Progressive primary wins and Mamdani address set counterpoint
President Donald Trump opened America’s 250th birthday weekend with a speech at Mount Rushmore in which he described a resurgent “communist menace” as the “enemy of July 4th, 1776,” delivering an address that opened with unifying language about the nation’s founding before moving into sharp attacks on progressive Democrats.
Trump spoke for half an hour Friday night at the South Dakota monument, the latest stop on his tour celebrating the semiquincentennial of the U.S. declaration of independence from Britain. Greeted by chants of “USA! USA!” and a flyover of F-16 jets, Trump praised the four presidents carved into the mountain — George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln — calling them “men of action, men of ambition, men of daring, men of destiny, and men of truly great intelligence.”
Trump, who has never ruled out the idea of his own face being added to Mount Rushmore, asserted that U.S. exceptionalism is rooted not only in its constitution but in its “distinctive culture and identity.” He condemned recent attempts to “beat the American spirit out of us” and “alienate us from our history,” vowing to an overwhelmingly white crowd: “We are going to give our country its identity back.”
Trump then shifted from a unifying register into a partisan one, telling the crowd that progressive Democrats are communists who pose an existential threat to America. He spoke hours after Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York and a democratic socialist, delivered a pro-immigrant address widely seen as a rebuke of Trump and his “Make America great again” movement.
Trump tied his anti-communist rhetoric to the anti-immigrant theme that fueled his election. “A generation after we fought and won the cold war against the menace of communism, there is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land, including from newcomers to our country who embrace ideas totally opposed to our way of life and our great success,” he said.
He described communism as a greater threat than both world wars and the September 11 2001 terrorist attacks. “It’s the enemy of the constitution. Above all, it’s the enemy of July 4th, 1776 … Communism is the exact opposite of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It’s death, tyranny and the pursuit of evil.”
Trump argued that communists “do not love God or religion” and have “no respect for law, justice, principle, tradition or God-given rights.” He said: “You can be loyal to Karl Marx or you can be loyal to America. You can be a communist or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both.”
The president has been widely criticized for weaponizing the semiquincentennial to rewrite history, promoting a narrative focused on white Christian men such as Washington and Jefferson while neglecting to acknowledge that both were slaveholders. “As for those who peddle Marxist lies about our heritage, tell our children that we live on stolen land or that our heroes were oppressors, they’re doing something much worse than slandering our past,” Trump said. “They are slandering and attacking our future — not going to let that happen.”
Trump spoke in the Black Hills, which the U.S. government illegally seized from the Sioux Nation in 1877 after Congress forced the tribe to cede land it had been guaranteed under treaty.
Trump went on to equate the alleged communist threat with immigrants whom he suggested could be expelled. Pledging to “vanquish communism quickly” and “send them into exile,” he told the cheering crowd: “We will send them quickly away, and we will continue to build our country bigger and better and stronger than ever before. America will never be a communist country.”
He urged Congress to terminate the filibuster and pass the Save America Act, which has been widely criticized as a voter suppression bill. “We do that, we’re not going to lose an election for a hundred years,” he said. “The communist party is made up of illegal immigrants, criminals and everybody that doesn’t want to work.”
On Saturday, Trump is scheduled to address a crowd on the National Mall ahead of a massive fireworks show amid a searing heatwave that has disrupted Independence Day celebrations across the country.