Leave it to Pete Hegseth to ruin D-Day

If you’ve ever been to Normandy in early June of any given year, you probably saw something that’s not all that common. Around the anniversary of the D-Day invasion on June 6, the whole place turns into a love-fest for America. Or at least it used to. After what Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth did on his visit this year, I’m not sure that will ever happen again.

I’ve been there during the annual commemorations, and it’s a very moving experience. If you’ve seen movies like “The Longest Day” or Saving Private Ryan,” you have some idea of what it was like, but when you personally come in by boat and sail along the coast near the beaches where the Allied troops landed 82 years ago, it really hits home. It must have felt like a suicide mission but they did it anyway. There were more than 10,000 casualties among the Allied troops who stormed the beaches that day, with about 4,400 killed, 2,500 of them Americans. The best estimates of German casualties are between 4,000 and 9,000 killed or injured.

Ever since, the people of France and Normandy have shown their gratitude for America’s sacrifice. They gave the U.S. a perpetual concession for the cemetery where most of those fallen Americans are buried. Every year, local people come along and rub beach sand into the marble headstones so the names of those U.S. soldiers can still be read. There are plaques and memorials everywhere; the war and the Nazi occupation still seem present, even to younger generations who have lived among these memories their whole lives.

In normal circumstances, when American dignitaries come to Normandy for the anniversary to pay their respects, it’s a solemn but proud occasion. It was arguably one of the finest moments in American history, a true act of courage and sacrifice for the greater good, at great risk to U.S. troops and the British, Canadian, Polish, Norwegian and Free French allies who fought alongside them. American leaders usually take that moment of deserved honor and gratitude to pay homage to the dead and wax poetic about the values and the ideals for which they died.

Ronald Reagan gave perhaps the most famous Normandy speech on the 40th anniversary of D-Day in 1984, now remembered as “The Boys of Pointe du Hoc.” Many D-Day veterans were present on that day to hear Reagan say, “These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc. These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the champions who helped free a continent. These are the heroes who helped end a war. Gentlemen, I look at you, and I think of the words of Stephen Spender’s poem: You are men who in your lives fought for life … and left the vivid air signed with your honor.” We need not admire him politically to agree that Reagan was good at that sort of thing.

Barack Obama was equally moving on the 70th anniversary in 2014, saying, “What more powerful manifestation of America’s commitment to human freedom than the sight of wave after wave after wave of young men boarding those boats to liberate people they had never met?”

This year marked the 82nd anniversary, and almost no one who was there in 1944 is still with us. Thankfully, America didn’t send Donald Trump over there to rant about the 2020 election or show the French pictures of his glorious ballroom. Instead, we sent Hegseth, who was at least as bad. Actually, he was worse. I think most of the world knows what Trump is by now, but some may still have believed that he was an anomaly who may still have some sane people around him. If so, Hegseth quickly put that thought to rest.

For reasons known only to himself, Hegseth gave a speech in which he drew a bizarre analogy between the Allied soldiers who stormed the beaches at Normandy to fight the Nazis and the “dangerous ideologies” (meaning those carried by immigrants, we must suppose) that are now storming the “beaches in Spain, Italy, Greece and Bulgaria.” He asked, “When will European capitals do something about that invasion, or is it too late? I pray not, and I believe not.”

Hang on a minute: Who are the good guys and who are the bad guys in this fantasy scenario? And what does any of that have to do with the Allies liberating occupied Europe from the Germans, who are, the last time I checked, also Europeans? Is Hegseth suggesting that the French were wrong to have welcomed the Allied anti-fascist “invasion” of a continent that was, at the time, being “defended” by the Nazis?

Let’s just chalk that part up to bad speechwriting and hope that whichever 20-something MAGA toady was responsible for that tortured analogy will soon dispatched to another job that has nothing to do with history, oratory or nuclear weapons. We understand Hegseth’s intentions perfectly well. Like the rest of the MAGA crowd around Trump in this second term, he’s a xenophobic, racist Christian nationalist. Also like the rest of them, he’s taken it upon himself to lecture berate Europe over its immigration policies in the name of saving “the West.” Using the D-Day anniversary to do it is just chef’s kiss, I’d have to say.

Did his speech go over well? It did not. Perhaps the best retort, among many, came from distinguished English historian Simon Schama, who described Hegseth’s words as “a special kind of loathsomeness: a blend of historical deafness, grotesque stupidity and comically ludicrous self-importance. As if the little people’s rage against immigration somehow is superior to the war against the Third Reich and entitles this comic book nobody to lecture the actual heroes.”

As it happens, Hegseth wasn’t alone in offending the entire Western world, which he purports to revere. The day before that embarrassing gaffe, Vice President JD Vance decided to lecture the U.K. on its immigration policies as well, commenting on a now-notorious murder case in England in which the perpetrator was a Sikh man and the victim was white. Unsurprisingly, Vance hadn’t done his homework: Both men involved in that crime were British by birth.

A couple of days later, former Border Patrol generalissimo Greg Bovino, the scourge of Minneapolis who sported that fancy, fashy overcoat and fade haircut, appeared in Portugal at a “Remigration Summit,” where he was the star attraction. As Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir wrote this weekend, “Bovino represents the MAGA soul — perhaps we should say the MAGA Geist — which is not just kinda-fascist but deeply and enthusiastically fascist, not just curious about the legacy of Nazism but achingly, passionately eager to revive it.” He’s not the only one.

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What fabulous representatives these are of the country that Europe once looked upon with gratitude and respect: clownish, crude and stupid all at once.

Hegseth told those gathered at the D-Day ceremony that “America will lead — and we must — but capable allies must be right there with us, shoulder to shoulder, in the breach, when it matters,” clearly suggesting he doesn’t think that they’re capable or will show up. That’s some irony, considering that he and the rest of the Trump administration are right now clearly considering abandoning those allies to a Russian threat and bailing out on a war in the Middle East. How fatuously un-self-aware is it to tell people in another country that “peace is not wished into being, it is bought with purpose, with honor and with strength. The men who landed on these beaches knew this; the question we ask ourselves is, do we?” I don’t know about Europe, but clearly the United States of America in 2026 does not.

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