Donald Trump’s campaign plan sounded good a priori: a visit last Monday to the solemn Arlington military cemetery, the final resting place of 400,000 people, including fallen US soldiers, veterans and their families. The former president wanted to mark with this appearance the third anniversary of the death in a suicide attack at Kabul airport of 13 members of the Armed Forces while they were participating in the dishonorable and chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. He also sought to contrast with Joe Biden, the commander in chief who ordered that withdrawal, who lives in the background after his resignation and has been on vacation this week. Trump had been invited by the relatives of two of those soldiers.
Things went awry when his entourage tried to film the former president and Republican candidate for the upcoming elections in a restricted area. Federal laws governing the cemetery, located across the Potomac River from Washington, prohibit filming on its grounds for election purposes. An employee of the cemetery, which is managed by the Army, came to remind him and, as it was first reported by public radio NPR, was met with profanity and pushes from two Trump collaborators. The incident was reported to the police department at Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall, but the worker in question “decided not to press charges,” so the Army, as could be read in a statement on Thursday, “considers this matter closed.”
The altercation occurred in section 60 of the cemetery, The Army said the ceremony was limited in access and largely reserved for those killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. “This was a regrettable incident, as was the fact that the employee and her professionalism were unfairly targeted. Arlington National Cemetery is a sanctuary for the fallen in the Armed Forces, and its staff will continue to ensure that public ceremonies meet the dignity and respect that the fallen deserve,” the statement released by the Army added.
Accusation without evidence
In another statement issued by the Trump campaign when the news broke, it was explained that the photographer accompanying the former president was allowed “access to the premises.” “An anonymous individual, who was clearly suffering from a mental health episode, [acusación de la que no se han aportado pruebas]decided to physically block the team members from [ex]President Trump during a very solemn ceremony,” the text states.
The next day —when the news channels had already turned the topic into the topic of the day, and of the week— Trump posted on his social media a photo of him surrounded by the families who had invited him to Arlington, with a text in which they thanked him for accepting the invitation and assured him that they had given him permission to film. However, it was not up to these families to dictate exceptions to a federal law. The photo of the relatives is accompanied by a text that says: “The [ex]“The president and his team behaved with the utmost respect and dignity.”
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Suspecting that Trump was going to use the visit for electoral purposes, the Department of Defense established specific rules: he would be allowed to go, accompanied by photojournalists, to make a tribute at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, one of the most sought-after spots in the cemetery, but the visit to the area where the dead are buried at the Kabul airport had to be private. The former president decided to break those rules and took a photographer and a cameraman with him.
A few hours later, his campaign officials posted a video on TikTok that could be described as election-oriented, featuring some of the images they had been banned from taking. On Wednesday, Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance called the controversy a “media exaggeration” at an election event.
Trump, for his part, defended himself by attacking, and, at a rally in Michigan, he downplayed the altercation and accused his opponent at the polls, the Democratic candidate Kamala Harris, vice president at the time of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, of not respecting the families of the soldiers killed during the evacuation.
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