If Donald Trump’s address on 3 July from Mount Rushmore will be remembered at all, it will be because that was the day of competing speeches, and competing visions, of the United States. Earlier on 3 July, the New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani, delivered a speech that was about half as long as Trump’s 28-minute address, but one that offered a far different assessment of the challenges facing his city and our nation.
“We see a city of contradictions within a nation of contradictions,” Mamdani said, while seated at George Washington’s desk and flanked by newly naturalized American citizens. “We see the wealthiest country in the history of the world – one where children go to sleep hungry while the world’s first trillionaire hungers for more.”
Mamdani’s speech was rich with historical references, beginning with his mention of the Lenape people who lived on the land of what we now call New York City before the Europeans arrived. (As far as I know, Trump never mentions the Indigenous nations of this land.) Mamdani’s address made a (too) brief nod to American chattel slavery, before celebrating American immigration, noting: “Irish immigrants [who] arrived with stomachs aching from a famine manufactured by imperial cruelty” along with “Jewish people escaping pogroms”.
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Next, it offered a sharp warning that the nation must not lose its way. “Those ideals upon which our nation was built – they are strong enough to endure any authoritarian regime, but only if we reach for them,” the mayor said. “Ours is a nation working each day towards the perfection in which it was conceived. A nation striving each day to better itself. Therein lies the work of America – the striving, the bettering, the reaching towards perfection.”
By their nature, these types of speeches are flavored with more than a dash of national self-flattery. And while Mamdani’s speech was clearly situated in the conflicts of our present political moment, his rhetoric was nevertheless unifying and optimistic. The latter half of Trump’s 3 July address and parts of his 4 July address were basically a stump speech for Republicans, as they face a tough midterm election season ahead.
Trump, clearly rattled by the success of the left wing of the Democratic party in New York and across the country, has decided to return to the 1950s. He is now brazenly resurrecting cold war rhetoric, repeatedly labeling his opponents “godless communists”, as he did on Friday.
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Trump delivered yet another speech on 4 July and in Washington DC. This address, besides being almost rained out, felt more like a strange mix of a State of the Union Address and a 1970’s game show, as Trump kept wheeling out old flags and centenarian veterans onto his stage as if they were all up for auction. Human and non-human props aside, his actual 4 July lecture offered, perhaps surprisingly, less substance than the one he had given the day before.
But democratic socialists are clearly not the “godless communists” Trump claims. Take our mayor, for example. Since Mamdani is a Muslim and a democratic socialist, he would be a Muslim communist and not a godless one. Please get it right, Mr President. Of course, the whole “godless communists” thing is pure fiction, but, as Trump well knows, it’s easier to fight the enemy who lives in your imagination than your actual opponent challenging you at the polls.
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Mamdani offered sober assessments of political opportunism. “At every moment in our past, those who led through exclusion and isolation have tried to win power and enrich themselves by turning us against one another,” he said, “Division is the oldest trick in politics, and the cheapest.”
Trump, on the other hand, simply rewrote the past. “As for those who peddle Marxist lies about our heritage, tell our children that we live on stolen land or that our heroes were oppressors, they’re doing something much worse than slandering our past,” Trump said on 3 July. “They are slandering and attacking our future – not going to let that happen.”
But Trump was delivering his speech on stolen land. That day, he was on Mount Rushmore, which is in the Black Hills, sacred territory of the Lakota people, who call the area He Sapa. “A more ripe and rank case of dishonorable dealings will never, in all probability, be found in our history” is how a 1980 US supreme court opinion described the theft of the Black Hills from the “Sioux Nation of Indians”.
As historian Nick Estes points out about that supreme court decision: “The court awarded the tribe $102 million; today, with the accumulated interest, it comes to nearly $2 billion. But the Lakota position remains unwavering, as shown by the popular slogan, ‘The Black Hills are not for sale!’ The relationship with He Sapa cannot be translated into money. The land itself, the tribes said, must be returned.”
Trump’s hubris is legendary (he has suggested he wants his face on Mount Rushmore), and he obsessively repeats, as he did in this speech, that the United States was “laughed at, mocked”, and seen as a “nation in decline” just two years ago. “And today,” Trump says, “We are the hottest country anywhere in the world. Everybody respects us like no nation.”
But the polling doesn’t bear any of this out. The Pew Research Center recently found sharp declines in US favorability around the globe. And what I imagine must really upset the president is that democratic socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani polls at a significantly higher approval rating (48%) than Donald Trump does (39%).
Mamdani’s speech illustrated his gifts of public speaking and emphasized his vision that the country is at its strongest when we look out for each other. “We see America each time working people demand more – not just for themselves, but for their fellow Americans,” he said. Trump’s speech was an appeal to an abstract future greatness based on defeating fictionalized enemies and returning to an often-mythical past. Both are versions of the United States of America. Between the two, between reality and fiction, we must choose where we want to live.
