By Steve Holland
KEYSTONE, South Dakota July 3 (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump called on Americans to protect the freedoms the nation’s founders envisioned 250 years ago against what he has portrayed as the “communist” threat posed by progressive Democrats, speaking on the eve of Independence Day at Mount Rushmore.
“We stand beneath the monument of these heroes, a true group of unbelievable people, and we rededicate ourselves to being a nation as big, bold, noble, and as great as these American giants, and that’s not easy to do, but we’re going to do it,” Trump said at the granite mountain in South Dakota where the heads of four American presidents are carved.
“There is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land, including from newcomers to our country who embrace ideas totally opposed to our way of life and our great success,” he said. “We’re not going to let this happen.”
Trump has been making such points about gains by democratic socialists for a week now, but he made his most pointed and prolonged argument on that theme on Friday, coming as Americans grapple with persistent inflation and high gas prices since the start of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran.
Increasingly uneasy that the conflict could cost the party control of at least one chamber of Congress in November’s midterm elections, Republican lawmakers have seized on a recent string of successes by left-wing Democratic candidates.
Trump said that the threat also came from “newcomers to our country,” tying his anti-communist rhetoric to the anti-immigrant theme that fueled his election and has been historically part of the criticism of communism in the United States. Trump at one point on Friday said the newcomers need to be expelled.
“We resolve and swear for all to hear that the citizens of the United States of America will vanquish communism quickly … We will send them quickly away, and we will continue to build our country bigger and better, stronger than ever before. America will never be a communist country!” Trump said, before seguing immediately into the issue at hand.
“We can only lose the midterms if we allow ourselves to lose the midterms.”
Four progressive candidates, including three democratic socialists, won competitive Democratic primaries in New York City last week and in Colorado on Tuesday. Progressive candidates have also won contests in Kentucky, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas.
Trump last week called their victories “the greatest threat to our country since its founding.”
On Saturday, Trump was scheduled to address a crowd on the National Mall ahead of a massive fireworks show amid a searing heat wave that has disrupted Fourth of July celebrations across a large swath of the country.
At Mount Rushmore the temperature was a cool 65 degrees Fahrenheit (18 degrees Celsius).
(With reporting by Jasper Ward and writing by Ann Saphir; Editing by Donna Bryson and Raju Gopalakrishnan)
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