Donald Trump doesn’t seem to know the differencE
For 24 hours a day, seven days a week, soldiers from the 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment stand guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery. Every hour or every half hour, depending on the season, the guard is changed in an elaborate ceremony.
Along with the reverential hush that marks the resting places at Arlington of more than 400,000 veterans and their dependents, this is one of the ways America acknowledges an unpayable debt to those lost in every war the country has fought. Each Memorial Day, presidents lay wreaths at the unknown soldiers’s tomb as members of the military stand watch.
The watchwords in this hallowed place are somber, reflective and sober.
So, how is it that Donald J. Trump could show up at the cemetery, grinning and sporting a thumbs-up sign over a grave with rows of graves behind him? How is that he could release a campaign TikTok video of his visit, exploiting the tragedy of American military deaths in Afghanistan in a bid to embarrass Kamala Harris?
It is, of course, illegal for candidates to use this cemetery as a campaign prop. A staffer made that clear to the Trump team, only to be shoved aside and later to have her mental health questioned. The U.S. Army quickly defended the staffer, reminding everyone in an unusual rebuke to Trump that “federal laws, Army regulations and DOD policies … clearly prohibit political activities on cemetery grounds.”
The Army added that the cemetery “is a national shrine to the honored dead of the Armed Forces, and its dedicated staff will continue to ensure public ceremonies are conducted with the dignity and respect the nation’s fallen deserve,”
But, even if it weren’t illegal, wouldn’t simple civility, a sense of decorum and respect for the dead keep a former president from behaving so badly, even if he is desperate to halt his slide in the polls. Wouldn’t a modest amount of good taste prevent him from marketing himself on the graves of the fallen?
Really, how low can the man and his team sink?
Indeed, not only are Trump and his team plumbing new depths, but they do so ignorantly. A top campaign adviser, criticizing the staffer who was pushed aside by a pair of Trump staff bullies, didn’t even grasp the difference between “hollowed” and “hallowed” in a statement he issued.
“For a despicable individual to physically prevent President Trump’s team from accompanying him to this solemn event is a disgrace and does not deserve to represent the hollowed grounds of Arlington National Cemetery,” the adviser said in a written statement provided to The Associated Press, as reported by the Military Times. He insisted that the ex-president and his team “conducted themselves with the utmost respect and dignity.”
Really, are grinning and offering a thumbs-up over a soldier’s grave dignifying and respectful? Perhaps in Trump World, but in any other realm?
Digging in, a top Trump campaign aide later attacked the Army for its rebuke of Trump. He wrote on X: “Reposting this hoping to trigger the hacks at @SecArmy.” He tagged the account used by Army Secretary Christine E. Wormuth in what The Washington Post called an apparent bid to escalate the Trump campaign’s feud with the Pentagon.
Not surprisingly, Trump appears to have made few friends among veterans with his action. “What kind of creep uses a national military cemetery to film a political hit ad?,” the group Veterans for Responsible Leadership asked. It said he violated both the “sanctity of Arlington” as well as the “code of conduct for national military cemeteries.”
“Trump only cares about the fallen when he can exploit their sacrifice for his own gain,” the progressive organization VoteVets said, as reported by the Daily Beast and yahoo!news. “To him, they’re just ‘suckers and losers.’ He’s proven time and again that respect and honor mean nothing to him.”
The reference to “suckers” and “losers,” of course, is to terms Trump, as president, used in referring to American soldiers killed in combat, as The New York Times reported. Last year, John F. Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff and a former Marine Corps general, confirmed reporting that Trump had used the words.
The context is noteworthy. On a trip to France in 2018, Trump declined a scheduled visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, where more than 2,200 U.S. service members are buried, as noted by a veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq, Brandon Friedman. “Why should I go to that cemetery?” Trump asked staff members. “It’s filled with losers.” It was in another conversation on the same trip that Trump called Marines who died at Belleau Wood, a major WWI battle site, “suckers” for getting killed.
Denying the reporting at the time, Trump also lashed out at Kelly, calling him “one of the dumbest people” he’d ever met. Of course, that hadn’t prevented him from having Kelly serve as his staff chief for 17 months and earlier as his Secretary of Homeland Security. Before that, Kelly was commander of the U.S. Southern Command. Kelly’s son, Robert, was killed in Afghanistan in 2010 and is buried at Arlington.
Others panned Trump’s vulgar grandstanding, as well.
Former Rep. Max Rose (D-NY), who serves as an adviser for the VoteVets group, condemned the events as “sick and tragic.” And Retired Maj. General Paul Eaton, another VoteVets adviser, told USA Today he “truly cannot think of something more repugnant than starting a political fracas on land where Gold Star families mourn. Someone who would do that should never be Commander in Chief.”
But Trump is consistent. He has a long history of demeaning military people. He belittled the parents of a slain Muslim soldier who had spoken at the Democratic National Convention in 2016, as the Times reported. The next year, he told the widow of a soldier killed in Niger that her husband “knew what he signed up for.” In 2020, he speculated that veterans and their families visiting the White House had infected him with the coronavirus.
Early in his 2016 campaign, Trump suggested that a critic, former GOP presidential candidate John McCain, was not a war hero because he had been shot down over Vietnam and had become a prisoner of war. (“I like people who weren’t captured,” Trump said.) Trump received five draft deferments during the Vietnam War — one for a diagnosis of bone spurs in his heels that led to a medical exemption, as the paper reported.
Trump also labeled as a “moron” retired U.S. Army General Mark A. Milley, a Princeton graduate and the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. This came after Milley said in an address at a military base: “We don’t take an oath a king or queen or a tyrant or dictator. We don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator. We don’t take an oath to an individual. We take an oath to the Constitution.”
Milley had told The Atlantic that when he invited a wounded, wheelchair-bound soldier to sing “God Bless America” at his 2019 welcoming ceremony as the Joint Chiefs chairman, Trump admonished him. “Why do you bring people like that here?” Trump asked, as noted by the former Army infantry officer, Friedman. “No one wants to see that, the wounded.”
More recently, Trump said that the Medal of Freedom, a civilian award he’d given to a Republican donor, was “much better” than the military Medal of Honor. Trump said that’s because Medal of Honor recipients are “either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets or they are dead.”
As Friedman argued in a commentary for MSNBC: “These are not one-off statements by a rhetorically reckless buffoon. This man harbors deep resentment toward the military and those who’ve sacrificed in service. Even when he poses with a family — as he did at Arlington this week — he only does so to enhance his campaign or his political prospects. Trump’s use for the military and our dead extends only as far as it suits him.”
The former president is, of course, chiefly a marketer, a real-estate huckster, and he has previously not shrunk from using sacred symbols to sell himself. In mid-2020, he posed holding a Bible in front of a Washington church, displaying it for the cameras (including holding it upside-down at times). Known as the Church of the Presidents because many have attended there, the church had been damaged in demonstrations against police brutality and had been boarded up. Trump’s photo-op was designed to counter the protestors.
Perhaps as a result of decades of manipulating the press, Trump may be relishing the attention the Arlington visit has garnered. He may believe, as P.T. Barnum is often reported as saying, that any publicity is good publicity. Indeed, he’s certainly not backing away from his campaign’s use of the cemetery as a prop and has touted supportive comments by members of deceased soldiers’s families.
Now, will most Americans see his stunt for the self-aggrandizing shameful display it was? Trump is exceptionally skilled at bending reality in ways his diehard backers seem to enjoy. Will even some of them blanch at this episode, though? If many don’t, that may be a sorry statement not only about Trump, but about how low some Americans have slipped in the Trump era.