Last week, Donald Trump was photographed visiting Arlington National Cemetery. This immediately raised the question of how Trump was able to use the famous military gravesite as a campaign prop when no other candidate or president has done so.
The answer turns out to be, unsurprisingly, that he couldn’t. Trump used the site as a photo op in apparent violation of federal regulations, and when cemetery staff tried to prevent the crime, “campaign staff verbally abused and pushed the official aside,” reports NPR.
This is one of those scandals that is relatively small-bore by Trump standards but would be catastrophically damaging by normal-politician standards. It highlights two especially disqualifying aspects of Trump’s character.
The first is a blatant disregard for the law. While the incident has not yet been subject to an investigation, the facts seem clear. “Federal law prohibits political campaign or election-related activities within Army National Military Cemeteries, to include photographers, content creators or any other persons attending for purposes, or in direct support of a partisan political candidate’s campaign,” according to NPR. Arlington staff was aware of the law and tried to enforce it, only for Trump’s staff to bully them.
Trump’s only defense was to claim, via campaign spokesman Steven Cheung, that the official attempting to enforce the law was “clearly suffering from a mental-health episode,” and that the campaign “was prepared to release footage of the confrontation to support its account of the clash,” while refusing several requests to supply said footage.
Neither claim would offer any legal defense. Whatever the footage shows, Trump’s own photographic evidence shows him using the site as a campaign photo op:
Thumbs up at the grave today. Nice photo op. Nobody fakes sincerity quite like Trump.
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) August 26, 2024
Have fun, everybody. MAGA! pic.twitter.com/3Mv5f5h6hi
And even if the Arlington official were suffering a mental-health episode, that does not give Trump the right to violate federal law. The cemetery visit was obviously nowhere close to the same kind of violation as January 6, or even stealing classified documents and refusing to give them back. But like Trump’s general pattern of lawlessness, it reveals that “you can’t do that, it’s a crime!” has no deterrent effect on him. The relevant question you have to ask in the context of any Trump violation is “what is the enforcement mechanism?” And if that mechanism is one unarmed staffer trying to explain the law to Trump’s staff, then the law might as well not exist.
The broader context of the trip is that Trump was obviously trying to address a political vulnerability, which is that he believes putting your life in danger for your country is something only an idiot would do.
Four years ago, The Atlantic reported that Trump objected to visiting military graves because the soldiers who had died in war were “losers.” That reporting was quickly confirmed by the Associated Press, the New York Times, Fox News (!), and the Washington Post. It also reflected comments Trump has made in public, such as calling John McCain a “loser” and questioning whether being a prisoner of war is heroic.
The problem resurfaced recently, when Trump announced that the Presidential Medal of Freedom he was bestowing on Republican donor Miriam Adelson to honor her for donating massive sums to his election was better than the Congressional Medal of Honor bestowed upon wounded service members. (“It’s actually much better because everyone gets the Congressional Medal of Honor, that’s soldiers, they’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets, or they’re dead.”)
The insult was so blatant that the Veterans of Foreign Wars admonished him for it.
This is a serious problem for Trump’s coalition. He has always posed as an ally and champion of veterans. This is a key aspect of his general attempt to convince people that his motive for running for office is selfless — he no longer cares about his own wealth and happiness and wants only to create a better world for Americans.
But Trump doesn’t actually care about the country. The whole idea of caring about the country is difficult for him to fathom. He believes in the gangster ethos that people are universally selfish, that those who claim to uphold higher values are merely hypocrites, and the only exception are the saps who get conned into risking their lives for strangers.
His goal in the Arlington visit was to smooth over his political liability by creating the false image that he actually cares about the honor of fallen soldiers. Instead, he confirmed once again that he doesn’t.
