President Trump is scheduled to speak at Mount Rushmore on Friday night as part of the nation’s 250th anniversary celebrations. There will be military flyovers, precision drill demonstrations and lots of fireworks. Governor Larry Rhoden of South Dakota and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum are set to speak before the president.
It’s not the president’s first time making a big speech before the fine grained granite faces of Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln.
This week six years ago, when he was at the end of his first term and campaigning for another, he spoke at Mount Rushmore. Back then, Kristi Noem was governor of South Dakota (she compared him with Theodore Roosevelt in public, and in private she presented him with a four-foot model of Mount Rushmore with his face added to it) and the country was in the throes of the pandemic and civil unrest after the death of George Floyd. There was a national debate about statues and historical figures, and Mr. Trump used his speech that night to warn of a “new far-left fascism.”
This week he was warning of a new far-left “communism,” as he did repeatedly on Wednesday, when he was in nearby North Dakota, making a speech at the opening of the new Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library.
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