This week, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth was on hand in Normandy for the 82nd anniversary of the D-Day invasion. He made the usual remarks about US dedication to defending freedom, just as he did last year on a similar occasion.

This time around, however, Hegseth veered off into controversial territory.

Not that you can figure this out from the War Department’s anodyne summary of Hegseth’s speech. Unlike last year, the US government hasn’t seen fit to provide a transcript of Hegseth’s remarks. You have to nose around the internet to find out what Hegseth said that raised so many eyebrows.

Did the Pentagon chief use the D-Day commemoration to denounce the current specter of fascism that is haunting Europe?

It’s hard to know if Europeans really take seriously the prospect of an invasion coming from the West. But they are certainly worried about the failure of the United States to honor its D-Day commitments in the future.

Did he warn of the threat that Russia poses to the continent?

Hegseth denounced an invasion of an entirely different sort. “Today, different European beaches are stormed by different dangerous ideologies,” he said. “Boats and men arrive. When will European capitals do something about that invasion? Or is it too late?”

Between his speech last year and the one this year, Hegseth has evidently gotten his marching orders. Ever since JD Vance lectured his elders and betters at the Munich summit last year, the Trump administration has united around the theme that immigrants threaten European “civilization.” Vance wasn’t even being original. Both his and Hegseth’s talking points come straight out of the mouths of the European far-right. Unlike the usual game of telephone, where the message is garbled through misheard repetition, the fulminations of President Donald Trump’s henchmen are loud and clear.

The Trump administration is all about defending white “civilization” from the impertinent contributions of Black and brown people. At home, that means scrubbing all government websites, National Park inscriptions, and federal grants of any reference to “woke” ideologies, which used to be known as anti-racism, diversity, or just plain common sense. It has meant restricting refugee policy to the only group the Trump administration perceives as meeting the need-based criteria—white South Africans. It has meant an industrial-strength deportation campaign.

Abroad, the Trump administration is trying to “save” Europe from the immigrants that are in reality keeping European societies afloat in the face of demographic decline. In this effort, it has joined hands with the most repulsive extremists on the continent. Greg Bovino, who headed up Trump’s immigration crackdown in the United States as the commander-at-large of the US Border Patrol, recently showed up in Europe to headline an event in Portugal populated by white supremacists and neo-Nazis. The era of covert alliances and dog-whistling is long past.

But the D-Day speech was something different: a historical commemoration that has usually avoided contemporary politics. Prompted to reflect on present-day “invasions,” the European heads of state listening to Hegseth’s speech might have been thinking of an entirely different group of men and boats. The Trump administration has talked about the possibility of storming the beaches of Greenland to seize the island, an eerie echo of Nazi Germany’s blitzkrieg seizure of Poland in 1939. On this anniversary of D-Day, Americans in boats are the last thing Europeans want to see approaching the fringes of the continent.

“Different dangerous ideologies, indeed,” the Europeans in the audience must have been thinking. Having been warned on numerous occasions, European capitals are certainly doing something to prepare for the impact of the ideologies dominating the Trump administration. It’s hard to know if Europeans really take seriously the prospect of an invasion coming from the West. But they are certainly worried about the failure of the United States to honor its D-Day commitments in the future.

The Immigration Obsession

The European far right has made its name by playing up the “threat” of immigration. Keeping out immigrants was a central plank in Viktor Orban’s platform in Hungary as well as that of Law and Justice Party in Poland, both of which have subsequently lost power. No matter: Other parties are on the ascendant. The far-right Alternative for Deutschland, having weaponized the issue of immigration, is on the verge of taking control of its first German region in elections in September in Saxony-Anhalt. Similar anti-migrant far-right parties are in coalition governments in Finland and Croatia and dominate the parliament in The Netherlands.

Then there’s Italy. Although she has diverged from the Trump administration on a number of issues, including their views of the current Pope, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni remains vehemently anti-immigrant, pushing ahead with the country’s expulsion of migrants and asylum-seekers to detention centers in Albania, despite legal pushback from Italian courts and European Union bodies.

What might have once been a fringe opinion has now moved front and center in Europe. As a result of rising far-right influence, the EU is now using Italy’s detention centers in Albania as a model for “detention hubs” planned for Africa. “This deal will give governments much broader powers to detain and deport people,” Marta Welander of the International Rescue Committee told PBS. “It looks set to normalize immigration raids, expand the use of detention in prison-like facilities outside EU territory that are essentially legal black holes, and increase the risk of people being deported to countries where they could face persecution, torture or worse.”

So much for Europe stepping forward in the Trump era to uphold the rules-based order. At least on immigration policy, the EU is instead following Trump’s lead. Hegseth, in addition to his other failings, didn’t even read the newspaper before giving his D-Day speech. Even as he was channeling the........

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