Trump vows to defend statues in dark Independence Day speech after Native American protests

President defends Confederate-era monuments and says his opponents’ goal is to ‘end America’

Donald Trump has heightened his law-and-order threats against Americans demonstrating against racial injustice, a movement that he called “a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children”.

The president’s remarks, invoking his dark vision of an America under siege, were addressed to a crowd of several thousand people at Mount Rushmore National Monument in South Dakota to mark Independence Day.

Dozens of Native American protesters who have condemned the president’s appearance at the sacred Sioux Nation site had attempted to block a road to the event. National Guard troops fired pepper spray at several protesters, and a dozen people were arrested moments before the president arrived.

While a dangerous spike in new coronavirus cases has forced Americans to cancel celebrations over the three-day holiday weekend, the president has insisted on holding his event, inspired by a growing nationalism that has redefined the cries for justice against police killings of black Americans as a “growing danger that threatens every blessing our ancestors fought so hard for”.

The president has long sought a televised fireworks spectacle at Mount Rushmore to legitimise his presidency, on a stage flanked by red, white and blue banners with a military band and generous crowd.

But he walked onstage on Friday in the midst of a crisis, as cases of Covid-19 continue to spike across the US, which have reached nearly 3 million, including the deaths of more than 128,000 Americans inside four months. A densely packed crowd at the monument’s amphitheatre was not asked to physically distance themselves or wear any face coverings.

Rather than addressing the intense division that has dominated American life in recent months, he defended monuments to the Confederacy erected in the Jim Crow era, as well as other controversial public monuments to prominent slavers, as Americans and state and local officials have wrestled for years with their placement in public areas across the US.

He announced an executive order creating a “National Garden of American Heroes” to feature statues of several presidents and other American figures, from Amelia Earhart and Harriet Tubman to former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and evangelical leader Billy Graham.

Under the massive stone faces of former presidents at Mount Rushmore in Keystone, South Dakota, the president’s remarks echoed his re-election campaign’s violent rhetoric, promising a cultural civil war against Americans that only his administration can defeat.

He accused anti-racist demonstrators, journalists and educators of a “far-left fascism” that is “designed to overthrow the American revolution”.

“Their goal is to end America,” he declared. “In its place they want power for themselves.”

Protests greeted him in South Dakota, where roughly 100 Native Americans and other demonstrators demanded that the president cancel the event and honour a longstanding treaty that allows tribal governance over South Dakota’s Black Hills, home to dozens of tribal nations.

Construction on Mount Rushmore’s sculpture began in 1927 and was competed 14 years later, with the faces of former presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt carved into the Six Grandfathers, the mountain edifice as it’s known to Native Americans.

“The whole Black Hills is sacred,” Ricky Gray Grass, a member of the Oglala Sioux’s executive council, told The Washington Post. “For them to come and carve the presidents, slave owners who have no meaning to us, it was an insult.”

Its creation also undermined the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, which had established the area as part of the Great Sioux Reservation. The federal government routinely infringed on those agreements in the decades that followed, from the peak of the Gold Rush through to the president’s latest visit.

In 1980, the US Supreme Court ultimately ruled that the Sioux Nation had not been justly compensated for the value of the land, and must be so with interest.

Hours before the president’s arrival, the Oglala Sioux tribal council voted to ban the president and South Dakota governor Kristi Noem from the area.

Oglala president Julian Bear Runner wrote to the White House to cancel the event after the president had refused to discuss the matter with native leaders.

“The people are angry,” Bear Runner said this week. “All I can do as a leader is stand back and support them ... and to stand with them and help them in every way I can to do what is right.”