US President Donald Trump said on Friday that America's culture and national identity were facing a sustained challenge, warning that efforts to rewrite the country's history threatened the values that, he argued, had sustained the United States for 250 years.
In an address at Mount Rushmore on the eve of the nation's 250th Independence Day, Trump devoted a significant part of his speech to what he described as attempts to undermine America's historical legacy and weaken its shared identity.
"But in recent years, there's been an undeniable attempt to change this exceptional character, to beat the American spirit out of us, alienate us from our history, and to make it impossible to even answer the question, what does it mean to be an American?" Trump said.
He argued that the country's freedoms rested not only on its Constitution but also on the beliefs and traditions passed down through generations. "We must never forget there is no American freedom without American culture. And there is no American founding without the American people," he said.
"A constitution is only as strong as the people and the culture responsible for upholding it." Trump described American identity as rooted in liberty, self-reliance and faith, saying the country's founders created a society where citizens governed themselves and valued individual freedom.
"Americans did not bow before a king or a government, but kneeled only before Almighty God," he said. He added that Americans "love freedom", "cherish independence", and do not need "anyone's permission to say what we think and to live as we please, to worship as we choose, or to keep and bear arms."
The President also defended English as a defining element of the country's identity. "In America, we speak English because that is the language of our founding," he said. Trump criticised what he characterised as efforts to portray the nation's history negatively.
"As for those who pedal Marx's lies about our heritage, who tell our children that we live on stolen land or that our heroes were oppressors," he said, "they're doing something much worse than slandering our past, they are slandering and attacking our future."
He argued that such efforts sought to erode the country's foundations. "They're trying to tear down the great American character to destroy the people who declared independence, who crossed to Delaware, who settled the west and conquered the skies," Trump said.
Throughout the speech, Trump linked patriotism with preserving what he described as America's enduring values. He said every generation had a responsibility to pass those traditions to the next. "For generations, it was understood that the core of patriotic duty of every American was to pass this culture onto our children and to preserve the nation for centuries and centuries to come," he said.
Debates over American history, national identity and civic education have become increasingly prominent in recent years. Questions surrounding school curricula, historical monuments and the interpretation of the nation's founding have emerged as recurring themes in the country's political discourse, with Republicans and Democrats often taking sharply different positions.