COLUMN: Trump Turns the D-Day Anniversary into a Personal Publicity Stunt, and the Internet Is Fuming

The Symbolic Role of the U.S. President

The President of the United States is not merely an administrator. In the American republican tradition dating back to Washington, he is the guardian of a collective memory. This memory does not belong to any party. It does not belong to any one man. It belongs to the people, and the President is its temporary custodian. When Franklin Roosevelt spoke on the radio in 1944, he prayed. Literally. On June 6, 1944, Roosevelt read a prayer on the radio that he had written himself, asking God to protect the soldiers engaged in the D-Day landings. This prayer lasted six minutes. It did not speak of Roosevelt. It spoke of “our sons.” Eighty-one years later, his successor can’t find six minutes—or even six seconds—to make the same gesture. The break is historic. It is more serious than media coverage has suggested, because it strikes at the heart of what makes a presidency legitimate beyond the ballot box: the ability to transcend one’s own self to embody something greater. Trump embodies nothing but Trump. And on June 6, 2025, this reality was laid bare for all to see—unfiltered, unscripted, with no advisors to save the day.

The Reaction of Veterans and Their Families

The Raw Story article reports that several commentators, some of whom identify as descendants of D-Day veterans, expressed outrage that goes beyond politics. One of them writes that his grandfather died at Omaha Beach in 1944, and that seeing the president “ignore his sacrifice” to talk about his own affairs is a “personal insult.” Another recalls that his father, a veteran of the 101st Airborne, parachuted in on the night of June 5–6 and spoke of the D-Day landings only once in fifty years—to weep. These families are not political. They are hurt. The wound is an old one. It dates back to an evening in June 1944 when telegrams began arriving at farms in Wisconsin, apartments in Brooklyn, and bungalows in California. It was passed down through the silence of fathers who returned home unable to speak. It was passed down through the anniversaries of deaths that children learned to observe without always understanding. And in 2025, it resurfaces because a president—their own, the president of their country—could not muster even the slightest sense of gravity to acknowledge that this day is not his own.

A nation that no longer commemorates its dead through the voice of its head of state begins to lose something that cannot be measured immediately, but which becomes apparent later, when a new generation must be asked to die in turn. No one dies for a president who has never been able to name those who died before.

When the “I” Takes Center Stage

What is at play in Trump’s posts on June 6, 2025, goes beyond a matter of taste or elegance. It is an observable, documented, and recurring psychological mechanism. Political narcissism has a signature: every external event becomes a mirror. Celebrating others becomes impossible because it requires relinquishing the centrality of one’s own narrative. The narcissist cannot honor the dead. He can only exploit them. The deceased becomes an opportunity to talk about oneself—how one, too, would have “fought,” “won,” and “succeeded” where others failed. This dynamic transforms every national commemoration into a personal publicity stunt. And yet, this is not the first time we’ve seen this behavior from Trump. In 2018, during a trip to France for the centennial of the 1918 Armistice, he canceled a visit to the American cemetery at Aisne-Marne because of the rain. The incident is well documented. It was later revealed by John Kelly, his former chief of staff, that Trump had reportedly referred to the American soldiers who died there as “losers” and “suckers.” Trump denied it. Several witnesses confirmed it. The incident on June 6, 2025, is part of this pattern. It is not a slip-up. It is his trademark.

The Republicans’ Silence

What is perhaps more troubling than Trump’s posts themselves is the near-total silence of the Republican Party. No major elected official has publicly challenged the content of the messages. No senator has issued a separate statement to remind people of the significance of June 6. No governor has set the record straight on behalf of his or her state. This silence is consent. It suggests that one can be commander-in-chief and fail to mention the fallen of Normandy without a single conservative voice speaking out to defend the military legacy that this same party has claimed to embody since Reagan. The party that has presented itself for forty years as the party of the military has just proven, through its silence, that this identity is nothing more than an electoral posture. Veterans see it. Families see it. And some are beginning to say so publicly—something that rarely happens in a predominantly conservative, military-minded America. The rift is wide open. It will not be mended by a press release.

A party’s silence in the face of the betrayal of a memory is a form of complicity whose names history records. And history, unlike social media algorithms, never erases.

The Ceremonies in Normandy

While Trump was posting his self-referential messages on Truth Social, France was holding official ceremonies in Normandy. President Emmanuel Macron visited the beaches. American, British, and Canadian military delegations were in attendance. Veterans, whose average age is now approaching 100, made the trip for what, for many, will be their last commemoration at the site. The American cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer welcomed thousands of visitors. French schoolchildren laid flowers on the graves. American families made the pilgrimage to find the name of a grandfather or great-uncle inscribed on a white cross. France, Europe, Canada, and the United Kingdom did what the U.S. president failed to do: they named the dead. They honored them with their presence, their speeches, and their moments of reflection. They reminded us that June 6, 1944, belongs to no single man, no single party, and no particular generation—it belongs to the collective memory of the civilization that survived thanks to that sacrifice.

Europe is looking at America differently

This day did not merely reveal a void in Washington. It revealed something deeper: Europe is beginning to understand that the guarantee of historical memory that once bound the United States to it is no longer automatic. When a U.S. president no longer honors the American dead who fell for the liberation of Europe, Europe must ask itself what, in concrete terms, remains of the transatlantic bond. The institutions still stand. NATO still holds. Trade agreements still hold. But the symbolic glue that made these institutions seem self-evident is beginning to crack. The Western alliance does not rest solely on treaties. It rests on a shared memory. And that memory has just been abandoned by the very person who was supposed to preserve it. European foreign ministries have taken note. Without saying so publicly. For now. But the calculations are underway in every foreign ministry across the continent: if Trump’s America no longer knows why it came to die here in 1944, can it still guarantee that it will come to defend Berlin, Warsaw, and Tallinn in 2027 or 2028? The question, asked in whispers today, will be asked aloud tomorrow.

A memory that is no longer passed down is not merely lost: it becomes available to those who will rewrite it to their own advantage. The presidential silence on June 6, 2025, is not a void. It is an open door.

What the Comments Reveal

Raw Story reports a wave of outrage on social media following Trump’s posts. The comments cited reveal something that goes beyond politics. Users are posting photos of their grandfathers in uniform who died in Normandy. Others are sharing letters found in family archives, written from England on the eve of D-Day. Still others recall the names of cemeteries, operations, and battalions. Popular outrage steps in to fill the void left by failing institutions. When the president remains silent, citizens speak out. When the commander-in-chief forgets, families remember. This dynamic has long been a part of American history. When those in power betray memory, memory becomes a matter of the people. It spills out into the streets, into comments sections, into forums, and into family conversations. It survives despite institutional betrayal. But this survival comes at a cost: it exhausts citizens. It demands that they bear alone what the state should be bearing for them. And in the long run, this exhaustion breeds cynicism. Cynicism kills democracies more surely than coups d’état.

The comment that sums it all up

Among the reactions cited by Raw Story, one stands out. One user writes, in essence: “Not a word for the heroes. Not a word. He’s really not well.” This sentence deserves closer attention. “Not well”—the expression is ambiguous in English. It can mean “sick.” It can mean “morally failing.” It can mean “unfit for office.” All three interpretations coexist. And all three are, to varying degrees, defensible. When a commander-in-chief cannot, on the 81st anniversary of D-Day, write the word “heroes” in reference to the soldiers who died for their country, there is a problem that cannot be solved by a change in communication strategy. The problem runs deeper. It concerns the president’s ability to hold office—not politically, but functionally; symbolically; anthropologically. A nation that can no longer count on its leader to honor its dead loses something that no election can restore.

Public outrage is admirable, but it cannot replace the symbolic role of a president. When citizens must commemorate in place of the head of state, it means the state has already been partially abandoned.

June 6, 2025, as a Sign

Ten years from now, twenty years from now, when historians write about the Trump-2 presidency, June 6, 2025, will likely be cited as a revealing day. Not the most dramatic. Not the most violent. Not the one that triggered a crisis. But a day when the veil fell. When it became impossible to pretend that Trump could, at any moment, in any place, in any specific role, embody anything greater than himself. June 6, 2025, is the date when America saw, without ambiguity, that its president had lost touch with what made America great in the sense that Reagan, Eisenhower, Roosevelt, and Lincoln understood it. That kind of greatness isn’t built on slogans. It’s built on tiny, repeated gestures: honoring the dead, naming the heroes, acknowledging the debt. Trump refused to make any of these gestures on June 6—not out of calculation, but out of inability. Because the symbolic role of the presidency demands a humility he does not possess and never has possessed. The Americans who elected him in 2024 knew this. Many elected him despite it. Some elected him because of it. But on June 6, 2025, the cost of that choice became clear to everyone.

What Is Passed Down, What Is Lost

The transmission of the memory of the D-Day landings rests on three pillars: surviving veterans, families, and public institutions. The veterans are passing away. Of the hundreds of thousands who took part in the operation, about 1,000 remain. In five years, almost none will be left. Families continue to pass on the memory, but this transmission erodes with each passing generation. Public institutions were the last line of defense: the government, through its official commemorations, ensured that the memory would survive even when individual voices fell silent. On June 6, 2025, this last line of defense crumbled. The President of the United States, the ultimate institutional guarantor, failed to fulfill his role. Schools, museums, veterans’ organizations, and the media will continue their work. But the presidential absence leaves a void that none of these actors can fill. Because the presidential office is unique: it is the one that says, on behalf of everyone, “we remember.” When it no longer says this, the “we” itself becomes fragile.

Nations do not die from war. They die when they forget why they accepted war. June 6, 2025, is a small death. A silent death. But a death nonetheless.

Why This Day Is Significant for Kyiv

We need to make the connection that no one in the American media has clearly made. June 6, 2025, comes as Ukraine has been at war since February 24, 2022, against a full-scale Russian invasion. Ukrainian soldiers are dying every day to defend the very same thing that American soldiers in 1944 died to defend: a nation’s right to exist without a foreign dictatorship deciding its fate. This parallel is not a figure of speech. It is accurate—historically, geographically, and morally. When the U.S. president can no longer name the heroes of Normandy, he is signaling to Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in Kyiv, Lviv, and Kharkiv, that today’s heroes will not be named either once they are dead. The promise of remembrance is part of the promise of support. Without remembrance, support becomes transactional. Without remembrance, aid becomes negotiable. Without remembrance, the dead become mere numbers in a budget. On June 6, 2025, Trump demonstrated that he lacks the symbolic capacity to honor the memory of any of the dead—not even those from his own country who fell eighty years ago. How, then, could he possibly honor the memory of today’s Ukrainian soldiers?

The Message Sent to Moscow

Vladimir Putin watched June 6, 2025, with particular attention. In the official Russian narrative, the Normandy Landings are downplayed in favor of the Soviet victory on the Eastern Front. Russian propaganda has been repeating for decades that it was the Red Army that won World War II, and that Westerners exaggerate their own contribution. The U.S. president’s silence on D-Day is, for Russian propaganda, an unexpected gift. It confirms what Moscow has been saying: the Americans themselves no longer believe their own narrative. When Trump fails to honor the fallen at Omaha Beach, Putin concludes that he can now rewrite the history of 1944 without much resistance. This rewriting has been underway for a long time. But it accelerates every time a Western leader abandons his share of remembrance. June 6, 2025, accelerated the trend. The Kremlin took note. Russian propaganda outlets exploited it in the days that followed. And the effect is slowly spreading—through European public opinion, on the fringes of democratic societies, and in conspiracy circles where people are beginning to say that “perhaps the official history of the D-Day landings is exaggerated.” Once memory is abandoned, it becomes available to those who wish to falsify it.

Historical memory is a geopolitical weapon. Those who wield it win future wars. Those who abandon it lose wars before they even begin. Trump laid down his weapon on June 6, 2025. Putin picked it up.

Two Americas Confronting Their Dead

June 6, 2025, revealed that there are now two Americas when it comes to their own military history. The first America—that of veterans’ families, historians, public schools, and museums—continues to pass down the memory of the D-Day landings as a sacred legacy. It travels to Normandy. It reads the names. It unfurls the flags. It weeps before the white crosses. The second America—the one that has rallied around Trump since 2015—views these commemorations as elitist ceremonies, disconnected from the “real people,” tired, predictable, and boring. For this second America, Trump’s silence on June 6 is not a scandal. It is proof of authenticity. He rejects the rituals imposed by “the establishment.” He talks about what interests him—himself—and that is what his voters love. The divide over memory has become an active political divide. And this divide cuts America into two nations that no longer share the same founding narrative. A nation that no longer shares its founding narrative is a nation on the brink of a cold civil war. Not an armed one. Not yet. But culturally, narratively, symbolically—already engaged in a struggle that will not be resolved by the ballot box alone.

What This Divide Portends

This divide has practical consequences that will become apparent in the months and years ahead. Enlistment in the U.S. military is already in free fall. Young Americans no longer want to serve a country whose president does not honor its fallen soldiers. Active-duty veterans, in internal polls, express growing unease with the chain of command. Foreign allies—the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Poland, Canada, Japan, and South Korea—are revising their strategic calculations to account for the fact that American military memory is now conditional. June 6, 2025, accelerated a trend that was already underway: the institutional desacralization of the U.S. presidency. This desacralization cannot be undone by an election. It leaves scars that last for decades. The next president, whoever that may be, will inherit a diminished presidency, where the ability to embody the nation is no longer automatic. It will have to be reclaimed, gesture by gesture, commemoration by commemoration. And even then, the memory of June 6, 2025, will remain—as a precedent, as proof that it is possible, and as a tacit authorization for those who follow to continue down this path.

A symbolic role, once abandoned, can never be fully restored. It can be rebuilt, yes. But it bears the scar. And the scar is visible.

The veterans who are still alive have seen

We must think, in concrete terms, about what men aged 99, 100, and 101 experienced on June 6, 2025. They got up. They turned on their televisions or tablets. They saw the messages from their president. They understood. They understood that the person who, on behalf of their nation, was supposed to say “thank you” would not say it. For men who have spent seventy-five years recounting, passing on, and bearing witness, this silence is a blow. A belated blow. An unexpected blow. A blow that adds to all the losses they have already endured—comrades who have died, parents who have passed away, spouses who are gone. At 100 years old, one no longer has the time to forgive new insults. One carries them with one. Many of these veterans will die in the coming months. Some have already died since June 6, 2025. They left with, as their last image of the president, a man who could not bring himself to say “heroes” when speaking of them. This is a cruelty that history will record. Not because Trump intended it. But because his inability to see beyond himself inflicted a real wound on real men, in the final weeks of their real lives.

The Families Who Won’t Give Up

Beyond the veterans themselves, it is the families who bear the wound. The grandchildren of soldiers who died at Omaha Beach, who never knew their grandfathers but grew up with their photos on the living room wall. The great-grandchildren who learn in school that their family lineage played a part in an event that shaped modern civilization. These families need the government to acknowledge, from time to time, that their long-standing grief has meaning. When the president fails to do so, that grief becomes private. It becomes solitary once more. It loses its collective dimension. And the meaning of sacrifice erodes in the national consciousness, generation after generation. The vast majority of these families will not give up. They will continue to pass on their legacy. They will go to Colleville-sur-Mer. They will lay flowers. They will tell their children the stories. But from now on, they will do so in opposition to the state, not in partnership with it. This reversal is fraught with consequences. A memory passed down in opposition to the state ultimately produces citizens who distrust the state. This mistrust, while legitimate, undermines the very democracy it claims to protect. It is one of the most toxic paradoxes that Trump is quietly establishing: he is transforming the guardians of patriotic memory into institutional opponents.

One can be loyal to one’s country and yet despair of its president. The families of D-Day veterans have just learned, in 2025, that they must now choose between the two. No choice comes without a cost.

The Duty of a Commander-in-Chief

A commander-in-chief who, on June 6, cannot write ten lines about the American soldiers who died in Normandy should resign. This statement may seem excessive. It is not. It is the ethical minimum that a democracy should demand of its head of state. When the symbolic role of the presidency is publicly abandoned, the incumbent loses the moral legitimacy to continue holding office. This standard no longer exists in current American political practice. Standards have been lowered so much over the past decade that this statement seems almost naïve. But it remains true. It remains a requirement. And the fact that no institutional mechanism can force a failing president to acknowledge his symbolic inadequacy is, in itself, a major democratic flaw. The Founding Fathers did not foresee this scenario. They envisioned mediocre presidents. They did not envision presidents incapable of understanding the symbolic function of their own office. This incapacity, unprecedented at this level, would require a constitutional amendment that no one will dare to propose. So nothing will change. And the precedent will remain open for those who follow.

The Inevitable Conclusion

June 6, 2025, will go down in history as the day America looked in the mirror and saw a president incapable of honoring its own dead. That mirror will remain hanging on the wall. Future generations will look into it. They will wonder how this was possible. How could a nation built on the sacrifice of its soldiers have elected and kept in office a man incapable of uttering the word “hero” on the anniversary of their greatest collective sacrifice? There will be many answers. Historians will say it was the culmination of a forty-year process. Sociologists will speak of the deinstitutionalization of the symbolic. Psychologists will analyze structural narcissism. But no analysis will restore to the veterans still alive in 2025 what that day took from them. No analysis will restore to the families the institutional respect they expected. No analysis will restore European confidence in the transatlantic alliance’s resilience of memory. What was broken on June 6, 2025, cannot be repaired. It is recorded. It is passed down like a scar in the national memory. And it serves as a reminder—to all who are willing to see it—that democracies die less from coups d’état than from presidential silences.

The memory will live on without him

We must conclude on a note that is neither naive hope nor resignation. The memory of D-Day will live on. It will live on without Trump. It will live on despite Trump. It will live on because millions of people—Americans, French, British, Canadians, Germans, Poles—refuse to let it fade away. It will live on because the white crosses at Colleville-sur-Mer still stand, and no Truth Social post can erase them. It will continue because schools still teach about Operation Overlord, because museums still display the uniforms, and because the veterans who are still alive continue to tell local journalists what they saw on the morning of June 6, 1944. Memory is stronger than presidential silence. It always has been. It always will be. But it comes at a price. It is wearing thin. It is relying on volunteers. It is losing the institutional guarantee that once ensured its automatic transmission. And in the long run, this loss will manifest itself in the generations that will not have received the message, because no one will have conveyed it to them with the symbolic authority necessary for it to take root.

The verdict on this day

June 6, 2025, is a date to remember. Not as a tragic day. Not as a historic day in the grand sense. But as a revealing day. A day when the American Republic saw its leader publicly refuse to fulfill the simplest part of his duty: to name the dead. This day is part of a long series of small failures that, when added together, ultimately paint a portrait of a presidency stripped of its symbolic substance. Trump is not the first narcissistic president in American history. But he is the first to hold the office without any filter, without any internal safeguards, without any ability to feign—at the very least—respect for the sacred duties of the office. On June 6, 2025, he demonstrated that even feigning respect has become impossible. He can no longer even pretend. And perhaps that, at its core, is the true significance of this day. Not that he doesn’t respect the heroes—we already knew that. But that he can no longer pretend to respect them, not even for ten lines, not even for six seconds, not even for appearances’ sake. The mask has fallen. It will never go back on. And America will have to live with a presidential face that no longer knows how to honor its dead or protect their memory. Four years is a long time when you wear that face. The veterans still alive won’t see the end of his term. Many of them will be gone by 2025. They’ll have passed away knowing that their president couldn’t bring himself to say “hero.” Not a single word. For any of them. Not that day. Not the next. Not ever.

Eighty-one years after Omaha Beach, the U.S. president’s silence made more noise than the bombs of June 6, 1944. And that noise, unlike the sound of bombs, never stops.

By Jacques Pj Provost, columnist