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I had a surprisingly restful Fourth of July holiday weekend. I didn’t watch the news at all and I barely even watched tennis. I mostly just played games on my iPad and watched Castle DVDs, because I’m a giant social distancing loser. Anyway, it’s back to the grind and back to pretending that I was actually paying attention to any of the political stories this weekend. Apparently, Trump went to Mount Rushmore, huh? And he gave a speech about the fascism of the left and such.

President Donald Trump celebrated America over the Fourth of July weekend with a pair of ugly speeches at Mt. Rushmore and in Washington, D.C. that attempted to rally conservative support by demonizing the left and defending monuments. “Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children,” Trump said on Friday night at Mt. Rushmore, as he tried to revive his base following an embarrassing turnout in Tulsa. “Angry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our founders, deface our most sacred memorials, and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities.”

Trump, who last weekend promoted a video advocating “white power,” has defended honoring the racist Confederacy with statues and at military bases. While Trump has a history of racism, the Washington Post notes that his strategy of “amplifying racism and stoking culture wars” has been especially striking in this particular moment of national reckoning, one that Trump has responded to with stunningly divisive rhetoric “seeking to weaponize the anger and resentment of some white Americans for his own political gain” rather than calming a country in crisis.

Trump has responded to the outcry for reform with a reimagined version of the “American carnage” he cited at his inauguration, during which he painted a dark picture of a United States exploited by immigrants and foreign nations. But unlike in 2016, notes the Post’s David Nakamura, the enemy has also become other Americans who, in challenging the nation’s founding ideals, pose a threat to Trump’s conservative base. “We are now in the process of defeating the radical left—the Marxists, the anarchists, the agitators, the looters,” the president remarked on Saturday. On Friday, he warned of “the violent mayhem we have seen in the streets of cities that are run by liberal Democrats,” drawing battle lines in an attempt to galvanize supporters. “Our children are taught in school to hate their own country,” he claimed.

From the Black Hills of South Dakota, Trump warned of a “new far-left fascism” and “cancel culture” that “is designed to overthrow the American Revolution.”

[From Vanity Fair]

Fun fact for the amateur historians out there: the monuments of Confederate generals and the historical relics of the Confederacy are not, in fact, part of the American Revolution. I’m not naive, and I know what Trump is trying to do: he’s trying to conflate the (necessary) movement to rip down all of the Confederate monuments with the larger (and more nuanced) conversation about the history of slavery, white supremacy and racism in America, and the conversation about who gets monuments and whose history gets (literally) whitewashed. But considering Trump’s ride-or-die supporters are the f–king idiots who scream at people for wearing masks, I don’t expect them to recognize what Trump is actually doing. He just wants to convince aggrieved white people that the race war is already upon them.

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Photos courtesy of Getty.