Biden makes veiled allusions to Trump in D-Day speech about democracy

President Joe Biden on Friday urged the current generation of Americans to heed the example of the Greatest Generation by defending democracy at home and abroad in a speech rife with allusions to his 2024 election opponent.

Speaking from the same location where then-president Ronald Reagan honored the “boys of Pointe du Hoc” four decades earlier, Biden channeled the memory of the US Army Rangers who’d fought their way up the sandy heights to open a hole in Nazi Germany’s so-called Atlantic Wall and cast the contemporary tensions between democracy and modern authoritarian movements as a similar battle.

His remarks, while official in nature, came at a time when he is seeking to cast Trump as a grave threat to democracy allied with the same authoritarian forces that Americans have fought in generations past.

“As we gather here today, it’s not just to honor those who showed such remarkable bravery that day June 6, 1944 — it’s to listen to the echo of their voices. To hear them. Because they are summoning us,” he said.

As he invoked the memory of the soldiers who’d climbed up the sheer cliffs while facing German gunfire 80 years ago to defeat the “hateful ideology” of Nazism, Biden suggested — without mentioning Trump’s name — that those honored veterans would have sided against him in the present time.

He asked: “Does anyone doubt they would move heaven and earth to vanquish hateful ideologies of today?”

“They’re asking us what will we do. They’re not asking us to scale these cliffs. They’re asking us to stay true to what America stands for,” he said, adding that the current generation is “the fortunate heirs” of those departed heroes.

“We must also be the keepers of their mission… the bearers of the flame of freedom