Arlington National Cemetery fiasco shows that for Trump, nothing about America is sacred or above exploitation
Where other Americans see hallowed ground that commemorates sacrifice in service of country, the former president sees a great spot to shoot an ad, break the law, and start a fight
This piece was originally published at The Hot Screen.
Given his compulsive output of dehumanizing rhetoric, authoritarian declarations, racist bile, and vengeful intent in the 2024 campaign, you might think it would be difficult for Donald Trump to plumb new depths — to engage in behavior that might be considered truly groundbreaking for him. How to rise above this hateful and fascistic blur?
Whether by accident or intent, Trump has in fact managed to outdo himself. His late August visit to Arlington National Cemetery was both a stand-alone obscenity and an uncanny summation of so much that is vile and disqualifying about this troubled man. To summarize: In violation of federal law, the Trump team conducted campaign-related activities in areas of the cemetery where such things are strictly forbidden, then in subsequent days lied about doing so while releasing campaign materials containing photos and video obtained by breaking the law. Less lawlessly, but in a grotesque display lacking grace or basic empathy, Trump was also photographed giving a grinning thumbs-up at the grave of a recently deceased soldier. These events alone would be remarkable for multiple reasons. The first is the utter contempt displayed for the sanctity of Arlington, a site where laws and regulations have been specifically adopted to prevent the partisan exploitation of a shared, apolitical, and very much hallowed ground. Not only was this an assault on what Ben Kesling at Politico accurately describes as a uniquely sacred site in American consciousness, it also constituted an enormous “fuck you” to all the families of deceased service members who expected their loved ones to rest in peace beyond the reach of crass political exploitation. With his startling behavior, Trump proved himself to be a man who cannot even visit a cemetery without managing to break the law or shock the conscience.
Equally chilling, though, is the fact that the Trump team has been accused of engaging in physical violence in the course of conducting their propagandistic visit. When a cemetery employee attempted to stop the entourage from filming or photographing in a restricted area, two members of his team engaged in verbal harassment of the woman, and one of them allegedly pushed her aside so that the Trump campaign could do as it wanted. In the aftermath of the incident, the employee filed a police report but declined to press charges, reportedly out of fear of retaliation by Trump supporters. Regardless, the Trump campaign proceeded to slander the employee, with statements that she was “clearly suffering from a mental health episode” and was “a disgrace and does not deserve to represent the hallowed grounds of Arlington National Cemetery.”
But these verbal attacks can’t hide the vile behavior they seek to sweep away. As Talking Point Memo’s David Kurtz observes, this sordid graveyard altercation has ominous echoes of the larger air of menace and violence that surrounds Trump: “The fascist overtones from the Arlington National Cemetery incident are unmistakeable: a presidential campaign run like a gang, with enforcers shoving aside a public servant enforcing the rules and a mob of millions of supporters with a track record of doxxing, harassing, intimidating, and threatening anyone who gets in their candidate’s way, all the while being egged on by the candidate himself.” In the last few days, National Public Radio was able to obtain the identities of the two Trump team members involved in the reported altercation, “deputy campaign manager Justin Caporale and Michel Picard, a member of Trump’s advance team.” Significantly, NPR reports that “[Caporale] was also listed as the on-site contact and project manager for the Women for America First rally in Washington, D.C. on Jan. 6, 2021 where Trump urged the crowd to “stop the steal” before some of them stormed the U.S. Capitol.” Caporale’s involvement with both the January 6 insurrection and the aggression allegedly deployed at Arlington isn’t just an indictment of him personally, or of the character of the men and women with whom Trump chooses to surround himself. This should also drive home the continuity between the two events, even if they’re disparate in scale — for Trump and his followers, there is no obstacle that can’t ultimately be resolved with intimidation and violence, no law that can’t be broken with apparent impunity.
What’s particularly appalling about the cemetery incident is that, in significant ways, the intimidation seem to be working, as if the nation has learned nothing from the worst events of Trump’s presidency, and Trump is blithely proceeding as if the law doesn’t apply to him. Once again, I think David Kurtz captures this dynamic when he writes that, “The erosion of any kind of strong, unified, national, countervailing force to Trump’s public bullying and nastiness only enables and emboldens the thuggery that is central to his appeal and that he has already notoriously used on Jan. 6 to try to retain power.” We have already seen the Army indicate that it considers the matter closed, even as there’s plenty of evidence that Army officials instructed the Trump campaign ahead of time about the rules it needed to follow; moreover, as Kurtz observes, the Army seems to have made a choice to put a low-level official into an impossible situation of enforcing the rules without full-throated backing. In other words, the Army did not and still does not want to antagonize the Trump campaign, even if doing so is necessary to prevent the illicit politicization of Arlington.
It is a small sign of hope that the Democrats, including the Harris campaign, seem to understand the political potency of what transpired at the national cemetery, and that Trump can’t be allowed to hide behind false claims of honoring fallen service members or behind his recent lies that the altercation with the Arlington official didn’t actually happen. Democratic staff members associated with the Senate Armed Services Committee are reportedly trying to obtain details from the Army regarding the police report that the assaulted Arlington employee filed, and Democratic congresspersons have criticized the Trump campaign’s behavior. Vice President Harris herself has also employed the incident as an opportunity to hit Trump’s lack of respect for U.S. troops.
Incredibly, given that an ordinary politician would prefer to put the incident in the rearview mirror, Trump himself has continued to pour oil on the fire. As the New Republic’s Greg Sargent reports, just days after the Arlington visit Trump “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.” And, as noted above, Trump more recently went so far as to falsely claim that the incident with the employee never even happened. Sargent is exactly right: Democrats should be driven by the Arlington scandal and Trump’s subsequent statements to investigate what happened, as what transpired “reveals a level of contempt for the law and public service that’s incompatible with democracy.”
Indeed, the Trump team’s behavior at Arlington — the lawbreaking, the casual thuggery, the disrespect for the fallen — amounts to what we might term secular sacrilege: the desecration of an area of public life commonly held to lie beyond the realm of politics, as they illegally sought to use the backdrop of America’s war dead to make political hay. And this should remind us of a broader point — that there is in fact no area of our collective life for which Donald Trump holds any respect. Rather, he views our shared world as a thing to be exploited, manipulated, and if necessary, betrayed in order to serve his quest for personal aggrandizement, which at this point reduces to regaining the presidency in order to evade the legal consequences of his many crimes against the republic and its citizenry.
Over the years, Trump has insisted that there are certain limited, prescribed ways in which a person can be considered to actually be a real American. Again and again, he has essentially asserted that being American is a matter of having the right skin color, the right religion, the right ancestry. In many ways, he has simply adopted and echoed the retrograde views of the American right, with its emphasis on a hierarchy atop which sit white Christian males. Regardless, these ideas, particularly the parts about the superiority of being white and male, and the rightness of feeling contempt for women and for black and brown people, have found a deeply receptive home in his addled psyche.
But for the members of the American majority who are either excluded by these degrading definitions, or are alternately unconvinced, appalled, or repelled by them, Trump’s foregrounding of American identity has opened the door wide to a necessary reckoning with such exhausted ideas about national identity. Because if someone as deranged and unfit as Trump can opine on who belongs here, then it stands to reason that average Americans also have a claim to think about the question, and to come to their own conclusions.
In light of events like January 6 and now Trump’s immoral Arlington visit — not to mention the countless lesser depravities of the last eight years — it feels like we’re on solid ground turning the right-wing rhetoric around and asking, Exactly what sort of Americans are Trump and his accomplices? You don’t have to say they’re un-American or anti-American to conclude that, at the most basic level, they’re simply not Americans in the way that most of us think about being Americans. Most of us don’t think it’s OK to desecrate military cemeteries or lie unapologetically afterwards about the desecration or to physically push aside a representative of the U.S. military trying to make sure that federal law is adhered to. For all of Trump’s talk of illegal aliens invading the country, he and his coterie come across as the ultimate aliens in America, unable to understand or respect the most rudimentary notions of patriotism, cut off from human decency, and trapped in a cycle of rage and retribution that has led the ex-president to literally start a fight in a graveyard.