OAN Staff Katherine Mosack
8:38 AM – Saturday, July 4, 2026
President Donald Trump gave a half-hour address beneath the faces of four of his predecessors at Mount Rushmore.
On Friday, the eve of America’s 250th anniversary of independence, impersonators of the four presidents memorialized in stone, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, gave remarks, including famous American quotations.
The former presidents were later joined by the U.S. Air Force Academy Band, with performances including “Sweet Child of Mine” by Guns N’ Roses and “Life is a Highway” by Rascal Flatts.
After a flyover from Air Force One, President Trump took to the stage to announce, “Tomorrow we mark 250 years of glorious independence and 250 years of majestic American freedom. Nothing like it.”
He noted that the United States of America is widely recognized as the oldest major republic on earth, as its Constitution is the oldest written and codified national constitution still in active use.
“250 years ago, tomorrow, the words of our Declaration of Independence sent an earthquake to all of the coming time. They sparked a revolution that has never ended, but still continues to this day. And tonight, we come to this beautiful mountain — and it is beautiful — to express our gratitude to those who made it possible, starting with the four men most responsible for reaching this milestone more than any others,” Trump stated.
“We salute the father of our country, George Washington, the author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, the great emancipator and savior of our union, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and the man who built America into a global superpower, Theodore Roosevelt,” he continued. “These are the men who declared our freedom, won our freedom, saved our freedom, and secured our freedom.”
“These men could only have been made in the USA,” he later added.
The president congratulated those in the crowd for being American citizens.
“We must never forget that there is no American freedom without American culture, and there is no American founding without the American people. Many nations have paper constitutions and legal systems, but the citizens live in fear and squalor,” Trump explained. “A constitution is only as strong as the people and the culture responsible for upholding it.”
In reminding Americans of the country’s identity, Trump explained that U.S. citizens speak English “because that is the language of our founding.” He added that “you do not have to be born here, but you do have to love what we have built.”
“There has never been anything like us anywhere on Earth and we are not going to let anyone take that away,” he said, pointing out the “renewed attack” of Marxist ideologies in American culture.
“A generation after we fought and won the Cold War against the menace of communism, there is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land,” Trump warned, later emphasizing, “Communism is a mortal threat to American liberty.”
He juxtaposed communism, “an ideology of mass theft, mass control, mass lies and mass murder,” with the ideals and values of American culture, arguing that the two cannot coexist for the United States to succeed.
“Communism is the exact opposite of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, it’s death, tyranny and the pursuit of evil. They don’t want good, they don’t love God. … but we will not let them win,” said Trump.
“Very simply, communism represents the worst ideas and abuses in history by the worst people. The American founding represents the best ideas and traditions in history by the best people, like you,” he told his audience. “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.”
Trump called upon the American people, on the eve of its Semiquincentennial, to “vanquish communism quickly.”
He hailed American achievements, including but not limited to railroads, skyscrapers, electricity, the lightbulb, the telephone, the airplane, the assembly line, the television, the microchip, the personal computer, the internet, the GPS, the smartphone, baseball, basketball, football, volleyball, NASCAR, the rodeo, and, importantly, air conditioning.
Trump noted that Americans have won the most Olympic gold medals and Nobel Peace Prizes, interjecting, “they haven’t given me one.”
During his speech, Trump did not mention his dream of being added to the bluffs of Mount Rushmore, which he relayed to former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem while she served as a U.S. Representative for South Dakota. In 2020, she gifted him a 4-foot-tall model of the monument that included his face.
Senator Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) said in an interview that there were considerations to add either Trump or President Ronald Reagan to the façade, but “the problem is the geologists we’ve talked to tell us there’s simply no good rock on the mountain.”
The event ended with a fireworks show for those who won a lottery to attend.
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