Trump to launch America’s 250th birthday celebrations at Mount Rushmore

Donald Trump opened the weekend of America’s 250th birthday celebrations with a speech at Mount Rushmore on Friday, placing the semiquincentennial kickoff at one of the country’s most charged civic symbols. The setting in South Dakota’s Black Hills turned a holiday commemoration into a political stage, with the memorial’s carved presidents looming behind a president who has repeatedly used patriotic imagery to define loyalty.

Mount Rushmore National Memorial features George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, and the National Park Service says its purpose is to communicate the founding, expansion, preservation and unification of the United States. Construction began in 1927 and was completed in 1941 after work by roughly 400 laborers. The monument was first envisioned by artist Gutzon Borglum, and President Calvin Coolidge attended the Aug. 10, 1927 dedication ceremony, where he promised federal funding for the project. The first ceremonial drilling took place that year after Coolidge handed Borglum drill bits, and the first actual carving began in October 1927.

Those details matter because the memorial was built to tell a national story through four presidents chosen for specific eras. Washington represents the birth of the country, Jefferson its expansion, Lincoln the preservation of the Union and Theodore Roosevelt the nation’s development into the 20th century. That curated version of history has given later presidents a ready-made backdrop for campaign messaging, especially when they want to wrap themselves in the language of patriotism and national renewal.

The monument has also been a flashpoint. In 2020, Trump held a July 3 fireworks event there that drew criticism from Native American groups, who said the site is a profanation of land taken from tribes. One fire expert called the display ill-advised because of dry conditions and wildfire risk. The event was expected to draw as many as 7,500 people and cost about $1.5 million, including $350,000 for fireworks.

Mount Rushmore has also been the site of Indigenous protest activity around Trump’s visits, a reminder that the monument’s meaning is still contested. As the country enters its 250th year, the speech at the memorial folded together commemoration, campaign theater and a decades-old argument over who gets to claim the symbols of American identity.