Every time you think the regime of Donald Trump can stoop no lower, it manages to do something even more sordid to show contempt for America’s traditional allies and the global fight for democracy. On Friday his awful vice-president JD Vance, behaving like a far-right agitator, sought to fan flames of bigotry and division in our nation with a vile social media post in the wake of a disturbing murder. Then former Fox News pundit turned “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth tried to outbid his bosses the following day by defiling the annual D-Day commemorations with an attack on European migration policies in pursuit of their poisonous culture wars.
Hegseth is the most repulsive character in Trump’s terrible team, a strutting disaster of a defence secretary who helped lead the United States into a Middle East war, exposing their weakness to the world. He is, remember, so inept and out of his depth that he shared planned military strikes on a messaging app with a journalist. Now this pumped-up poseur, standing in a cemetery filled with the graves of fallen Second World War heroes, has dared use the Normandy gathering to attack “European capitals” for failing to stop “different European beaches” from being “stormed” by an “invasion” of migrants with “dangerous ideologies”. And he lectured “much of the West” for their supposed forgetfulness over freedom.
