A nationalist address that broke with the unifying traditions of past Independence Day celebrations and tied the midterm elections to the fight against an ideological enemy.
KEYSTONE, South Dakota. On the eve of America’s 250th birthday, President Donald Trump delivered a speech at Mount Rushmore that framed communism as the gravest existential threat the nation has ever faced and fused the celebration with a campaign-style rally for the upcoming midterm elections.
Standing before the granite faces of Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln, Trump told a crowd of 4,800 ticketed attendees on July 3 that communism represents a “mortal threat to American liberty” that surpasses even the World Wars, Pearl Harbor, and the September 11 attacks.
“Communism is the greatest threat to our country, including World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor or even 9/11,” Trump said. “It is the exact opposite of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. It is death, tyranny and the pursuit of evil.”
The speech marked the second time Trump has used Mount Rushmore as a backdrop for a divisive political address. In 2020, he spoke there during nationwide racial justice protests, railing against efforts to remove Confederate statues. This year, while the backdrop had changed, the structure of the message remained the same: an America under cultural siege, with Trump as its defender.
“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,” Trump said. “You can be a communist, or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both.”
The line drew loud cheers from the audience gathered at the South Dakota memorial. But it also drew attention for its echo of Cold War-era Red Scare rhetoric, which the AP noted evoked the 1950s, when suspected communists were blacklisted from jobs and careers across American society.
Trump added: “You do not have to be born here, but you do have to love what we have built. You must love our country.”
The nationalist framing was unmistakable. Trump declared the United States “the most successful, most accomplished, most exceptional nation ever to exist in human history” and argued that American identity itself was under direct attack. “There is no American freedom without American culture, and there is no American founding without the American people,” he said.
Though Trump did not name any specific political figures in the communism section of his speech, the context was hard to miss. Democratic socialist candidates have scored a string of primary election victories ahead of November’s midterms. The most prominent is Zohran Mamdani, the socialist mayor of New York City who won the mayoralty in November 2025, defeating Trump-backed candidate Andrew Cuomo. Mamdani delivered his own July 3 address from City Hall, casting America as a nation of contradictions “working each day towards the perfection in which it was conceived.”
Earlier that same day, Mamdani sat behind George Washington’s desk and railed against wealthy elites and immigration authorities. Trump has repeatedly called Mamdani a “communist candidate” on social media. Other socialist primary winners include Darializa Avila Chevalier, who defeated a Democratic New York City congressman in June.
Trump pivoted directly from the communism warning to the November elections. He told the crowd that the only way to guarantee Republican victories was to abolish the Senate filibuster and pass the SAVE America Act, a bill that would require all voters to prove their US citizenship when registering and present photo identification at the polls.
“We will not lose an election for a hundred years” if Republicans pass these measures, Trump said.
The SAVE America Act has stalled in the Senate. Majority Leader John Thune, who was present at the Mount Rushmore event, has acknowledged the bill lacks the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster. Trump’s call to abolish the 60-vote threshold put him in direct tension with Thune, who has pledged to protect the filibuster.
The performance was not an ordinary Independence Day address. Presidents from Gerald Ford to Ronald Reagan used high-profile July 4 appearances to strike unifying, apolitical tones. Trump’s speech broke sharply from that tradition, functioning instead as a preview of his midterm campaign message: that the Democratic Party has been captured by socialist radicals, and that only Republican control of Congress can save the country from a creeping ideological enemy.
The fireworks show at Mount Rushmore was reinstated by Trump after the Biden administration had discontinued it on environmental and cultural grounds. Native American tribes that consider the Black Hills sacred have long opposed the fireworks. In 2020, a protest led by Native American activists blocked the road to the memorial and ended in arrests. This year, no protesters appeared at the designated First Amendment zone.
Trump followed the Mount Rushmore address with a planned speech on the National Mall on July 4, which he had billed as “the most spectacular Trump rally of them all.” Extreme heat, with temperatures forecast above 38 degrees Celsius (100 degrees Fahrenheit), delayed entry to the Mall until 5 p.m. and forced the cancellation of Washington’s annual parade.
The two-speech Independence Day weekend amounted to a full-scale campaign launch for the midterms disguised as a birthday celebration. By placing communism at the center of his argument, Trump gave his supporters a defined enemy and his Republican Party a rallying cry for November. Whether that message resonates beyond the base will determine whether his prediction of a century of Republican dominance was prophecy or bluster.