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President Donald Trump used a Fourth of July eve speech at Mount Rushmore National Memorial to warn that communism poses “a mortal threat to American liberty” and urged 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, the president said the nation is entering its 250th year while confronting renewed challenges to its identity.
“Communism is a mortal threat to American liberty,” President Trump said in remarks aired live on RSBN. “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.”
The president argued that communist ideology is fundamentally incompatible with the values on which the United States 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 said, adding that communist systems “killed 100 million people just in the last century alone.”
The president contrasted American ideals with Marxist ideology.
“You can be a communist, or you can be a patriot,” he said. “You cannot be both.”
Earlier in his remarks, Trump praised the four presidents memorialized at 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.
The Mount Rushmore appearance launched the nation’s semiquincentennial celebration ahead of the major Independence Day event on the National Mall in Washington, where President Trump is scheduled to deliver another address before a large fireworks display.