President Donald Trump celebrated America over the Fourth of July weekend with a pair of ugly speeches at Mt. Rushmore and in Washington, D.C. that attempted to rally conservative support by demonizing the left and defending monuments. “Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children,” Trump said on Friday night at Mt. Rushmore, as he tried to revive his base following an embarrassing turnout in Tulsa. “Angry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our founders, deface our most sacred memorials, and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities.”
Trump, who last weekend promoted a video advocating “white power,” has defended honoring the racist Confederacy with statues and at military bases. While Trump has a history of racism, the Washington Post notes that his strategy of “amplifying racism and stoking culture wars” has been especially striking in this particular moment of national reckoning, one that Trump has responded to with stunningly divisive rhetoric “seeking to weaponize the anger and resentment of some white Americans for his own political gain” rather than calming a country in crisis.
Trump has responded to the outcry for reform with a reimagined version of the “American carnage” he cited at his inauguration, during which he painted a dark picture of a United States exploited by immigrants and foreign nations. But unlike in 2016, notes the Post’s David Nakamura, the enemy has also become other Americans who, in challenging the nation’s founding ideals, pose a threat to Trump’s conservative base. “We are now in the process of defeating the radical left—the Marxists, the anarchists, the agitators, the looters,” the president remarked on Saturday. On Friday, he warned of “the violent mayhem we have seen in the streets of cities that are run by liberal Democrats,” drawing battle lines in an attempt to galvanize supporters. “Our children are taught in school to hate their own country,” he claimed.
From the Black Hills of South Dakota, Trump warned of a “new far-left fascism” and “cancel culture” that “is designed to overthrow the American Revolution.” Trump continued to put forth such messaging from the White House on Saturday, during which he vowed to “never allow an angry mob to tear down our statues, erase our history, indoctrinate our children, or trample on our freedoms.” The president pledged to “defend, protect, and preserve American way of life, which began in 1492 when Columbus discovered America.” On Friday, Trump described the goal of protesters to be “the end of America.”
“That’s not just bigotry to the outside world, but now he’s really attacking millions of Americans as worthless, as socialists, as anarchists,” said presidential historian Douglas Brinkley of the “deeply divisive speech.”
The New York Times reported both speeches to be “a reflection of his dire political standing” as he strives to win reelection without “a booming economy or a positive message to campaign on,” a moment that has him instead making appeals to racists and sowing division. In Washington, the president praised his administration’s handling of the pandemic and again suggested increased cases to merely be the result of more testing, a false claim he repeated to Saturday’s crowd.
“The aperture of the campaign is constricting, not expanding—he’s energizing a smaller and smaller group of angrier and angrier Americans,” Peter Wehner, a former speechwriter for president George W. Bush, told the Post. “And to try to energize that base, he has to say more and more extreme things.”
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