How a Trump visit sparked turmoil at America's most sacred cemetery

[mahatmakanejeeves]

How a Trump visit sparked turmoil at America’s most sacred cemetery
Army officials hoped clear rules would avoid a damaging public spat with Trump. He gave them one anyway.


GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump attends a wreath-laying ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery on Monday. Among those with him are Tyler Vargas-Andrews and Kelsee Lainhart, two Marines who were wounded in the August 2021 suicide bombing in Kabul. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

By Isaac Arnsdorf, Josh Dawsey and Dan Lamothe
August 28, 2024 at 7:04 p.m. EDT

Earlier this month, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s campaign contacted military officials about visiting Arlington National Cemetery to mark the third anniversary of the Islamic State bombing that killed 13 U.S. service members during the evacuation from Afghanistan.

Federal law prohibits election-related activities at military cemeteries, and Arlington is the most prestigious and sacred of all. Pentagon officials were deeply concerned about the former president turning the visit into a campaign stop, but they also didn’t want to block him from coming, according to Defense Department officials and internal messages reviewed by The Washington Post.

Officials said they wanted to respect the wishes of grieving family members who wanted Trump there, but at the same time were wary of Trump’s record of politicizing the military. So they laid out ground rules they hoped would wall off politics from the final resting place of those who paid the ultimate sacrifice for their nation. .. Instead, they got sucked into exactly the kind of crisis they were hoping to avoid.

{snip}

Hau Chu, Alex Horton, Hannah Knowles, Amy B Wang and Marianne LeVine contributed to this report.

By Isaac Arnsdorf
Isaac Arnsdorf is a national political reporter covering the Trump campaign. His first book, "Finish What We Started: The MAGA Movement’s Ground War to End Democracy," was published in 2024. Twitter

By Josh Dawsey
Josh Dawsey is a political enterprise and investigations reporter for The Washington Post. He joined the paper in 2017 and previously covered the White House. Before that, he covered the White House for Politico, and New York City Hall and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie for the Wall Street Journal. Twitter

By Dan Lamothe
Dan Lamothe joined The Washington Post in 2014 to cover the U.S. military. He has written about the Armed Forces for more than 15 years, traveling extensively, embedding with five branches of service and covering combat in Afghanistan. Twitter

[lees1975]

1. So?

He got away with it and no one did anything. Laying out ground rules for this guy is meaningless. So much for protecting the sacred nature of Arlington.