Executive order: Monarch Watchers must redesign “Trump tags” to include president’s face

President Donald Trump issued an executive order on Tuesday declaring that all 2026 monarch butterfly tracking tags made available by conservation organization Monarch Watchers must include an image of the president’s face. The newly-designed tags provided by the White House feature Trump with a surrounding crown motif and the words Make Migration Legal Again in bright red ink.

“There’s only one monarch in the United States of America,” press secretary Caroline Levy stated at a press briefing. She added that the small stickers, which are adhered to the wings of migrating monarch butterflies each fall, will be known as “Trump Tags” going forward.

Hundreds of thousands of the tiny, round labels are sold annually to community scientists who assist researchers in tracking the migration of the Americas’ favorite insect as it moves over multiple generations from Mexico through the U.S. to Canada and back.

Monarch Watchers’ monarch butterflies tags will now be known as “Trump tags.” –Photo by Misha Khan

Volunteers typically purchase the tags in late summer for $15 per sheet of 25 tags. They capture the migrating monarchs in butterfly nets, gently adhere the stickers to a specific cell on their wings, record the date, time, place and sex of the butterfly, then release the creatures to continue their migration. The process usually takes a minute or less, and the data gathered is sent to Monarch Watchers to be used in research.

2026 Monarch Watchers “Trump tags” will be redesigned to include the president’s face.–Photo by Misha Khan

Levy explained that the Trump tags would not only reinforce the status of the president as “the only reigning monarch” in the United States, they would also allow border patrol agents and immigration officials to determine which butterflies had been tagged in the United States, and were therefore, “legal.”

Butterflies without a Trump tag entering the United States next spring will be apprehended, said Levy, reiterating the administration’s official policy. “Any individual, a foreign national, who illegally enters the United States of America, is by definition a criminal,” Levy said.

When a reporter asked if Trump might consider developing autographed and/or gold-dusted Trump tags to be sold at a premium, Levy responded, “Nothing is off the table.”

She added that the administration is considering doubling the price  of the tags, with the added revenues going to the recently created Make Immigrants Legal Again Foundation.

Skip Naylor, who founded Monarch Watchers more than 30 years ago at the University of Kansas, responded to the executive order with a mixture of disbelief and pragmatism.

“This is preposterous,” said the 86-year-old entomologist. “I guess we’ll have to stop the presses and rework this year’s tags,” he added, noting that the specialized stickers had been recently sent to the printer for production so as to be ready in time for tagging season.

Longtime volunteers for Monarch Watchers were less accepting.

“Given his penchant for orange, I’m not surprised,” said Carol Park, who has been tagging the butterflies for more than a decade. Park added that she would rather use tags from previous seasons than one with Trump’s face on it. “I’ve got lots of extras from years’ past.”

“Politicizing our most beloved insect by pasting his face on a tool created for science and wildlife conservation–causes Trump has shown himself to completely disregard–is the height of hypocrisy,” said Samuel White, director of the Insect Protection Society, a nonprofit organization based in Portland, Oregon, devoted to invertebrate conservation.

Protesters at the March 28th No Kings rallies wore monarch butterfly t-shirts. –Photo by Misha Khan

Black suggested the timing of the executive order came in response to last weekend’s No Kings protests, which drew an estimated eight million protesters at more than 3,000 events across the country.

Levy dismissed the protests as “Trump Derangement Therapy Sessions” and said the only people who care “are the reporters who are paid to cover them.”

Labeled one of the largest protests in American history, the rallies challenged current immigration policies, ICE interventions, high grocery and gasoline prices, the war in Iran, and the administration’s disregard for the U.S. constitution. Some protesters wore monarch butterfly t-shirts and carried signs reading “No Kings! Only Monarchs!” “We love our immigrant neighbors!” and “The Only Orange Monarch I Want” with depictions of monarch butterflies.

TOP PHOTO: A Trump tag on a monarch butterfly. –Photo by Misha Khan

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