“We won two world wars,” President Donald Trump told the crowd beneath Mount Rushmore, and then he went looking for a new enemy.
The speech opened the weekend of America’s 250th anniversary, delivered at the granite monument on the eve of Independence Day. Trump started with the military. “We created the strongest and most powerful military,” he said, adding that the Cold War had left America’s enemies “in the depths of history.” He claimed the United States “beat Venezuela in one day” and “knocked the hell out of Iran.”
On the ongoing U.S.-Israeli war with Iran, he was brief. Tehran is “dying to settle,” Trump said, and Washington had allowed “a week off for a funeral because we’re nice.” He meant the days-long state funeral for Iran’s late Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who was killed in a strike on the first day of the war. Al Jazeera noted that voters are already feeling the conflict through persistent inflation and high energy prices.
Most of the address, though, was about threats at home. “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,” Trump said. He called communism “the enemy of the Constitution” and promised that “the citizens of the United States of America will vanquish communism quickly.”
He linked that message to immigration, suggesting that left-wing political figures and certain undocumented arrivals should be removed from the country. His remarks followed a run of progressive primary wins in New York, Colorado and Texas. Trump called the rise of democratic socialists the “greatest threat to our country since its founding” and compared its potential impact to World War II and the September 11 attacks. He closed by calling the anniversary “the beginning of the golden age of America.”
Reaction
Republican strategist Eli Bremer told Al Jazeera that parts of the speech were unifying enough that they “could have been delivered by Ronald Reagan … 45 years ago.” He also said “the gap between the American left and the American right has really never been wider.”
Democratic strategist Ameshia Cross, a former Obama campaign adviser, saw it differently. She said Trump is “upset that there is a younger crop of Democrats who are running and winning across this country,” and called the speech the work of “a president who sees his grip on America steadily slipping away.” She pointed to his loss days earlier in a Supreme Court decision on birthright citizenship.
In New York, Mayor Zohran Mamdani spoke at a naturalisation ceremony, using a desk that once belonged to George Washington to praise immigrants and describe civic dissent as patriotism. Democrats have also accused the administration of letting a conservative group take over planning for the anniversary from a bipartisan congressional commission.
