On the eighty second anniversary of D Day, Donald Trump flooded social media with AI generated images of himself. Not a single word remained for the more than four thousand who fell on the beaches!
There are days on which a country does not speak about itself but about its dead. June sixth was such a day. The President of the United States did not follow that rule. Donald Trump, seventy nine years old and turning eighty in a few days, spent the anniversary flooding Truth Social with artificially generated images and videos whose sole subject was himself. One music video shows him riding on the back of a lion, jumping from the sky beneath a red parachute, walking through cheering crowds, and dining with the powerful of the world. Whatever artificial intelligence is capable of producing, that day it placed entirely in his service, and it produced nothing except him.
Added to this was an image portraying the future presidential library of Barack Obama as a giant garbage container surrounded by homeless encampments and a collage mocking Rosie O’Donnell. Another fabrication imagined a “drone harbor” at the White House and in the same breath attacked the federal judge who had temporarily halted construction of his planned ballroom. In one post he embraces an oversized American flag in front of the Washington Monument. In another military helicopters pass overhead while he looks into the distance as though something there were looking back at him.
Amid this flood one thing was missing, and it was the only thing that mattered. Not one word was spoken about the reason for the day.
June sixth marks the eighty second anniversary of the Allied landings in Normandy. More than 156,000 soldiers came ashore on the beaches of German occupied France, more than four thousand of them died there, and it was that sacrifice that turned the course of the war in Europe. As the hours passed and the Commander in Chief spoke about everything except them, his critics noticed. The conservative group Republicans Against Trump wrote on X that it was D Day and Trump’s first post was a bizarre AI video about how much people loved Donald Trump. Not a word about the heroes who stormed the beaches of Normandy.
Meanwhile, the White House quietly released a written statement commemorating the anniversary and honoring America’s “Greatest Generation.” And so it happened that the building remembered the dead while the man inside remembered himself.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth traveled to France to commemorate the landings and used the solemn occasion to lecture America’s European allies. He accused them of complacency and compared migration across the continent to an “invasion.” “Beaches in Spain, in Italy, in Greece, and Bulgaria. Boats and men are coming,” he said. “When will European capitals do something about this invasion? Or is it too late?” On the very beaches where eighty two years ago boats and men arrived to free the continent from barbarism, the secretary now recognized only invasion.
“Sadly, today different European beaches are stormed by different dangerous ideologies. In Spain and Italy and Greece and Bulgaria, boats and men arrive. When will European capitals do something about that invasion? Or is it too late?”
There exists a photograph from May twenty fifth showing the President and Vice President JD Vance saluting at Arlington National Cemetery. The gesture of reverence comes naturally to him as long as cameras are nearby. On the day of Normandy they were not required, and so the gesture never came.
One cannot even say he was never capable of it. Last year he shared an image marking the anniversary, and in 2024 he circulated a video in which he spoke with four veterans of the landings. This year artificial images and videos dominated the day, along with attacks on his opponents. Until the day ended, remembrance never came.
To honor the dead means turning one’s gaze away from oneself and directing it toward someone who can no longer answer. It is that rare movement in which a person stops for a moment from being the center of his own world. That movement seems denied to this man, and it no longer appears to be defiance but incapacity. Artificial intelligence has handed him the perfect instrument for it, a mirror that instantly turns every wish into an image and allows no face besides his own to remain. Whoever can see nothing on such a day except himself has already lost hold of the world. And what remains is the question of who still remembers the dead in a country when the one entrusted with remembrance sees only himself.
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Narzissten und Soziopathen sehen niemanden außer sich selbst. Das Leid anderer interessiert sie nicht, weil ihnen Empathie fehlt.
Wie verroht ist ein Land, das angesichts dessen nicht aufschreit. Wie ignorant und Vergangenheitsvergessen sind die Menschen, die ihrer Geschichte nicht mehr gedenken und ihre Veteranen wahrlich mit Füßen treten. Auf ihren Gräbern tanzen und Tränen der Heuchelei vergießen wenn die Kameras laufen?
Mir fehlen die Worte. Amerika Was ist aus dir geworden!?
In den USA wird 10mal mehr dagegen unternommen, als in Deutschland gegen die AFD. Deutschland ist so groß wie Montana und US hat 50 Staaten. Man hat hier sehr viel erreicht, aber in der Dimenssionen, sind auch die Wege ganz andere.