President Donald Trump has taken a monumentally bad idea and made it worse by shrouding it in secrecy.

The president should let go of his misguided notion that reducing the size of three or more national monuments would benefit the nation by opening them up to logging, grazing and oil and gas drilling.

The potential damage to national treasures is immense, while the economic gains are seen by a majority of economists as minimal, at best.

Four months ago Trump asked Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to review more than two dozen national monuments designated by presidents over the last two decades. Zinke floated the idea and opened it for public comment.

Nearly 3 million Americans told the White House what they thought of it: 99.2 percent were strongly opposed. That didn’t deter Zinke. He submitted a report last week recommending the reduction of the size of at least three national monuments - but chose to keep the details from the public.

Coward.

Zinke and Trump have no valid case for shrinking national monuments, but here’s their likely reason. It was President Barack Obama and President Bill Clinton who expanded the three sites in question. Trump is obsessed with erasing their legacies, particularly in environmental protection.

The Antiquities Act of 1906, signed into law by President Theodore Roosevelt, was specifically designed to protect public land from commercial exploitation. Since then, presidents from both parties have designated 200 national monuments.

Trump sees this as a “massive federal land grab” and says “it’s time to end these abuses and return control to the people.”

“The people” in this case means business and industry - the Citizens United sense of “people.” The actual public will lose the benefits of the land opened for exploitation.

At the top of the list of monuments Zinke recommends downsizing is the Bears Ears National Monument, home to cliff dwellings, prehistoric villages and rock art panels of ancestral Pueblo Indians in Utah. Obama designated it at the very end of his presidency. The other two are Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and Oregon’s Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument.

A study released earlier this year by Headwaters Economics, a non-partisan economic research firm based in Bozeman, Mont., examined the economic impact of public lands being designated as national monuments.

The study “found no evidence that designating these national monuments prevented continued economic growth. Instead, trends in key economic indicators such as population, employment, personal income, and per-capita income either continued or improved in each of the regions surrounding the national monuments.”

All three of the national monuments that Zinke wants to shrink are breathtaking in their beauty. Environmentalists will fight this outrage, and we will cheer them on. But what a shame it may be necessary, despite the overwhelming support of Americans for these treasures.

—The Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.)

While on the campaign trail in 2015 and 2016, Donald Trump mostly stuck to Republican dogma when it came to taxes - all tax cuts are good, and they always pay for themselves with increased revenue - even if history shows that’s hardly the case.

But when it came to naming people to implement his agenda, this vagueness gave way to sophistication. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said lower tax rates for the rich should be accompanied by elimination of many deductions and dodges used to avoid paying income taxes. He called a simpler tax code — not lower rates — the key to boosting growth. Given how byzantine U.S. tax policies have led companies to park $2 trillion in profits overseas - funds that could be powering growth in America - Mnuchin has a strong case.

So when the president gave a speech on tax policy Wednesday, there was hope it would be substantive and smart. In part, Trump delivered, calling for eliminating “loopholes and complexity that primarily benefit the wealthiest Americans and special interests.” But his main emphasis was on cutting corporate tax rates at a time of record corporate profits - not on helping individual Americans. The criticism from Democrats like Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer of New York - that Trump’s proposed changes should focus on helping the middle class, not the 1 percent - is valid.

Yet a simpler, fairer tax code may still emerge when the dust settles. Both Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., have said this is their goal. Given how little Congress has accomplished this year, passing genuine tax reform would be a triumph that the GOP needs - and America deserves.