American settlers created the United States’ freedom culture, not just the Founders’ words, President Donald Trump said Friday in a Mount Rushmore speech that celebrated 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 declared.
That pitch is very different from progressives’ claims that America’s culture of freedom can be re-created or absorbed by any diverse migrant populations that agree to the civic creed outlined in the Declaration of Independence.
The progressives’ “creedal nation” theme has been pushed by pro-migration advocates such as former President Barack Obama and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Obama argues that many migrants can be blended into American society if they accept the themes of the Declaration. Mamdani argues that the creed is so broad that it can be rewritten by migrants, including ethnic Indian Muslims like himself.
Trump, however, argues that the Declaration’s themes could only emerge from the European migrants who settled America:
The identity of a nation is the destiny of a nation, and America has a destiny like no other, because we are a people like no other. For whatever reason, that’s just the way it is.
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 of America is where the greatest civilization in human history became greater than ever before on the grounds, granite hills, and the rugged plains of this wide open continent. They forged a uniquely American character, a new breed of citizen.
Constitutions, laws and creeds cannot survive if the population does not want to support them, Trump said:
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.
….
Many nations have paper constitutions and legal systems, but the citizens live in fear and squalor. A constitution is only as strong as the people and the culture responsible for upholding it, but as long as we remember who we are, we have to always remember who we are and what we’re all about.
Trump’s argument explains his support for reducing economic immigration and barring the inflow of migrants hostile to American culture.
However, Trump’s coalition includes many powerful business groups and aides who demand the inflow of many economic migrants from very foreign cultures, such as India, China, and Islamic countries.
Progressives such as Obama, however, have repeatedly argued that progressives can create a freedom society from diverse immigrant cultures that are different from the European culture praised by Trump.
In 2025, Obama declared:
[We progressives] say, based on these ideals — we hold these truths to be self-evident…all men are created equal … and a constitution and a Bill of Rights and a democracy — that we can somehow figure out how to get along and maintain our private beliefs and pray to god in our own ways, and retain aspects of the cultures that we bring from wherever it is that we’re coming from, and yet still decide that we are all Americans … and try to make it better for each successive generation.
He admitted, however, that his project is “an experiment,” not a tried-and-tested project: “There’s never been an experiment like this, where you have people from every corner of the globe show up in one place.”
He also admitted that his experiment in government-imposed diversity may be failing:
The point is, is that 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, along with economic and technological trends, he said.
“The country right now is going through sort of a political crisis of the sort that we haven’t seen before,” Obama said.
Mamdani goes further to argue that new migrants can rewrite America’s creed as they wish.
In his speech marking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration, he told his audience of legalized immigrants and illegal migrants that “You each hold a special power, the power to determine what America means.”
But the “creedal nation” pitch by progressive politicians is likely just political cover for their eagerness to welcome migrants. Those migrants, they hope, can fragment the freedom culture that helps ordinary Americans avoid dependence on elites and government agencies, and can also serve as imported voters for progressive power.
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