It’s still in peril
The contrasts during Thursday’s 80th D-Day remembance in Normandy could hardly have been more stark. The choices ahead for the U.S., NATO and Europe were there in subtext even when not all but obvious.
Stephen Collinson comments for CNN:
President Joe Biden is in Europe, warning of totalitarian evil and the dangers to democracy. Presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump is back home, seeking a favor from Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, mulling revenge and trashing US elections.
The former president is making his 2024 opponent’s case — that the West is being challenged by unprecedented threats to the rule of law from hostile forces outside and in.
But Trump’s strength also suggests that the centerpiece of Biden’s trip — an homage on Friday in Normandy to one of former President Ronald Reagan’s greatest speeches — may fall on many deaf ears back in America. The former president is showing in every speech and public appearance that the seduction of demagoguery, the demonization of outsiders and the language of extremism is as potent now as it was before World War II.
The 80th anniversary commemorations of the D-Day invasion that led to the liberation of Europe have turned into a rallying point for Western leaders warning that the darkest forces of political extremism are awakening. They have also used their meetings and speeches to draw parallels between Putin’s vicious assault on Ukraine and Adolf Hitler’s blitzkrieg.
There’s nothing new in a modern US president traveling to Europe to invoke the shared history of victory over tyranny. But no other commander in chief has done so after his predecessor tried to destroy democracy to stay in office. The possibility that Biden could lose reelection — and the threat of a return to the chaos Trump inflicted on European allies — has cast an ominous shadow over the trip.
Let me interrupt the horse-race framing the press prefers to garner views and clicks to remind readers that the presidential contest is trending away from Donald Trump. That won’t silence coverage intended to keep readers engaged in an election contest media outlets cast as a page-turner.
On Friday, Biden will send an unmistakable message by co-opting the legacy of Reagan — one of the greatest Republican presidents — to suggest that his rival is an affront to US and GOP values. In 1984, atop a cliff stormed by US Army Rangers on June 6, 1944, known as the Pointe du Hoc, the 40th president denounced US isolationism. He also invoked the war against Nazism to summon the West to a renewed and ultimately successful Cold War struggle against another form of extremism — Kremlin-style communism. Biden will imply that Trump, with his “America First” foreign policy, attacks on the integrity of the free and fair 2020 election and use of extreme anti-immigrant rhetoric that echoes that of the Nazis, is summoning the same forces that triggered global war.
Trump might not be the anti-Christ, but he is the anti-Reagan for Republican dead-enders who still hold onto some American values. Biden means to stimulate their vestigal memories and perhaps tweak their consciences.
Another CNN preview:
Eighty years after the allied landings, the president will draw a “throughline” from World War II to today in his remarks, national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters. But the subtext of the speech is also likely to be aimed at former President Donald Trump.
“He’ll talk about the stakes of that moment – an existential fight between dictatorship and freedom. He’ll talk about the men who scaled those cliffs and how they … put the country ahead of themselves. And he’ll talk about the dangers of isolationism and how if we back dictators, fail to stand up to them, they keep going, and ultimately, America and the world pays a greater price,” Sullivan told reporters aboard Air Force One.
Biden has repeatedly cast Trump’s embrace of authoritarian leaders – including Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un – as a threat to democracy.
We once fought them over there so we didn’t have to fight them over here, to borrow from the failed Global War on Terror (GWOT). But we grew complacent. The result is MAGA, the rolling back of civil rights, and an authoritarian cult.
How far has America fallen, asks this TikTok user, to consider for a second a wannabe dictator for the presidency? Donald Trump has failed upward his entire life, but that’s enough for the morally bankrupt Republican Party to nominate him again for president after he incited a violent insurrection. WTF?
@curmudge_john2.0 #greenscreen ♬ original sound – John R (Taylor's Version)
Let me leave you with something more positive, this clip from an interview with Tom Hanks in Normandy. Fight bad faith with good faith this year.
Do good deeds. Embrace what is right.
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