Donald Trump has kicked off America’s 250th birthday weekend with an extraordinary partisan attack on what he called the “communist menace” in America, framing its supporters as “the enemy of July 4th, 1776”.
The US president spoke for half an hour on Friday night at Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, the latest stop on his tour celebrating the milestone anniversary of the US declaration of independence from Britain.
Greeted by chants of “USA! USA!” and briefly interrupted by a flyover of F-16 jets, Trump praised the four presidents whose faces are carved into the granite mountain: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln.
“They were men of action, men of ambition, men of daring, men of destiny, and men of truly great intelligence,” said Trump, who has never ruled out the idea of his own face being added to Mount Rushmore. “Above all, they were the great men of history.”
The president asserted that US exceptionalism is rooted not only in its constitution, but 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 abandoned any pretence of making a traditional head of state’s speech designed to rise above the fray, unify political parties and strike a chord with citizens of all persuasions.
Instead, four months ahead of November’s midterm elections for US Congress, he picked up on a theme he has repeatedly hammered lately: casting progressive Democrats as communists, who pose an existential threat to America. He was speaking 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. » | David Smith in Washington | Saturday, July 4, 2026
Donald Trump hijacked America’s 250 and turned it into a ‘theatre of the absurd’: Trump, laying siege to freedoms and truth itself, is twisting America’s milestone birthday into a joyless occasion »
FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES:
At Mount Rushmore, Trump Veers From Patriotism to ‘Communism’: On the eve of July 4, President Trump extolled the nation’s founders while branding his opponents as “communists” in what seemed to be a warm-up for November. »
LESEN SIE AUCH:
Aggressive Rede zum Unabhängigkeitstag: Trump beschimpft Demokraten und Einwanderer als „kommunistische Bedrohung: Der US-Präsident warnt in seiner Ansprache vor dem 250. Unabhängigkeitstag vor einem „erneuten Angriff“ auf die amerikanische Identität. In Washington ist ein gigantisches Feuerwerk geplant. »
