President Donald Trump declared the United States the “most exceptional nation ever to exist” and vowed it would “never be a Communist country” during a patriotic address at Mount Rushmore on Friday as the nation prepared to mark its 250th anniversary, Trump told the crowd.
Speaking beneath the granite likenesses of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, Trump praised American history and called the republic unmatched in human achievement. “In all the chronicles of the ages, never before has any nation celebrated so magnificent a triumph as this one,” he said, adding that at 250 years the country is “the oldest republic on earth” and “the freest people on earth.”
Spectators cheered as the new Air Force One flew over Mount Rushmore before Trump took the stage, and the president remained afterward to watch a fireworks display over the Black Hills, his campaign said. Trump accused a growing communist movement of trying to undermine America’s “exceptional character” and to “alienate us from our history,” he said.
Trump described communism as “the greatest threat” facing the country and likened it to attacks and wars in U.S. history, saying it was as dangerous as World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor or Sept. 11. “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. You cannot be both,” he said, and invoked the sacrifices of earlier American generations at battles such as Concord, Gettysburg and Normandy.
Trump highlighted the four presidents carved into the mountain as embodiments of the nation’s founding ideals and called on Americans to rededicate themselves to those principles. He was scheduled to deliver another speech Saturday on the National Mall in Washington before a fireworks display celebrating the nation’s 250th anniversary, the White House said.
Jon Ross Myers is the executive editor and publisher of the Mississippi News Network, Mississippi's largest digital only media company. He can be reached at editor@tippahnews.com
