Josh Marshall on the Arlington scandal is really good. He makes the important point that the whole thing was designed as a campaign stunt to make Harris look bad for supposedly failing to honor the dead. We all know how that worked out:
Three days ago, the Trump campaign held a campaign event at Arlington National Cemetery. The idea was to lay a wreath honoring the 13 members of the U.S. military who were killed during the evacuation of Kabul in 2021 and film a political ad. They would distribute the video and attack Vice President Harris and President Biden for not “showing up” for their campaign event, which they sought to portray was an established memorial. As soon as the video circulated, military policy experts I know said right off the bat they were shocked that the campaign had been allowed to hold a campaign event on the grounds of the cemetery and circulate video of it. It isn’t just unseemly. It’s against the law. How were they allowed to do that?
That turned out to be a good and prescient question.
The first hint that anything else had happened on the visit came in a brief NPR article, published a day later, which reported that cemetery staff had sought to prevent the campaign from violating the law by holding a political event on the cemetery grounds. The details were limited but it seemed a verbal altercation became violent and two Trump campaign staffers physically assaulted a cemetery employee. The impression I got from the article was that they likely shoved the woman to the ground. But the details were cryptic.
What wasn’t cryptic was the Trump campaign’s wildly over-the-top response. Campaign spokesman Stephen Cheung denied a physical altercation had taken place and claimed the campaign was prepared to prove its claim with the release of a video tape. “We are prepared to release footage if such defamatory claims are made.”
He then proceeded to make a series of bizarre claims suggesting the attacked employee was actually some random person undergoing some sort of psychotic break. “The fact is that a private photographer was permitted on the premises and for whatever reason an unnamed individual, clearly suffering from a mental health episode, decided to physically block members of President Trump’s team during a very solemn ceremony.”
Later the campaign’s hyper-aggressive co-chair Chris LaCivita gave an even wilder comment to the Times, calling the assaulted cemetery employee “a despicable individual” and “a disgrace” who “does not deserve to represent the hallowed grounds of Arlington National Cemetery.”
At a speech Wednesday, vice presidential candidate JD Vance doubled down on the campaign’s defense, seeming to imply that campaign staffers were right to assault the cemetery employee. He said VP Harris could “go to hell” because of the backlash Trump is facing.
That’s just crazy. And then there’s this:
What’s so perverse about this is that this isn’t one of Trump’s predatory moments. There’s just something broken about the man since it doesn’t occur to him that a grinning thumbs up isn’t appropriate at the grave of a fallen soldier.
It was worse than we imagined:
The cemetery employee, a woman, filed a report about the incident. But she later declined to press charges, fearing — according to military officials who spoke to The New York Times — that Trump supporters would try to retaliate against her. So the woman was assaulted for trying to enforce federal law. She filed an official report about the incident but later declined to press charges because she feared reprisals from violent Trump supporters. Late this evening, the Daily Caller reported that Speaker Mike Johnson actually got involved to force cemetery officials to allow Trump to hold his campaign event on the grounds. The Caller, unsurprisingly, portrays this as the Gold Star families requesting help from Congress after Arlington officials tried to prevent Trump from accompanying them to the cemetery.
Spin aside, what I take as the relevant point is that Arlington cemetery officials could see this was a trainwreck-in-the-making from the start. And the Speaker of the House was brought in to overrule cemetery officials simply trying to enforce the prohibition against holding partisan political events on the cemetery grounds, especially in the area of recent burials. This whole thing went on, involving an assault on a cemetery employee, and it was all under the media radar until this NPR report.
It was one thing if Trump wanted to privately pay homage to the dead at the request of one of the families. That’s not a problem. But Trump isn’t alive unless he’s on camera and he and his henchmen thought using dead soldiers as a campaign prop was a great way to troll Kamala Harris. That’s what this was all about.
Considering that LaCivita is one of the swift boa strategists , we shouldn’t be too surprised. Using the military for crass political purposes is in the GOP DNA. But they should be smarter than to have Donald Trump pull a stunt like this. The guy who is known for saying that dead soldiers are suckers and losers probably ought to stay away from military cemeteries. Nothing good can come of it.