Biden in Normandy delivers a wake-up call address to Americans

POINTE-DU-HOC, France — President Joe Biden came to Normandy on Thursday to deliver a warning to the world not to squander the legacy of D-Day.

On Friday, he returned. This time, speaking squarely to an audience back home.

In a mid-afternoon speech Friday at this famed promontory over the English Channel, Biden hailed the memory of those 225 U.S. Army rangers who scaled the 150-foot cliffs 80 years ago. But the subtext was more political: urging Americans themselves to honor those sacrifices by embracing the principles of democracy and recognizing its fragility.

“Democracy begins with each of us, begins when one person decides there’s something more important than themselves … when they decide the mission matters more than their life, when they decide that their country matters more than they do,” Biden said, just steps from the site’s granite memorial. “That’s what the rangers at Pointe-du-Hoc did. That’s what they decided.” Delivered thousands of miles away from Washington, Biden’s remarks were, to a large degree, geared not just towards a broad American audience but toward specific segments of it — those Republicans enamored by former President Donald Trump’s isolationism, skittish Democrats and even traditional independents for whom his outward patriotism and traditional world view might strike a chord.

He did not mention Trump by name. Nor did he reference how the former president had skipped a wreath laying at the Aisne-Marne World War I cemetery outside Paris on his 2018 trip to France. But the thrust of the speech was meant as a contrast with the man who he is running against once more.

So too are several subsequent moves. Biden will lay his own wreath at Aisne-Marne before returning to Washington. And shortly after his speech concluded, his campaign released a video montage of Trump’s past comments and reported quotations joking about and deriding members of the military who risked their lives for their country. The video, which began with Trump’s comment about not going to Aisne-Marne, marked a clear effort to underline explicitly the contrast Biden had only implied.

“We must also be the keepers of their mission, the keepers of their mission, the bearers of the flame of freedom that they kept burning bright,” Biden said Friday, speaking before an audience of around 150 people. “To come here simply to remember the ghosts of Pointe-du-Hoc isn’t enough.”

Biden didn’t call out House Republicans. Nor did he bring up the painful months it took to get them to pass additional aid for Ukraine. But his remarks made clear that any wavering in support for Ukraine in its fight to stave off Russian aggression amounts to a betrayal of the sacrifices made here and across Europe in the final years of World War II.

“Does anyone doubt that [those Rangers] would want America to stand up against [Vladimir] Putin's aggression here in Europe today?” Biden asked. “They stormed the beaches alongside their allies. Does anyone believe these rangers want America to go alone today?”

Biden didn’t issue explicit pleas to an electorate skeptical about the ability of the government to address big problems. But he tacitly called on them to internalize the lessons of those who scaled the cliffs 80 years ago.

“They’re summoning us now,” he said. “They’re asking: What will we do? They’re not asking us to scale these cliffs. But they’re asking us to stay true to what America stands for.”

For all its grandeur — the history and the striking blue horizon of the English Channel as a backdrop — the speech also illustrated some of Biden’s own political limitations. The president only spoke for a brisk 11 minutes, his delivery occasionally choppy as he meandered here and there.

Despite having shared a stage with roughly 170 surviving veterans commemorating the 80th anniversary of D-Day at the Normandy American Cemetery one day earlier, the White House had decided to make a return trip to the region, in part to allow for Biden to have a different type of stage from which to speak. Whereas the commemoration ceremony was elegiac and somber, Friday’s remarks were presented as an opportunity for the president to triumphantly reaffirm his world vision.

Aides were not shy about discussing the political underpinnings of it. Plans for this ostensibly official but overtly political speech had been in the works for months. Because the event is not officially a campaign speech, the costs of the stage production will fall on taxpayers, although the scale of the event was far smaller than previous international speeches in Poland and Ireland that came before large crowds illuminated by laser lights.

Campaign aides plan to maximize Biden’s visit here, and in particular this speech by cutting clips into videos and ads over the next several weeks and months.

They also said that they were aiming to borrow a page from President Ronald Reagan, who stood atop the same concrete German army bunker here along this famed clifftop 40 years ago to deliver his own address to an American audience back home.

In his 1984 speech, Reagan immortalized “the boys of Pointe du Hoc,” a few dozen of whom were seated in the audience and shown with tears in their eyes as he spoke — images that helped make that speech one of the most remembered presidential speeches ever.

Forty years later, far fewer World War II veterans are still alive. But one was in the front row as Biden spoke. PFC John Wardell, 99, from New Jersey, who came ashore on June 16, 1944, sat in a wheelchair in the front row beside Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Biden marveled at Wardell and the scene beside him.

“I’ve long said that history has shown that ordinary Americans can do the most extraordinary things,” Biden said. “And there’s no better example of that in the entire world than right here at Pointe-du-Hoc.”