Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth delivers a speech to commemorate the 82nd anniversary of the D-Day landings in Normandy, France, June 6, 2026.Jeremias Gonzalez/AP
In a perplexing speech Saturday commemorating the World War II D-Day landings in Normandy, France, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth called for European leaders to combat what he implied was a second, modern D-Day—in which European countries were being “stormed by different dangerous ideologies” accompanied by “boats and men.”
The original D-Day was the Allied invasion to liberate France from Nazi German domination: the defenders were Hitler’s National Socialists and their army, and the “dangerous ideology” was anti-fascism.
At Normandy in 1944, genocidal far-right extremists “defended” a conquered Europe against a multiracial force fighting for democratic ideas. In 2026, Hegseth’s speech suggested, it was happening again: “When will European capitals do something about that invasion?,” he asked.
Hegseth may have been confused—or, then again, we might be at the stage where our government explicitly aligns us with Nazism. After all, every single refugee we admitted to the US this year was supposedly fleeing anti-white persecution.
Commentators online noted Hegseth’s choice of words:
While the self-proclaimed “Secretary of War” didn’t explicitly mention what those “dangerous ideologies” were, his past remarks and actions make it fairly clear. Last June, Hegseth ordered American troops to provide security during federal immigration raids in Los Angeles. In January, he thanked ICE for its invasion and occupation of Minnesota—“You are SAVING the country”—and followed the post with a graphic on X, listing three ways to avoid ICE: “don’t be here illegally,” “don’t attack I.C.E. officers,” and “obey federal and state laws.”
Since the beginning of Trump’s second term, Hegseth has fired or forcibly retired at least 24 generals and senior commanders without providing any merit-based justification provided; roughly 60 percent have been either Black officers or women of any race.
As my colleague Arianna Coghill wrote in September, for Hegseth, “a military with Black leadership, with women in senior roles, and without obstacles to a diverse officer corps is one in which white men have to take orders from the wrong kind.”
Hegseth, Trump, and JD Vance’s obsession with a more racist Europe is having an impact, with explicitly racist parties in multiple European countries touting their ties to the Trump administration and a white nationalist conference in Portugal recently inviting disgraced former Customs and Border Patrol “commander-at-large” Gregory Bovino to deliver a prominent address; earlier this week, the European Union advanced a plan to increase deportations and build detention centers abroad—which it calls “return hubs”—in a move with unmistakable echoes of Trump administration policies.
