Pete Hegseth Made a D-Day Analogy and Ended Up on the Nazi Side

Imagine you’re a 90-year-old WWII veteran, back at one of the most sacred beaches in history. You’ve traveled across the Atlantic to stand on the very sands where your teenage friends bled out during the largest seaborne invasion in history to liberate Nazi-occupied Europe. You’re expecting a solemn tribute to courage, sacrifice, and the defeat of fascism.

Instead, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth steps up to the microphone and starts complaining about immigrants.

Speaking in Normandy, France, during ceremonies marking the 82nd anniversary of D-Day, Hegseth warned that Europe faces a new kind of “invasion.”

“Sadly, today, different European beaches are stormed by different dangerous ideologies. Beaches in Spain, in Italy, in Greece and Bulgaria. Boats and men arrive. When will European capitals do something about that invasion?”

It’s hard to overstate how bizarre this analogy is.

D-Day is perhaps the most famous example in modern history of men arriving by boat on European beaches for a morally righteous cause. Thousands of Allied troops crossed the English Channel and stormed Normandy to help defeat Nazi occupation. So when Hegseth invokes D-Day to warn about migrants arriving by boat, is he suggesting those boats should have been stopped? Because by his logic, the people coming ashore in boats are the bad guy “invaders”—the exact role played by the Allied soldiers who liberated Europe.

It takes a truly remarkable level of right-wing brain rot to stand on the literal graves of the men who defeated Hitler, deploy a xenophobic dog whistle, and accidentally cast the Third Reich as the side that simply needed better border security.

Now I want to believe this was a syntactic oversight—Hegseth doesn’t seem like the type who aced English class. But that would require giving him credit for a baseline level of historical ignorance, rather than intentional malice.

After all, Pete Hegseth has long spurred white-supremacist and Christian-nationalist speculation because of his tattoos. He literally has “Deus Vult” (God Wills It)—a historical Crusader battle cry that has been thoroughly co-opted by modern far-right extremists—inked across his bicep. This tattoo got him flagged as an “insider threat” by a fellow guardsman and barred from serving on duty during Joe Biden’s 2021 inauguration.

He also sports a massive Jerusalem Cross on his chest, a symbol heavily romanticized by the “Western civilization is under siege” crowd.

So with this context, his remarks perfectly echo the administration’s broader panic over Europe’s “civilizational erasure,” coming almost a day after Vice President JD Vance unhingedly blamed a tragic UK stabbing on a “mass invasion of migrants” (despite both the victim and the suspect being British).

It seems Hegseth, Vance, and the rest of the Trump administration have settled on a simple message: the West is under siege, and the only way to save it is to embrace the very kind of ethno-nationalism our grandfathers died to defeat.

Which is why there was something uniquely grotesque about hearing that message delivered in Normandy. Of all the places in the world to warn that people arriving by boat are an existential threat, Hegseth chose the one that would most make him seem like a Nazi-sympathizer.