An Arlington National Cemetery employee was verbally and physically assaulted on Monday while trying to block a Donald Trump campaign photo-op, and the Trump campaign’s response was, not surprisingly, to claim that the employee trying to enforce federal law is mentally ill.
“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,” campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said in a statement to NPR.
Using Cheung’s phrasing, the fact is that “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,” a spokesperson for Arlington National Cemetery said in a statement.
The spokesperson confirmed that “there was an incident, and a report was filed” concerning the matter, which stems from a crass effort by Trump to politicize the third anniversary of the deaths of 13 servicemembers killed in a suicide-bomb attack in Afghanistan that the ex-president has tried to blame entirely on the actions on the Biden-Harris administration.
Trump tries to make Afghanistan into wedge issue
Borrowing again from Cheung’s phrasing, the fact is, a 2023 State Department report excoriated both Biden and Trump, concluding that the “decisions of both President Trump and President Biden to end the U.S. military mission in Afghanistan had serious consequences for the viability of the Afghan government and its security.”
“Even prior to the signing of the February 2020 U.S.-Taliban Agreement, President Trump had signaled his desire to end the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan, and he steadily withdrew U.S. forces following that agreement,” the report noted.
“When the Trump administration left office, key questions remained unanswered about how the United States would meet the May 2021 deadline for a full military withdrawal, how the United States could maintain a diplomatic presence in Kabul after that withdrawal, and what might happen to those eligible for the Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) program as well as other at-risk Afghans.”
After the failed Jan. 6 insurrection, Trump completed his administration’s drawdown of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, leaving just 2,500 military personnel, the lowest level since 2001, despite warnings from congressional Republicans, led by the Senate Intelligence Committee’s ranking Republican, Marco Rubio, R-Fla., that the drawdown would lead to a “Saigon-type situation.”
The situation that Rubio forewarned of was no doubt aided by a key win for the Taliban in the February 2020 agreement negotiated by the Trump administration – the release of 5,000 Taliban fighters who had been held by the U.S.-backed Afghan government.
Amrullah Saleh, then Afghanistan’s first vice president, told the BBC in January 2021 that Afghan leaders had told Trump officials that “violence will spike” with the release of the prisoners, and that as Trump completed his drawdown, indeed, “violence has spiked,” Saleh said.
“Caused by Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, the humiliation in Afghanistan set off the collapse of American credibility and respect all around the world,” Trump told an audience of 4,000 National Guard members and their families at a campaign rally in Michigan after the Monday photo-op
“The voters are going to fire Kamala and Joe on Nov. 5, we hope, and when I take office, we will ask for the resignations of every single official,” Trump said at the Michigan rally.
“We’ll get the resignations of every single senior official who touched the Afghanistan calamity, to be on my desk at noon on Inauguration Day. You know, you have to fire people. You have to fire people when they do a bad job,” Trump said.
You could say that’s what 81 million voters did in 2020, but that’s getting us away from the story at hand, which involves a rather aggressive photo-op that was conducted in obvious violation of federal law.
“The hallowed grounds of Arlington National Cemetery are the final resting place of our American heroes. Trump defiled Arlington National Cemetery by doing a crass campaign stunt over the grave of a dead hero. And his campaign staff acted like bullies,” Congressman Ted Lieu, D-Calif., posted to Twitter.
That about sums it up.
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Chris Graham
