“For two and a half centuries, our American Republic has stood as the crowning achievement of human history. This country is the home of freedom. This is the land of Liberty,” President Donald Trump declared in his speech marking the nation’s 250th birthday. He added that it is “the most extraordinary, most exceptional, most incredible nation ever to exist on the face of the earth.”

It was a pretty epic weekend for the nation, with parades, fireworks, and festivals dotting the fruited plain from sea to shining sea. Celebrations and patriotism were everywhere.

Unfortunately, severe weather marred the celebrations in DC, leading to a two-hour evacuation of the National Mall. The parade through the streets of DC was canceled “due to extreme heat.” Yeah, it’s called “July.”

Nevertheless, the president who loves America so much delivered his speech after a delay. Much like he did in a similar speech on Friday night at Mount Rushmore, the president walked through American history, celebrating our nation’s triumphs and achievements, from Medals of Honor and military greatness to flight and space.

“For 250 years,” he noted, “the United States of America has been the hope, the promise, the light and the glory among all of the nations of the world.” He added, “There is no challenge Americans cannot overcome. There is no place we cannot go. There is no goal we cannot reach. And there is nothing that Americans cannot do.”

One thing he insisted that we do is defeat the communism that is festering in our own country.

“America will never be a communist country. Won’t happen,” he vowed. “Communism is a loser, and it always will be. The communist system is the opposite of the American system, and the communist system has never worked. 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. We’re not going to let it happen. We like to stop a threat like that immediately and before it begins. It’s like a cancer. You got to cut it out. You got to cut it out fast.”

Indeed, communism is like cancer. Whereas American free enterprise builds and creates, communism hijacks, consumes, and destroys. Yet when you put smiley faces on it, the way Democratic Socialists do in the modern Democrat Party, it puts a veil over the inevitable Jacobin reign of terror and draws miseducated young people to it like mosquitoes to a zapper.

At Mount Rushmore, Trump inveighed against communism at greater length. “There is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land, including from newcomers to our country who embrace ideas totally opposed to our way of life and our great success,” he warned. “These are not mere political disagreements like differences over taxes or regulations. Communism is a mortal threat to American Liberty.”

“Communism is the exact opposite of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” he continued. “It’s death, tyranny, and the pursuit of evil.”

The president highlighted the binary choice: “You can be a communist, or you can be a Patriot. You cannot be both.”

That’s exactly right, and if America is to survive another 250 years, it’s going to take strong Patriots standing against the rising tide of Marxism.

Who better to illustrate the choice President Trump presented than Zohran Mamdani? He’s the Muslim socialist who inexplicably now leads the city of New York, 25 years after Islamofascists murdered thousands of Americans at the World Trade Center.

“Never forget,” eh?

Just after Mamdani’s wife, Rama Duwaji, left America to avoid the Fourth in the Mediterranean island of Mallorca, the mayor sat behind a desk once owned by President George Washington, flanked by newly naturalized American citizens who didn’t exactly look thrilled to be here, to deliver a speech rewriting American history as one of darkness and oppression. “American exceptionalism,” he lectured, is little more than “an arena of supremacy” where “monopolies dominate every industry” and “oligarchs buy elections.”

“We see masked agents terrorizing our streets, eating food cooked by undocumented neighbors before spiriting them away in unmarked vans,” Mamdani declared. “We see a nation whose immense wealth has been built by those with calloused, dirt-streaked hands, those who toil on factory floors and chisel into stone, and we see a nation that has allowed so much of that wealth to be held instead in the soft hands of a precious few.”

He got it exactly backward, saying, “We are told that America is exceptional because we are richer, stronger, more powerful than everyone else.” No, we’re richer and stronger because our foundational principles are exceptional.

“America, if you ask [the powerful],” he groused, “becomes less the more people it welcomes. America, they will tell you, belongs only to those with the right accent or the right shade of skin. The rest of us, they insist, should be grateful for merely being allowed to visit.”

I’ll respond to this slander with a suggestion: How about a one-for-one trade? We keep the World Cup visitors who enthusiastically love America, and, for each one, we send an America-loathing socialist to one of the many socialist countries around the world, where they can dwell in, er, happiness and quit trying to destroy our country.

In short, the contrast here is stark: Trump offers a vision of a strong and prosperous America with enormous potential. Mamdani sees — and, frankly, promises — little but an American dysoptia that isn’t much different from the Third World.

I’ll side with Trump on that one, thanks.

“Americans love freedom,” Trump said at Rushmore. “We cherish independence, and we know that we are the heirs to the most beautiful land, the most thrilling story, and the most precious legacy on which the sun has ever shined.” Let’s keep it that way.

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