President Trump on Saturday delivered a storm-delayed address on the National Mall that capped the July 4 leg of the country's 250th birthday, wrapping his remarks just before midnight after a two-hour thunderstorm evacuation forced organizers to postpone the program and shelter World War II veterans in nearby buildings.
The Salute to America speech extended the political framing Trump had set at Mount Rushmore on Friday: renewed attacks on what he called a "communist menace" at home, a fresh push for the SAVE America Act voter-citizenship bill, and boasts about the U.S.-Israel war with Iran that cast the campaign in the vocabulary of past American conflicts. With the November midterms four months away, the president used the anniversary stage to preview themes his party is expected to carry into the fall.
The storm delay
Severe thunderstorms swept through Washington on Saturday evening, forcing officials to evacuate the Mall and shelter guests at the Salute to America, the Great American State Fair and a FIFA fan zone in nearby buildings, according to the BBC. Trump had originally been scheduled to take the stage at 10 p.m., a Freedom 250 spokesperson said. The delay pushed his remarks past 11 p.m., and the fireworks that followed ran until about 1 a.m., the BBC reported.
"I'm going through bad weather. No matter what happens, I am delivering this speech," Trump told Fox News anchor Bret Baier by phone during the delay, likening the postponement to D-Day and pledging to keep the program going.
The storms were the weekend's second weather crisis. About 750,000 properties across Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York and New Jersey lost power, tracker Power Outage said, and Michigan utility DTE attributed more than 350,000 outages in that state to winds above 60 miles per hour. Washington had baked in 100-degree heat earlier Saturday, with New Jersey reaching 106.
Communism and the SAVE Act
When Trump finally spoke, the address mixed veteran tributes with sharper rhetoric. He honored World War II soldiers, a Vietnam-era Green Beret and William Harvey Carney, the escaped slave who became the first Black recipient of the Medal of Honor. He then pivoted to domestic politics.
"Our warriors did not fight communism on battlefields across the world, only to have that menace rear its ugly head right back here in America," Trump said, according to CBS News. "It's like a cancer, you got to cut it out."
The president tied the theme to his voting overhaul. "We want to keep America great, and we will do so by approving the Save America Act," he said. "You won't have cheating on the elections anymore, it's very simple." The measure would require voters to prove U.S. citizenship to register and to show identification before casting a ballot. It is the same bill Trump pressed the Senate to advance by scrapping the filibuster during his Mount Rushmore address the night before.
Iran and Venezuela
Trump reserved much of the historical stretch for U.S. military claims. "You look at Venezuela, you look at Iran, we wiped it out, wiped out their military," he told the crowd, according to CBS News, before comparing the Spanish-American War sinking of a Spanish fleet at Manila Bay to this year's strikes on Iran.
He described the Iranian result as "much like our recent victory by sinking the entire Iranian navy, 159 ships to the bottom of the sea, all done in just a moment's time." An Al Jazeera account of the Mount Rushmore speech reported that Trump had told that crowd Tehran was "dying to settle" and that Washington had granted "a week off for a funeral," a reference to the state rites underway in Iran for slain Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, killed in the opening U.S.-Israeli strike in February.
Trump closed by calling the day "only the dawn of the golden age of America," CBS News reported, and said "the best is yet to come." Earlier in the address he told the crowd, "The American dream is back," the BBC reported.
The counterpoint
Not all of Saturday's imagery ran with the administration. About 400 members of the white nationalist group Patriot Front marched in unison through downtown Washington carrying U.S. flags, the BBC reported, passing near the Capitol and Union Station in videos posted to social media. The bipartisan America 250 commission established by Congress remained a separate track from Freedom 250, the privately funded events committee Trump launched, a split the BBC said fed accusations that the president had politicized the milestone.
Former President Bill Clinton, in a statement collected by the BBC alongside remarks from Joe Biden, Barack Obama and George W. Bush, marked the anniversary by calling out "another period of deep division, renewed questions about America's future and role in the world, and serious threats to our own institutions and to our democracy itself." Bush struck a milder note, telling Americans "the next 250 years require Americans to be citizens, not spectators."
What is next
The White House billed the Salute to America program as the centerpiece of the July 4 weekend, but the America 250 calendar runs through 2026. America 250 organizers buried a 200-year time capsule on the Mall containing a signed copy of the Constitution and artifacts from all 50 states. U.S. nuclear talks with Iran are set to resume in Doha on July 9.