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(Dobbs) Trump Won't Be Up On The Mountain To Tell Us Otherwise

“Do you know it’s my dream to have my face on Mount Rushmore?”

Jul 5

“Show us a mountain, and we’ll just climb it. Show us an ocean and we’ll just cross it. Show us a problem and we will just solve it. Show us a task the world calls impossible and Americans will get it done.”

Stirring words. Soaring words. Prophetic words. Almost uniquely American words. The kinds of words you could expect to hear from eloquent orators like Ronald Reagan or John F. Kennedy. The kinds of words you want to hear on the eve of the Fourth of July.

But if Reagan, or Kennedy, or any other president had said them, speaking at the foot of Mount Rushmore for our beloved nation’s 250th anniversary, they would have left it at that. Any other president.

But not Donald Trump.

Friday night, he delivered inspirational sentences like “Americans will get it done” that his speechwriters wrote for him. But then he couldn’t stop himself. He couldn’t let this nation’s birthday stand alone as a day for all Americans. He had to deliver a nasty screed about Americans who haven’t fallen under his spell.

“Communism,” he declared, “is the enemy of July 4, 1776.” He called his political rivals “godless” and “evil” communists. “Communism,” he said like a dog with a bone, “is the exact opposite of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It’s death, tyranny and the pursuit of evil.”

Many presidents have pounded that theme over the years. But they were talking about Soviet communists, sometimes Chinese and North Korean communists, Vietnamese communists. Trump was talking about Americans. He pulled out a scare tactic familiar since the sinister era of Joe McCarthy: “The Communist Party is made up of illegal immigrants, criminals and everybody that doesn’t want to work.”

And if that didn’t scare everyone within the sound of his voice, maybe this would: “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.”

For the record, no it’s not. It hasn’t been since the Cold War, if it even was then. How dare this president, cheapening the lives of those we lost from two world wars to 9/11.

But this is Donald Trump’s way of scaring Americans in the run-up to the midterm elections where he and his presidency have everything at stake. Make them believe that “Democrat” means the same thing as “communist.”

As The New York Times put it, “He said the word ‘communism’ so many times, you might’ve thought the Cold War was still on.”

For the record, again, it’s not.

And how dare him steal a backdrop sacred to Americans to stage his new political line of attack. Mount Rushmore. But he wants it for more than a backdrop.

Friday, before he flew to South Dakota to make his speech, Trump’s White House issued a statement in response to inquiries from The Washington Post: “There would be no better addition to the iconic Mount Rushmore than the 45th and 47th President of the United States, Donald Trump.”

It was accompanied on Trump’s own website by this gold-cast rendering of just how uplifting he seems to think that would be.

This is an ambition long simmering in the ego of this president. He has never come right out and said, “Put me on Mount Rushmore,” but his hints leave little doubt. Only about a month ago he posted on his website a photo of the four presidents carved into the mountain— Washington, Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, and Lincoln— with his face making it five.

After Trump’s inauguration last year, Florida representative Anna Pauline Luna proposed a bill to instruct the Interior Department to start the process for real. Then Tennessee representative Andy Ogles asked Trump’s interior secretary Doug Borglum to explore it further, and posted a picture to show us how it would look.

An obliging Borglum said on Fox, “They certainly have room for it there.”

But this started back in 2017, according to the Sioux Falls Argus Leader— although at the time Trump denied it— when the president told then-congresswoman and soon-to-be South Dakota governor Kristi Noem, “Do you know it’s my dream to have my face on Mount Rushmore?” That same year he told a rally in Ohio that he wanted to ask the crowd “whether or not you think I will someday be on Mount Rushmore,” but that he wouldn’t because “the fake news media” would say, “He believes he should be on Mount Rushmore.” A couple of years later, when the publication The Hill asked if he’d like to see his face added to the mountain, he responded, “If I answer that question, ‘Yes,’ I will end up with such bad publicity.” But he didn’t answer “no.”

On Twitter in 2020, when The New York Times reported that the White House had actually asked then-Governor Noem’s office about the possibility of adding Trump to Rushmore, he wrote on Twitter, “Never suggested it,” although he couldn’t help but show his hand: “Although, based on all of the many things accomplished during the first 3 1/2 years, perhaps more than any other Presidency, sounds like a good idea to me!”

An editorial cartoonist at the Tulsa World showed the way many of us would see that “good idea” if if happened:

The caption was pure Trump: “Make me thinner and lose the other guys.”

None of this comes as any surprise. Neither his distasteful digs at Democrats from Mount Rushmore, nor his quest to be recognized as the best president this nation has seen. Between his face on huge banners outside government agencies in Washington, to his image on everything from passports to coins to passes for our national parks, to his larger-than-life golden statue outside his golf course in Florida, it is classic Trump. Bigger than the rest of us. Smarter than the rest of us. Richer than the rest of us. More important than the rest of us.

But maybe Mount Rushmore will be his ego’s Waterloo. In the 1980s, I had the thrill of spending a couple of days, along with a camera crew, crawling around the faces of our four illustrious presidents. Engineers were inspecting, then sealing cracks that had developed since Gutzon Borglum and his crew finished carving those immortal faces in 1941. I remember what the park superintendent told me: “We are just making sure that Mount Rushmore is one thing in America that will never change.”

The Park Service today tells the same story. It explained to the Sioux Falls Argus Leader during the middle of Trump’s first term, when he was inspiring proposals to be carved into the mountain, “There is no more carvable space up on the sculpture.”

So, on future Fourths of July, we can celebrate the eternal message from the Declaration of Independence, that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

And Trump won’t be up on the mountain to tell us otherwise.

[Salon] “Do you know it’s my dream to have my face on Mount Rushmore?”

(Dobbs) Trump Won't Be Up On The Mountain To Tell Us Otherwise

“Do you know it’s my dream to have my face on Mount Rushmore?”