing that Utah’s other seven monuments — ranging from roughly 700 to 7,000 acres — reflect what the law intended, while Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, at multiple millions of acres, do not. He noted the reductions “does not remove the other protections that already exist in those areas,” meaning the underlying federal land remains publicly owned and subject to other environmental rules even outside monument boundaries.
Cox’s home-state framing is backed by Utah’s official reaction: in a statement posted after the signing, his office and Utah House Speaker Mike Schultz both applauded the “modification” of the monument boundaries.
MacGregor: a 120-year-old law and a 1,200-acre precedent
Deputy Secretary Katharine MacGregor, in her second stint at Interior after also serving there during Trump’s first term, drew a direct line back to the law’s origin. “The Antiquities Act is 120 years old, but the first monument that was created was only 1,200 acres,” she said, adding that Presidents Clinton, Obama, and Biden had since “increased the acreage in the state of Utah and locked those acres up, over million acres.”
Fact check: MacGregor’s numbers hold up well. The Antiquities Act was signed in 1906 — 120 years before this signing. The first monument designated under it, Devils Tower in Wyoming, covered roughly 1,150 to 1,350 acres depending on the source, close enough to “1,200 acres” to call accurate. Her account of Interior’s real chain of command is also correct: MacGregor has served as deputy secretary since June 2025, having held the same post in Trump’s first administration.
Trump followed up by describing the practical effect of a large monument designation in blunt terms: “You can’t do anything. You can’t go hunting. You can’t go fishing. You can’t do anything. You can virtually not even walk on it.” That overstates the actual restrictions — national monument status generally restricts new mining, drilling, and large-scale development, but hunting, fishing, and hiking are commonly allowed within monument boundaries, including at both Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante under prior management plans. MacGregor did not correct the claim, telling Trump, “That’s exactly right, sir.”
Lee and Maloy: “Overlooked” standards and unanimous local opposition
Sen. Mike Lee, who has pushed monument-related legislation for years, restated the legal standard at the center of the dispute: monuments should be “the smallest area compatible with the objects to be protected.” He argued Presidents Biden, Clinton, and Obama “overlooked that standard” and credited Trump with “fixing it.” Later, answering a reporter’s question about how so much of Utah ended up under federal control in the first place, Lee explained that the Antiquities Act itself is what gives presidents the power to designate monument land by proclamation, and that the current monuments — at roughly three million acres — amount to “two Delawares,” a comparison he said he made directly to President Biden.
Rep. Celeste Maloy pointed out something rarely mentioned in coverage of the original designations: both Bears Ears (created by President Obama in 2016) and the Grand Staircase-Escalante expansion (Biden’s 2021 restoration built on Clinton’s original 1996 designation) were made “over the unanimous opposition of Utah’s federal delegation, our governors” and county commissioners. She described Monday’s signing as “a very different process” — one built around consultation with local officials rather than a unilateral proclamation.
The politics: Orrin Hatch and a promise kept
Trump grew personal when discussing the late Sen. Orrin Hatch, who represented Utah for over four decades and died in 2022. “I remember Orrin Hatch before he passed away. He was a great guy. He was a friend of mine. And he felt so strongly about this,” Trump said, framing the 2017 shrinkage — and its reversal — as unfinished business. “They took the land away from the people, quite honestly. It was ridiculous… we’re putting it back, but we’re actually giving more than we did the first time, back to the people of Utah.”
An unidentified Utah official at the event went further, describing conversations with the outgoing Biden administration: “We sat down with the previous administration and said, why don’t we just work this out… we promised that once we have the power, we’re going to make sure that the people’s voices are heard.”
What comes next
Conservation groups, according to reporting from the Washington Post and the Center for Western Priorities, are already preparing legal challenges to the new boundaries, arguing — as they did in 2017 — that the Antiquities Act does not give presidents explicit authority to shrink monuments once designated, only to create them. That legal question was never resolved in court during the first Trump term because Biden restored the monuments before it reached a final ruling, so it’s likely to resurface now.
Topic Two: The War With Iran
Once the signing wrapped, Trump took questions, and the conversation pivoted almost entirely to the ongoing U.S. conflict with Iran — by far the most consequential and most disputed part of the transcript.
“We are back at war”
A reporter noted that Trump had told Congress the U.S. is “back at war” with Iran and asked how long the fighting might last. Trump said the campaign is “going very fast,” claiming the U.S. has “demolished their military” and would launch “another very major attack tonight” targeting Iran’s remaining capability around the Strait of Hormuz.
Fact check: The renewed strikes are real. CNN, NPR, and Al Jazeera all confirmed the U.S. carried out fresh bombing runs on Iran on July 13, 2026, following an Iranian strike on a commercial tanker in the Strait of Hormuz and an Iranian threat to close the waterway. But describing this as a fresh outbreak undersells the timeline: the war, code-named Operation Epic Fury, actually began February 28, 2026, and had already gone through a period of heavy fighting, a partial pause, and now a renewed escalation — closer to four and a half months of intermittent conflict, not a new four-month war starting from scratch.
Trump also said the U.S. would maintain “a very strong blockade” of Iranian ports, letting other countries’ shipping through while blocking anything tied to Iran. That matches contemporaneous reporting: NPR reported Trump had announced a resumed blockade and even floated charging other nations a fee — reportedly around 20 percent of cargo value — for U.S. protection through the strait, though that fee proposal did not come up in this particular exchange.
The 52,000 figure
Twice in the briefing, Trump said Iran has killed “52,000 protesters” during its domestic crackdown. “It’s really terrible situation,” he said, describing “burial lots where they’re doing… where they’re burying the protesters.”
Fact check: This is the single largest factual gap in the transcript. Independent tallies of the 2025–2026 Iranian protest crackdown vary widely, but none currently match 52,000. Iran’s own government has claimed roughly 3,117 deaths. The U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency had documented around 7,000–7,015 confirmed deaths as of early February 2026, with thousands more cases under review. The highest published estimate — from local health officials cited by Time, The Guardian, and Iran International, describing a single two-day massacre in early January — reached 30,000 to 36,500. Trump’s 52,000 figure exceeds even that highest documented estimate by roughly 15,000 to 20,000. That doesn’t mean the underlying atrocity isn’t real and severe — human rights organizations agree mass killings occurred — but the specific number Trump cited is not supported by any public accounting currently available.
Claimed military losses
Later, pressed on whether the war has become a permanent fixture, Trump offered a detailed rundown of Iran’s supposed losses: “We knocked out their Navy in a period of one month… their air force is nonexistent… we knocked out their drone manufacturing capability about 92 percent [and] their missile capability for manufacturing, we knocked out 89 percent.” He went even further later in the briefing, saying Iran now has “159 ships underwater” out of a total fleet of 159, and that all 230 of its attack planes are “gone.”
Fact check: These figures are difficult to verify and, in several respects, appear to be exaggerated. Independent fact-checking (via Factually.co, drawing on Pentagon statements and satellite-imagery analysis from firms like Maxar) found that U.S. military spokespeople have described a blockade and limited interdictions — with one Pentagon briefing citing 13 ships “deterred” — a figure far below Trump’s claim of 158–159 ships destroyed. No independent reporting has corroborated Trump’s claim that Iran’s entire navy or air force has been eliminated, and analysts note that a loss of that scale would be expected to show up in satellite imagery, which it reportedly has not.
Trump also said Iranian inflation has reached “over 300 percent… could be 350 percent.”
Fact check: Iranian state media has reported an inflation rate of about 88.6 percent — high, and consistent with a wartime economy, but far below Trump’s 300–350 percent claim. CNN separately fact-checked a related Trump claim about pre-war U.S. inflation being 1.7 percent, finding the real figure was closer to 2.4–2.7 percent at the time.
Soleimani and the nuclear rationale
Trump tied the current war back to his 2020 killing of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, calling him “a person that was very evil… an evil genius” who “was looking to take out a lot of our military installations in Iraq and Iran.” (Soleimani’s killing in a U.S. drone strike near Baghdad International Airport in January 2020 is a matter of historical record from Trump’s first term.) He argued the broader campaign has prevented Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon: “If we didn’t bomb them with the B-2 bombers… within one month from the day we bombed them, they would have had a nuclear weapon.” This specific one-month timeline is Trump’s own characterization and was not independently corroborated by outside intelligence assessments in the material reviewed for this piece.
Gulf allies and “reimbursement”
Trump revisited a long-standing theme — that wealthy Gulf states should pay the U.S. for military protection — naming Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait as countries benefiting from U.S. operations in the strait. “We think it’s appropriate that… we don’t need them,” he said, pointing to U.S. and Venezuelan oil production as evidence America controls “more than 50 percent of the world’s supply.” That specific market-share figure is a Trump talking point rather than a sourced government or industry statistic, and it was not verified against independent oil-production data for this article.
Iranian drones in Cuba
Cameron Arcand of Townhall asked directly about reports of Iranian drones stored in Cuba and whether military intervention against Havana was “still on the table.” Trump replied: “If they do have that, and they might very well have that, we’ll take care of it… We’re not going to allow that to happen.”
Fact check: This exchange is well-documented outside the transcript. Townhall’s own July 13 report — bylined by Arcand — confirms this question and answer nearly verbatim. The underlying intelligence traces to a mid-May 2026 Axios report alleging Cuba had acquired more than 300 Shahed-136 attack drones from Russia and Iran since 2023, reportedly capable of targeting Guantanamo Bay, U.S. Navy ships, and Key West. Trump’s answer at this signing — noncommittal but not ruling out action — is consistent with his other public statements on the subject.
Topic Three: The Economy, NATO, and Military Recruitment
Asked a more personal question — whether he’d had a moment where he felt God had spared him for a reason — Trump pivoted to a broader case for his presidency, citing “$19.2 trillion” in investment into the U.S. under his administration, record military recruitment, and a warm reception at a recent NATO summit.
Fact check: The $19.2 trillion figure is one of Trump’s most disputed economic claims. Independent fact-checkers, along with the White House’s own published figures, put verified “major investment announcements” closer to $10.6 trillion — itself widely viewed as an inflated count that includes vague pledges and bilateral trade figures rather than confirmed U.S. investment. Federal data on actual foreign direct investment in 2025 put the number closer to $232 billion. The $19.2 trillion figure should be read as a political talking point, not a verified economic statistic.
Trump’s claims about military recruitment (“we’re setting records”) and a positive NATO reception were not independently fact-checked for this article but are consistent with previous administration messaging on those topics.
Topic Four: A Grand Prix Down Pennsylvania Avenue
In a lighter aside, Trump previewed an IndyCar race “in 41 days,” saying “they have 250,000 tickets ordered” and comparing the anticipated crowd to UFC’s record-setting events.
Fact check: This is real and independently confirmed. The event is the Freedom 250 Grand Prix of Washington, D.C., scheduled for August 22–23, 2026 — roughly 40 days after this signing — on a 1.7-mile street circuit that runs along Pennsylvania Avenue past the Capitol, the National Mall, and the Smithsonian. Multiple outlets, including the Washington Times and CNN, confirmed the route and date. General admission to the event is free, so Trump’s reference to “250,000 tickets ordered” likely refers to premium seating, grandstand packages, or advance RSVPs rather than paid general admission, which was not independently verified in the reporting reviewed.
Topic Five: Remembering Sen. Lindsey Graham
Trump closed with an emotional tribute to Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who died two days before this signing. “He was a friend of all of us. He was a great guy… it’s hard to believe he’s gone,” Trump said, noting Graham had called him the night before his death and that flags would remain at half-staff “until Saturday evening.”
Fact check: This tribute lines up with confirmed reporting. Graham’s office announced his death early on July 12, 2026, at age 71, attributing it to “a brief and sudden illness,” later specified as an aortic dissection related to cardiovascular disease. He had just returned from a trip to Kyiv, where he met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Trump has said he spoke with Graham by phone hours before his death. Trump’s reference to the SAVE America Act — a voter-eligibility and election-integrity bill Graham had co-sponsored alongside Mike Lee — is also accurate; Lee has since said he’ll keep pushing the bill in Graham’s memory, though it remains well short of the 60 Senate votes needed to overcome a filibuster.
Source
“Remarks: Donald Trump Signs an Executive Order on National Monuments – July 13, 2026.” Factbase, CQ Roll Call/FiscalNote, 13 July 2026. Transcript accessed 14 July 2026.