At a rally in Michigan on Thursday, Donald Trump unleashed an extended rant about the confrontation this week between his campaign staff and Arlington National Cemetery officials. Shockingly, he offered a highly distorted account of the scandal and painted himself as one of its victims. Trump even linked this to a bigger lie about the Deep State being out to get him, backhandedly illustrating a big reason why all this matters in the first place: It reveals a level of contempt for the law and public service that’s incompatible with democracy.
Now that Trump has offered this rant—his most extensive public explanation for this scandal yet—it should prompt Senate Democrats to exercise oversight responsibility and get to the bottom of this saga once and for all. It would be derelict not to, as a matter of basic public service. We deserve a full accounting.
In his Michigan rant, Trump claimed he’d been invited to Arlington by the relatives of soldiers killed in the 2021 bombing at Abbey Gate outside Afghanistan’s Kabul Airport. He then lashed out at the Arlington staffers who’d tried to prevent the Trump campaign from filming in a restricted area of the cemetery—in apparent violation of the law—which reportedly led a Trump aide to push aside one of those cemetery officials. In his speech, Trump linked the staffers—federal employees simply doing their jobs of guarding ground most Americans revere—to law enforcement prosecuting him for his various alleged crimes.
“These are bad people we’re dealing with,” Trump seethed. “They say I was campaigning,” he continued. “I don’t need the publicity.” Trump flatly dismissed the idea that he was at Arlington to “politick” in any way, and insisted he’d only been asked by relatives of the fallen to pose for pictures at a gravesite. Watch it courtesy of Aaron Rupar:
Trump claims the debacle in Arlington Cemetery happened yesterday — it was actually 3 days ago — and says, “these are bad people we’re dealing with” (they are cemetery workers) pic.twitter.com/AgSFd8XDiG
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 29, 2024
This account is baloney. The suggestion that Trump was only invited to pose for pictures by relatives leaves out the fact that Trump’s aides themselves took video of the event, which was subsequently posted to his Tik Tok account. That video is slickly produced. It sharply contrasts the Trump and Biden administrations on their handling of Afghanistan, criticizing the latter over the final withdrawal and falsely suggesting no deaths occurred during “18 months” (Trump doesn’t say which) of his presidency. It’s a campaign video, full stop.
What’s more, even if Trump were invited to Arlington by families, that account also omits key facts. The Washington Post reports that earlier this month, his campaign officials contacted Arlington about the upcoming visit. During these exchanges, Army officials informed the Trump campaign in advance that any political activity in the relevant section of the cemetery would be unlawful. That’s also confirmed by an unusually blunt statement from the Army itself.
Which is precisely what led to the confrontation. When a woman who works at the cemetery tried to enforce those rules, she was “abruptly pushed aside,” as the Army statement puts it. The New York Times reports that the woman—whose name hasn’t been released—contemplated pressing charges, but refrained out of fear of retaliation from Trump supporters.
All this raises some questions: How violently was she pushed aside? It’s reasonable to speculate that she wouldn’t entertain charges unless some measure of violence—or at least inappropriate manhandling—was exercised. Who on Trump’s campaign staff did this? What exactly did cemetery officials initially tell the Trump campaign in warning against such activities? Did these activities at Arlington break the law, or not? Cemetery officials clearly believed they did. Why did they conclude that?
These questions are answerable. The woman reportedly filed an incident report with military authorities before declining to press charges. Arlington is managed by the Army via the Office of Military Cemeteries. The Senate and House Armed Services committees have oversight jurisdiction here. Senator Tim Kaine and Representative Gerry Connolly, both Democrats of Virginia and respective members of those committees, have called on the Army to provide the report and release more information.
What’s more, Senate Armed Services Committee staff have been directly communicating with Army officials about the incident, and are in the process of seeking and receiving the information in the report and about what happened, a congressional aide tells me. Meanwhile, senior House Democrats are privately pushing Army officials to say more clearly what laws or regulations they think may have been broken, and to reveal more details about what happened, another aide says, noting that Democratic staffers are encountering resistance, leaving them frustrated.
Some Democrats might be skittish about taking this on, given that Trump is pretending the episode was only about honoring the wishes of relatives of the fallen. It’s clearly true that these relatives wanted Trump there, and because of these very real sensitivities, you can see why the Army is trying to deescalate this standoff.
But another family whose loved one is buried at an adjacent grave is unhappy about what Trump did. And regardless, nothing gives the Trump campaign license to use Arlington as a staging ground for political activities, or to physically abuse a member of staff for doing her job. Establishing what happened at a minimum is perfectly reasonable: If the Trump campaign broke the law and violence was exercised against this official simply because she sought to ensure that rules were followed, we should know about it.
Seriously, Dems, your job is to explode in righteous anger on behalf of all the dead soldiers Trump used as props, and even more fury, once you substantiate Arlington’s account, on behalf of the cemetery employee his entourage assaulted. Demand the footage. Get moving!
— Brian Beutler (@brianbeutler) August 28, 2024
Trump campaign officials treated this woman horrifically, deriding her as unpatriotic and mentally unstable. And so, as Talking Points Memo’s David Kurtz notes, a big question is at issue here: Whether Team Trump will get away with employing thuggery and intimidation to bully an official in furtherance of this scheme—and to avoid facing consequences for it. Now that Trump has obliquely attacked her during a rally, that could draw an even more vivid target on her back.
The constant threat of thuggish and violent retribution is ever present with the MAGA movement, and its targets are often people who serve the public but have suddenly been designated as inimical to Trump and MAGA’s interests. It’s no accident that Trump lumped in this woman with his prosecutors. Those who seek to apply rules and laws to Trump and his followers—whether it’s a cemetery official enforcing the prohibition against using Arlington as a political backdrop, or prosecutors holding Trump and his mob of insurrectionists accountable for criminally and violently sabotaging our elections—belong to the enemy class by definition. The laws and rules they are flouting are discarded as inherently illegitimate.
Trump has also sought to erode the ideal of insulating the military from politics—not subjecting it to political manipulation or using it to manufacture propaganda—on other fronts. As president he routinely talked about “my generals”—but they are not his. Trump tried to enlist generals as political props at the end of his presidency, leading his former Defense Secretary to call on the military to reaffirm its commitment to the Constitution, not Trump. These days Trump talks explicitly about sending the military into blue states to carry out his domestic agenda—against their will.
Democrats should get to the bottom of the Arlington fiasco. At issue is the casual designation of public servants as the enemy, the blithe treatment of public procedures as thoroughly dispensable, and the contempt for the ideal of an independent military—all hitched to the passing whims and needs of Trump and his movement. They’re all incompatible with maintaining a healthy democratic public sphere, and the question once again is whether Trump will be allowed to get away with all of it.
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