Trump manages to disrespect both veterans and women as Arlington visit blows up his campaign

There are lots of places in Washington D.C. that are awe-inspiring – the Capitol, the Lincoln and Washington and Jefferson Memorials, the White House, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall – but Arlington National Cemetery, positioned on a hillside across the Potomac from Washington, has always been special to me.  It’s not just the thousands of rows of graves of our dead veterans that strikes you as grand and yet solemn when you visit.  It’s the quiet and reverence paid by the families of the fallen and tourists alike who visit there.   

That is why the story of Donald Trump desecrating the ground of Arlington National Cemetery on Monday is personal for me.  My grandfather, General Lucian K. Truscott Jr., and his wife, Sara Randolph Truscott, are buried at Arlington.  When he died in 1965, I was given leave from West Point to take part in his funeral in the chapel at Fort Meyer, where he had served in the cavalry in the 1930’s, and where in the early 1950’s my father had commanded “The Old Guard” of the 3^rd Infantry Regiment who guard the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

After the service in the chapel, I marched wearing my Dress Gray cadet uniform behind the caisson carrying grandpa’s casket and in front of the black horse mounted with his cavalry saddle with his boots turned backwards in the stirrups.  I was 18 years old, and tears streamed down my face all the way from the plaza in front of the chapel to the burial site just down the hill.

I visit grandpa and grandma’s grave whenever I have the time while in Washington.  It stands, shaded by trees, with the chapel where grandpa’s funeral took place and some of the buildings of Fort Meyer visible up the hill.  As an army family – my grandfathers were army officers, making my mother and father both army brats, and my father was an Army officer – none of us ever had hometowns where our families came from that we could return to.  The army posts where we were stationed call to us in something of the same way.  Fort Meyer is one; the cavalry post in Marfa, Texas where grandpa served in the 1920’s is another; Fort Riley, where grandpa was in the cavalry and dad had a mechanized infantry battalion, and Fort Leavenworth, where both dad and grandpa were students and then professors at the army’s Command and General Staff College loom large in our family’s memory.

Arlington National Cemetery is special not just because it is grandpa’s place of burial, but because it symbolizes the honor and service of so many men and women who served this nation in peacetime and war.  As a nation, we have given them Arlington as their final place of rest, making it one of the most hallowed grounds in the United States of America.

And now, Donald Trump has found yet another way to desecrate this hallowed ground.  How is this for the headline as we close in on 60 days to go before the election: “Trump team downplays Arlington ‘incident’ in an effort to minimize political fallout.” 

Just to be clear:  any time a political candidate sees the words “downplays,” and “political fallout” in the same sentence, he is losing.

Trump was obviously hoping that the story of his misbegotten visit to Arlington National Cemetery would fade from the headlines.  To recount – on Monday, Donald Trump made a campaign stop on the hallowed grounds of Arlington National Cemetery to attend a wreath-laying ceremony marking the anniversary of the deaths of 14 American soldiers who were killed by a suicide bomber during the military’s pullout from Afghanistan.  Photographs of Trump at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier show Corey Lewandowski and Chris LaCivita, both of whom senior managers of the Trump campaign, standing off to the side as Trump descends stairs leading to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. 

It was a campaign event, pure and simple, or Trump wouldn’t have had two of his top campaign managers observing his attendance at the ceremony.

But it was after the wreath-laying at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier that the presence of Trump’s campaign officials and photographers really got him in trouble.  One of Trump’s aides pushed and verbally assaulted a female employee of Arlington National Cemetery when she attempted to stop the campaign from taking photographs and videos within the boundaries of Section 60 of the cemetery, where veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are buried.  Arlington has a rule that no photographs or videos can be taken inside Section 60 by persons other than family members of the deceased soldiers.  Additionally, the Army forbids “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.”

That would apply to Corey Lewandowski and Chris LaCivita, just for starters, as they are “other persons attending for purposes, or in direct support of a partisan political candidate’s political campaign.”  That would be their employer, Donald Trump, who is the Republican nominee for president.

After the confrontation between the Arlington employee and the member of Trump’s campaign apparatus, his campaign spokesman, Steven Cheung, was quoted as defaming the Arlington employee who attempted to uphold the rules of the cemetery, saying that she was “a liar,” who “was clearly suffering from a mental health episode.”  As if that weren’t enough, LaCivita weighed in, calling her “a “despicable individual” who “does not deserve to represent the hallowed grounds of Arlington National Cemetery.”

The family of the dead soldier, Marine Staff Sergeant Darin Taylor Hoover, behind whose grave Trump posed with a big grin on his face giving the thumbs up sign, gave interviews yesterday saying that they had invited Trump to the gravesite of their family member and had given permission for photographs and videos to be made there.  It is unclear if the wishes of a family of a dead soldier can negate the rules of Arlington National Cemetery. 

Today, it became known that the family of Army Master Sergeant Andrew Marckesano, a soldier buried next to the grave behind which Trump posed, told the New York Times that they had not given permission for Trump and his campaign to film his gravesite, which appeared in photographs and videos of Trump.  “The Trump campaign staffers did not adhere to the rules that were set in place for this visit to Staff Sergeant Hoover’s gravesite in Section 60, which lays directly next to my brother’s grave,” Marckesano’s sister Michelle told the Times in a statement.  Master Sergeant Marckesano served six tours in Afghanistan over the 20-year duration of that war, and died by his own hand in 2020 after a long battle with PTSD.

The Trump campaign has widely distributed the photo of Trump and the Hoover family smiling and giving the thumbs up with the grave of Sergeant Marckesano clearly visible in the photos.  Trump posted a video on TikTok and his social media website showing him walking through Section 60 with a voiceover critical of the pullout from Afghanistan.  The video also showed him placing flowers on the grave of Sergeant Hoover with Sergeant Marckesano’s grave visible next to it.

The Hoover family clearly supports Trump.  In one of the photos of Trump at the gravesite, one of the women pictured appears to be giving a white supremacy sign.  Her right hand is held directly in front of her chest next to Trump, with her fingers circled and her little finger extended and raised. 

The Marckesano family has not said who they support for president, but they have objected to having the name of their son and brother and husband included in photos and videos taken for political purposes.  The photos of Sergeant Marckesano’s grave that have appeared in Trump campaign postings on social media, taken without his family’s permission, are clear evidence of why there is a federal law forbidding political campaign events on the soil of Arlington National Cemetery.

A spokesman for Arlington National Cemetery said today that holding a campaign event on its soil not only breaks the rules of the cemetery but is a violation of federal law. The Pentagon has not said whether it will pursue legal action regarding either the Trump campaign’s violation of cemetery rules and federal law, or the apparent assault on a cemetery employee by a Trump campaign staff member. 

The Arlington employee who was assaulted was interviewed by the Military Police, and a report was filed.  She has said she has chosen not to file charges against the Trump employee who assaulted her because she fears retaliation from Trump supporters.  Trump spokesman Cheung said the employee’s fear of retaliation was “ridiculous” and accused her of having “Trump derangement syndrome.”

The Trump campaign just keeps pushing the story further and further with its denunciations of the Arlington National Cemetery employee.  The Trump campaign employees who were involved in the confrontation with the woman in Section 60 have not been identified, but it is known that both Corey Lewandowski and Chris LaCivita accompanied Trump throughout his visit to the cemetery.  Lewandowski was charged during the 2016 Trump campaign with grabbing a female reporter and pushing her out of the way during a campaign rally.  Lewandowski denied that he ever touched the former Breitbart reporter, but the confrontation was caught on tape and he was charged with battery in Florida.  The charges were later dropped. 

Lewandowski was fired from his position running one of Trump’s SuperPacs in 2021 after he was accused of sexually harassing the wife of one of Trump’s largest campaign donors. Lewandowski was also fired from being one of South Dakota Governor Krisi Noem’s campaign advisers after the allegations became public.  Lewandowski was later charged with misdemeanor battery by prosecutors in Las Vegas, where the sexual assault took place.  He cut a deal with prosecutors to drop the charges by agreeing to pay a fine of $1,000, undergo eight hours of impulse control therapy, serve 50 hours of community service and stay out of trouble for a year.

It is unknown if Lewandowski was one of the two Trump campaign staffers involved in the physical confrontation with the female employee of Arlington National Cemetery, but it sure sounds like him.

So, to sum up:  Here we are with two months to go before election day, and what are we talking about?  Donald Trump desecrating the hallowed ground of Arlington National Cemetery, something he has done before in the same area, Section 60, where in 2017 he called soldiers who lost their lives fighting in wars for their country “suckers” and “losers,” according to his own White House chief of staff, former Marine general John Kelly, whose son is buried in Section 60. 

And the story is still alive three days later.  Is there a way that Donald Trump can dig this grave for his campaign any deeper?  Stay tuned.