American settlers created the United States’ freedom culture, not just the Founders’ words, President Donald Trump declared Friday in a powerful Mount Rushmore speech celebrating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
“There is no American freedom without American culture, and there is no American founding without the American people,” Trump said.
The speech marked a clear break from the progressive “creedal nation” theory pushed by former President Barack Obama and other left-wing politicians who claim America’s freedom culture can be replicated by any diverse migrant population that simply agrees to a few civic principles.
“There is no American freedom without American culture, and there is no American founding without the American people.”
Obama has repeatedly argued that migrants can be absorbed into American society if they accept the themes of the Declaration. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, an ethnic Indian Muslim, goes even further — arguing the creed is so broad that migrants can rewrite it entirely.
Trump rejected that vision entirely.
Standing before the granite faces of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt, Trump argued the Declaration’s principles could only emerge from the European settlers who built America from scratch.
“The identity of a nation is the destiny of a nation,” Trump said, “and America has a destiny like no other, because we are a people like no other.”
He continued: “Here, the old world sent its bravest, boldest, and most resilient, its fiercest, most faithful, and freedom-loving. These men and women brought values, traditions, and customs transmitted over the centuries in Britain, and stretching back even further to Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome.”
The United States became the greatest civilization in human history, Trump said, because European settlers “forged a uniquely American character, a new breed of citizen.”
“We can never forget that American liberty has not endured for 250 years merely because of words on paper; Liberty has prevailed here because of the culture and character of the people who declared it, defended it, and preserved it.”
Constitutions and creeds cannot survive without the right people to uphold them, Trump warned.
“Many nations have paper constitutions and legal systems, but the citizens live in fear and squalor,” he said. “A constitution is only as strong as the people and the culture responsible for upholding it.”
The argument explains Trump’s push to reduce economic immigration and block migrants hostile to American culture.
Obama, however, has spent years defending the opposite vision — claiming progressives can create a freedom society from diverse immigrant cultures fundamentally different from the European traditions Trump celebrated.
In a 2025 speech, Obama framed mass migration as an “experiment” — and admitted it might be failing.
“There’s never been an experiment like this, where you have people from every corner of the globe show up in one place,” Obama said.
He also conceded that his diversity project has made governing harder: “Bipartisanship worked pretty well in Washington when everybody looked the same. And it was harder to do when people started seeing that, ‘Hey, those folks are now here, too.'”
“Changes in demographics” are a problem, Obama admitted, along with economic and technological trends.
“The country right now is going through sort of a political crisis of the sort that we haven’t seen before,” he said.
Mamdani pushes the creedal theory even further. In a recent speech marking the 250th anniversary, he told an audience of legalized immigrants and illegal migrants: “You each hold a special power, the power to determine what America means.”
But Trump’s Mount Rushmore speech made clear: American freedom isn’t up for reinterpretation by global migrants with no connection to the culture that created it.
Patriots know the truth — a nation’s identity determines its destiny. And Obama’s mass-migration experiment is running out of time.
Anyone trying to redefine an American as an idea is explicitly saying that you, your fathers, and your children are not people. It’s dehumanizing by default.
— Andrew Torba (@BasedTorba) July 3, 2026
.@POTUS at Mount Rushmore:
On this anniversary, we must remember that American liberty has not endured for 250 years merely because of words on paper; liberty has prevailed here because of the culture and character of the people who declared it, defended it, and preserved it.… pic.twitter.com/aAQWSTynwh
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) July 4, 2026
