My father, Raymond Lantos, died in 2007 and would have been 100 years old this year. Eighty years ago, he was a private first class who stormed Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944. Along with 11,000 Allied aircrafts, 7,000 boats and ships, 160,000 Allied troops, including 73,000 from the United States and 83,000 from Great Britain and Canada, these heroic soldiers put their lives on the line to fight Hitler’s Nazi regime.

My father survived D-Day despite being wounded three times and received a Purple Heart. Unfortunately many of his friends and fellow soldiers, including 2,500 Americans, died on D-Day while 5,000 more were wounded. Many of these brave soldiers gave their lives to fight for our freedom, our democracy and our way of life. That is why they have been called and honored as The Greatest Generation. These courageous soldiers were fighting against a Nazi regime run by Adolf Hitler. He had forced every member of the German military to take an oath of personal loyalty to him and not to the German government. Anyone who disagreed with Hitler was called the “enemy from within,” and millions of these citizens ended up dying in concentration camps. After Hitler’s eventual defeat and death, the Allies called the Nazi Party a criminal organization, and to this day it is banned in Germany.

Now in 2024, in the United States of America we have a man who was just elected as president of the United States who has threatened to use the military against his fellow citizens.

He has called his political opponents, journalists and judges “the enemy from within” and wants them jailed or deported. He wants people working for him to be loyal to him and not to the Constitution. Anyone not willing to do that for him in the past was fired, and many of his former advisors who were loyal to him are now in jail.

Four decorated war heroes and four-star generals, including former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, John Kelly, H.R. McMaster and James Mattis, all of whom have worked closely with President Trump in the Situation Room and the Oval Office, have warned of the danger to our country of another Trump presidency.

They were all enraged when Trump sat and watched the violence of Jan. 6 for hours and did nothing to stop it. The Capitol was attacked, police officers were killed and his own vice president’s life was being threatened. Gen. Milley has called Trump “fascist to the core” and Gen. Kelly says that Trump fits the definition of a fascist. His defines fascism as a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism and forcible suppression of opposition.

It is hard for me to believe that 80 years after my father landed on Omaha Beach, and after over 400,000 Americans died in World War II fighting a fascist in Germany, that we have elected a man with fascist beliefs in the United States of America. I think of my father and his fellow heroes buried in Arlington National Cemetery as well as those in the American Cemetery in Normandy. I hope many in that Greatest Generation did not die in vain.