July 4, 2020

Trump Eschews Traditional Unity Call in Favor
Culture Revolution Rhetoric on Dead Holiday

By Mike Hailey
Capitol Inside Editor

President Donald Trump reveled in visions of grandeur at Mount Rushmore on Friday night with the unveiling of plans for a magnificent monument park where people can come to worship historical figures who he officially deems to be heroes.

The rest of the nation that he vowed to make great again has cancelled the Fourth of July.

There will be no fireworks, parades or celebrations on July 4, 2020 when the beaches and the bars will be closed while restaurants rely more on curbside with occupancy restrictions that vary from state to state. Disneyland and Disney World won't be open and fun lovers can't get in either Six Flags park in Texas without advance reservations and religious adherence to safety standards that Trump's audience on the eve of the dead holiday abandoned for the cameras.

But Trump didn't let the worst public health crisis in more than a century spoil the festivities that peaked with a diatribe about evil forces taking over America with a social justice movement that the president portrayed as leftist terrorists bent on monument destruction and historical desecration.

Trump took the audience in Keystone on a trip back to the good old days with no social distancing and a very minimal number of masks thanks to a special exemption from South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem - a Republican who served in Congress and the state House before a promotion to her current job in 2018.

Trump all but ignored the pandemic wasn't in a speech that he used for an official opening shot in an exploding culture war that he's determined to perpetuate with racially inciting rhetoric and implied threats of violence if necessary to crush the demonstrating.

On the night before a holiday that had been a celebration of liberty and unity, the president drew a line in the sand at the second largest monument in a nation where the Statue of Liberty has been all but forgotten as the antithesis of the Trump campaign's central message.

The sermon at Mount Rushmore should have every Texas Republican in a race with competitive potential to be petrified heading into the rest of a summer that's been a nightmare up to now for a bitterly-divided GOP.

But the Trump speech's most amazing moment might have come when he announced the fast-track development of a massive new national park that will be a spectacular historic hero worship sanctuary in the great outdoors based on its portrayal in his words and an executive order that he signed on Friday.

Trump unveiled a star-studded original cast for the National Garden of Heroes" that he wants a federally-funded task force to have on the drawing boards in 60 days or less. John Adams, Susan B. Anthony, Clara Barton, Daniel Boone, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, Henry Clay, Davy Crockett, Frederick Douglass, Amelia Earhart, Benjamin Franklin, Billy Graham, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, Martin Luther King, Jr., Abraham Lincoln, Douglas MacArthur, Dolley Madison, James Madison, Christa McAuliffe, Audie Murphy, George S. Patton, Jr., Ronald Reagan, Jackie Robinson, Betsy Ross, Antonin Scalia, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Tubman, Booker T. Washington, George Washington and the Wright brothers Orville and Wilbur will be guaranteed pedestals in the grand Trump monument memorial.

Trump included Adams in the debut sculpture lineup as the nation's second president. But none of Adams' fellow Boston revolutionaries like Samuel Adams, John Hancock and Paul Revere were guaranteed pedestals at the start in the expansive national statue park.

After gushing about Theodore Roosevelt as one the four giant heads looking on from above, Trump left him off of the list of dead celebrities who will have automatic admission to his monument facility that he expects have ready to go in six years or less. Trump was apparently following the lead of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City where a racist statue of Teddy Roosevelt had graced the entrance before its removal last week. But Trump included George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincolin in the starting lineup.