Trump’s July 4th Speeches and JFK
Donald Trump made two speeches in celebration of the 250th anniversary of the founding of America. One was at Mount Rushmore, and one was on the National Mall in Washington. There was an overlap in content, but the second one was more cleverly staged around a point: that of American militarism.
The first speech featured a recurrent theme of Trump’s, namely American Exceptionalism. He started off by saying that things like liberty and justice and unmatched prosperity were flourishing in America like never before. He then added, “No other country has ever done more good for this world than the United States of America.”
As to the first, I think many Americans are feeling an economic pinch due to high prices, plus the fact that their wages have not kept pace with those prices. John Kennedy, unlike Trump, was always sensitive to this issue. This is why his tax cut, unlike Trump’s, was aimed at the middle and working classes. As commentators like Tim Noah have stated, in that respect, JFK’s tax cut was Keynesian. That is, it was trying to stimulate demand by giving the mass of the public more disposable income. (The New Republic, 10/11/12) Whereas Trump’s tax cuts, originating in 2017 and extended in 2025, proportionately favored the rich and corporations. Plus, the revenue losses were offset by those getting SNAP benefits and Medicaid. (CBS News, 7/3/26, story by Aimee Picchi and Megan Cerullo)
As per the second comment about America doing more good for this world than any other nation, I have to ask Mr. Trump: What good did American intervention in Southeast Asia do for Indochina? That intervention ended up being responsible for the deaths of up to five million people, 3 million in Vietnam and 2 million in Cambodia. The military dropped 7 million tons of bombs in Indochina, 2 million on Laos alone. That tonnage is more than all the bombs dropped during World War 2 combined. Parts of the region looked like the surface of the moon due to bomb craters. To this day, there is unexploded ordnance still in the ground, and this has killed about 20,000 civilians in Laos alone. (History.com, story by Jessica Pearce Rotondi, 12/5/19)
I might also ask the president: What good did the American-instigated government overthrows in Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954 do for those respective countries? What good did it do for the population to go from democratically elected leaders like Arbenz and Mossadegh to tyrants like the Shah and Castillo Armas? I would also like to ask the president, “Sir, what good did the American overthrow of Achmed Sukarno in Indonesia do for the people there in 1965?” Again, America backed a dictator in General Suharto over a nationalist leader in Sukarno. Reportedly, about 750,000 people were killed in the ensuing massacres. Again, President Kennedy backed Sukarno and was planning on visiting him in 1964.
If you add it all up, America generally ended up overthrowing republican forms of government and then backing military dictatorships. In just the cases I have mentioned above, close to 8 million people perished. There are many more instances I could list, but I recommend to the reader and Mr. Trump that he read William Blum’s classic reference book, The CIA: A Forgotten History.
Trump also mentioned his backing of the Second Amendment. This was on the same weekend that a man in a ski mask shot 8 people, four of them children, at Coney Island. Let us never forget that former Chief Justice Warren Burger called Justice Antonin Scalia’s interpretation of that amendment a hoax. Scalia led this drive from the Supreme Court in 2008 in the District of Columbia vs Heller case. The crusade was backed by the NRA and a fleet of libertarian attorneys, but it was still a 5-4 decision. (See the article at the Brennan Center site by Michael Waldman, 5/20/14) Today we have about 46, 000 deaths per year by firearms. Which is the highest volume and highest per capita rate of gun violence among all high-income nations. In 1962, there were about 1/3 that many. We know how Trump felt about Scalia. I guess we can deduce how he feels about the NRA. Bobby Kennedy was aghast at the NRA in his short-lived presidential campaign of 1968, as he was crusading for stricter gun control laws. (See RFK’s speech on gun control on May 27, 1968, in Roseburg, Oregon)
Trump also said that English is the language of freedom. Does this mean that France is not a republic--or Spain? Did he also forget all those centuries when England was ruled by a monarchy and conquered about 25 percent of the globe, creating an imperial empire?
But probably the most objectionable thing Trump said was the following:
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. These are not mere political disagreements like differences over taxes or regulations. Communism is a mortal threat to American liberty. It is the greatest threat to our country including World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor, or even 9/11. We’re not going to let this happen to us. Believe me we’re not letting it happen.
I wondered at first what the president was talking about. Russia is not a communist country anymore. China has become, more or less, a mixed economy. Cuba is about to transition to the same. And none of those nations seem intent on conquering the USA. Then I realized what Trump was talking about. He was talking about the recent progressive Democratic victories in New York and Colorado. In other words, he was talking in a shrouded and distorted way about the Zohran Mamdani movement.
Can you imagine saying that Mamdani is a bigger threat to the USA than the Third Reich? Or the Empire of the Sun? Or Al Qaeda? But this is what I think he was saying. Trump has swung so far to the reactionary right that progressive Democrats are now depicted as the second coming of Stalin to his audience.
Again, a comparison with the Kennedys is in order. Bobby Kennedy thought it was ludicrous for the FBI to be using hundreds of agents to infiltrate the communist party in 1963. (David Talbot, Brothers, p. 7) He would even joke about it; after all, half of their members were FBI agents. In his book, Pragmatic Illusions, Bruce Miroff details how JFK was much more worried about the rise of the radical right than he was about any internal communist threat. Harry Truman once said that any kind of program that benefits the public at large is somehow labeled as socialism, e.g., Social Security, Medicare and FHA Loans. Whereas Kennedy, in championing universal health care, pointed out that the USA is the only Westernized country that did not have it. Was JFK a communist? Pretty wealthy one, I guess.
Trump spoke after Mamdani, the mayor of New York--who is a democratic socialist--delivered a pro-immigrant address, which was widely seen as a rebuke of Trump and his ICE program. (Click here for that speech https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T71XJCtiSvo)
As Taegan Goddard noted on July 2nd in an interview with Paul Krugman, the fact is there are very few socialists in this country, let alone communists. And the ones who are call themselves democratic socialists. As Krugman went on to say:
What many, I’d say a majority, of Americans support is what Europeans call social democracy — an ideology that is OK with living in a mostly market-driven economic system in which some people make much more money than others, but one that advocates policies to tame markets and inequality with progressive taxation, safety net programs, and regulations.
In other words, the European, especially the Scandinavian, model. But this would be anathema to the Trump crowd since, for example, Sweden has high taxes on the wealthy to provide for its social welfare programs. For instance, universal healthcare, up to 480 days of paid parental leave per child, and unemployment insurance covering up to 80% of prior income for up to 300 days. There are also guaranteed minimum pensions, with housing benefits, and subsidized elderly care services. Sweden is not a communist country. But what they do there—redistribution of wealth through taxation—is anathema to someone like Trump. He then added, “You know who these people are.” Well, Donald, you never said Mamdani, but we get the idea. I think he was also including that other pinko, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Shades of Roy Cohn and Joe McCarthy.
Trump went on to say that some of these people want to tell our children we live on stolen land. Well, if you ask the Indians about that, they would say it was true. You know: Wounded Knee, the Trail of Tears, Sand Creek Massacre, Geronimo, etc. Is there anything exceptional about that? Except maybe that Indian tribes sued to get gambling rights in return for having their land swiped from them and every treaty broken.
Perhaps the most humorous and ironic thing Trump said at Rushmore was that if the GOP follows his advice and his example, they would not lose an election for a century. You really wonder who writes these speeches for him. This is a president who has an approval rating in the mid-thirties, one of the lowest since Richard Nixon’s. He has completely blown the independent vote, with a negative rate that is even worse than Nixon’s. (See Yahoo, story by Devanshi Basu, April 1, 2026)
Trump then bragged about his military exploits in Venezuela and Iran. Kidnapping a president, and then staging a sneak attack on a country that you were at peace with; these are things Trump says our military should be proud about. To me, Joe Biden was bad enough on this, with Gaza and Ukraine. Trump has only added to the list.
On the National Mall, the message was similar: American exceptionalism and all the good the USA has done. Again, he went after the Mamdani/Ocasio-Cortez wing of the Democratic Party. He then called the Constitution the most righteous political document ever conceived. Did Donald Trump ever hear of the 3/5 clause, which counted 3/5 of a southern state’s slave population toward that state’s population for apportionment purposes? I mean, what kind of education did this guy get at Penn? Did he ever hear of the Night of Terror at the Occoquan workhouse in Virginia in 1917, where jailed female suffrage protesters were beaten, then left without hospital care? How about what historian Carl Bauer called John Kennedy’s Second Reconstruction? That is breaking the back of Jim Crow in the South after almost a century of silence. This was an issue that people like Washington and Jefferson chose to ignore, probably because the former had over 100 slaves and Jefferson had over 200. This foundational problem was not really cured until the 1965 Voting Rights Act was passed, which Trump’s Supreme Court is trying to weaken.
The National Mall speech was used to praise America’s military history. Therefore, Trump addressed war survivors in the crowd, or their surviving descendants, e.g., Ken Schubring from World War II, and Paris Davis from Vietnam. He then uttered a real howler. He said that 38,000 Americans died during the construction of the Panama Canal. As any historian will tell you—or you can look it up-- that is even more than the total number from the previous French experience that ended in failure. The actual number is about 5,900 Americans who perished.
Trump ended with a salute to Gold Star families. About the smartest thing he did over the two speeches. All in all, I would rather have listened to Ocasio-Cortez on the 250th anniversary or Michelle Obama. At least the latter had the honesty to say that slaves were used to build the White House. But that is not really American Exceptionalism, is it?
