Set aside for the moment the mud wrestling between the world’s most powerful and richest men, Donald Trump and Elon Musk. This weekend, let’s focus on an insufficiently noticed exchange that goes more to the heart of the United States’ enduring and endangered purpose.

On the eve of the eighty-first anniversary of D-Day, the Allied invasion at Normandy that marked the beginning of Europe’s liberation from Adolf Hitler, newly elected German Chancellor Friedrich Merz brought a message to the White House that no American should ignore.

Merz made reference to the anniversary, in the context of Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine, as marking a day “when the Americans once ended a war in Europe.”

Caught off-guard, the US president quipped that D-Day wasn’t a pleasant day for Germany.

“And we know

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