Trump, Mamdani Mingle Politics With Patriotism in Dueling July 4 Messages

An established political star and a rising one — President Trump and Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York — kicked off America’s 250th birthday with an exchange of political gibes wrapped in the language of patriotism, reflecting the nation’s deep divisions ahead of November’s critical midterm elections.Speaking Friday evening in South Dakota with Mount Rushmore’s iconic carvings of four past presidents as a backdrop, Mr. Trump waxed at length about America’s greatness and its contributions to the world, slightly exaggerating its status as the world’s third-oldest republic behind San Marino and Switzerland.“At 250 years, America is the oldest republic on earth. We are the freest people on earth. We have the most righteous and enduring Constitution on earth. We are the strongest and most powerful country on earth,” he said.“The birth and survival of the American nation under God is, quite simply, the best and most incredible thing ever to happen on this planet by human hands, ever. No other country has done more good for this world than the United States of America.”Midway into his remarks, Mr. Trump pivoted to a dire warning about the threat posed to America by “communists,” an apparent reference to the growing influence and electoral success of the democratic socialist movement represented by Mr. Mamdani.“Our American ancestors did not shed their blood at Concord and Trenton, Gettysburg and Shiloh, Midway and Normandy, just so that a band of thieves, radicals, and lunatics could come in and loot, pillage our nation,” he said.Describing communism as “the greatest threat” facing America, Mr. Trump said the ideology “is the exact opposite of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — it is death, tyranny, and the pursuit of evil.”“You can be loyal to Karl Marx, or you can be loyal to America,” he went on. You can be a communist, or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both.”Mr. Mamdani, whose Democratic Socialists of America party has seen more than three dozen candidates win Democratic Party primaries this year, similarly embedded his political message in patriotic language and symbolism when he spoke earlier Friday.“Tomorrow, our nation marks 250 years since we declared our independence,” he said from behind a desk at New York City Hall once used by George Washington. “Two hundred fifty years of a grand experiment in self-governance, an experiment so audacious that some in 1776 doubted it would last more than a few years, let alone a quarter of a millennium.”But in his telling, America’s history of extraordinary achievement is also one in which successive generations of immigrants — many of them arriving in the country through New York’s harbor — were confronted with abject living conditions, sweatshop fires, and anti-immigrant riots “aimed at their very existence.”Turning to the present and in an apparent reference to the Trump administration’s immigration policies, he said, “today too many of our leaders do not believe in a vision of this nation as an asylum for the persecuted, but rather as one that persecutes those seeking asylum.”Describing New York as “a city of contradictions within a nation of contradictions,” he spoke of America as a country “where children go to sleep hungry, while the world’s first trillionaire hungers for more” and one in which ”we see masked agents terrorizing our streets, eating food cooked by our undocumented neighbors before spiriting them away in unmarked vans.”Mr. Trump, who has publicly hinted he believes his own image would be a welcome addition to those of Presidents Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, and Roosevelt on Mount Rushmore, elaborated at the Black Hills monument on the idea of “American exceptionalism.”“By the grace of God, the United States of America is the most successful, most accomplished, most exceptional nation ever to exist in human history,” the president said.As if anticipating the president’s remarks, Mr. Mamdani offered his own take on the subject.“We are told that America is exceptional because we are richer, stronger, more powerful than everyone else,” he said. “The truth, my friends, is that America is exceptional because here nothing is fixed into place. The frontier may be closed, we may have walked on the moon, but the work of fulfilling the values first enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, that work endures, and it belongs to us all.”

Trump, Mamdani Mingle Politics With Patriotism in Dueling July 4 Messages

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