Overview
- President Trump warned of “a resurgence of the communist menace” in a July 4 address at Mount Rushmore and said “You can be a communist, or you can be a patriot.”
- The speech explicitly equated communism with past national traumas and called it a mortal threat to American liberty, using stark language to contrast the ideology with the nation’s founding principles.
- Trump linked the threat to “newcomers to our country” and at one point said those newcomers “need to be expelled,” tying immigration rhetoric directly to his warning about ideology.
- The event drew about 4,800 ticketed attendees and ended with a fireworks display that the Park Service approved using a six-year-old environmental assessment, prompting concerns about wildfire risk, water contamination, litter, and harm to endangered bats as well as Native spiritual uses of the Black Hills.
- The address doubled as campaign messaging by name-checking Republican officials and urging changes to voting rules such as the SAVE America Act, and commentary ranged from supportive conservative accounts to critics who compared the rhetoric to McCarthy-era Red Scare tactics.