On the eve of Independence Day, President Donald Trump delivered a speech at Mount Rushmore warning that communism poses “a mortal threat to American liberty” and urging Americans to embrace the nation’s founding principles as the United States marked its 250th anniversary.
Speaking beneath the monument honoring Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, Trump said the United States is entering its 250th year facing renewed challenges to its national identity.
“Communism is a mortal threat to American liberty,” Trump stated. “Communism is the enemy of free people everywhere. Everywhere in the world. It never works.”
“It’s the enemy of the Constitution,” he said. “Above all, it’s the enemy of July 4, 1776.”
Trump argued that communist ideology is fundamentally incompatible with the values on which the nation was founded, calling it “the exact opposite of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
“It’s death, tyranny and the pursuit of evil,” he added. “Communist systems killed 100 million people in the last century alone.”
The president contrasted America’s heritage with Marxist ideology, declaring, “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,” Trump said. “You cannot be both.”
He also accused “radicals and extremists” of attempting to undermine the country’s history and identity by attacking its founding principles and national heroes.
“As for those who peddle Marxist lies about our heritage—such as telling children that we live on stolen land or that our heroes were oppressors—they are doing something much worse than slandering our past,” Trump said. “They are slandering and attacking our future.”
Earlier in his remarks, Trump praised the four presidents memorialized on Mount Rushmore, calling them “the men who declared the freedom, won our freedom, and saved our freedom and secured our freedom.”
“They were men of action, men of ambition, men of daring, men of destiny and men of truly great intelligence,” he said.
Trump emphasized that the nation’s future depends on preserving its culture and identity. “We must never forget there is no American freedom without American culture,” he stated. “And there is no American founding without the American people.”
The Mount Rushmore address kicked off the nation’s semiquincentennial celebrations ahead of Saturday night’s major Independence Day event in Washington, D.C., where Trump is scheduled to deliver another address before a massive fireworks display.
Trump closed his remarks by pledging that the United States would continue to reject communist ideology. “America will never be a communist country,” he said.
