Badlands National Park (South Dakota) — Oval Office rhetorical image

Wind‑carved buttes and ribbed gullies strip the horizon into brittle ribs of sun‑bleached stone. Dry air bites the mouth; fossil dust lifts under a stinging wind. The President folds this austere landscape into a single, portable image—absolute silence and hard light—using it as a rhetorical talisman to humanize policy and dissolve midnight tension. The park’s raw scale becomes emotional ballast in the Oval Office: a place conjured to teach stewardship, to puncture fatigue, and to seed later legal resolve.