There are millions of Americans who, like Trump, don’t give a damn about military traditions or rules at Arlington National Cemetery. But among the kinds of Americans who do care are some serious voters, many of whom have somehow been persuaded that Trump cares too. Yesterday, Michael Powell delved into why Trump’s debacle at Arlington is so serious— for him. “For Trump,” he wrote, “defiling what is sacred in our civic culture borders on a pastime. Peacefully transferring power to the next president, treating political adversaries with at least rudimentary grace, honoring those soldiers wounded and disfigured in service of our country— Trump long ago walked roughshod over all these norms. Before he tried to overturn a national election, he mocked his opponents in the crudest terms and demeaned dead soldiers as ‘suckers.’ But the former president outdid himself this week, when he attended a wreath-laying ceremony honoring 13 American soldiers killed in a suicide bombing in Kabul during the final havoc-marked hours of the American withdrawal. Trump laid three wreaths and put hand over heart; that is a time-honored privilege of presidents. Trump, as is his wont, went further. He walked to a burial site in Section 60 and posed with the family of a fallen soldier, grinning broadly and giving a thumbs-up for his campaign photographer and videographer.”
A cemetery employee politely attempted to stop the campaign staff from filming in Section 60. Taking campaign photos and videos at gravesites is expressly forbidden under federal law. The Trump entourage, according to a subsequent statement by the U.S. Army, which oversees the cemetery, ‘abruptly pushed’ her aside.
Trump’s campaign soon posted a video on TikTok, overlaid with Trump’s narration: “We didn’t lose one person in 18 months. And then they”— the Biden administration— “took over, that disaster of leaving Afghanistan.”
Trump was unsurprisingly not telling the truth; 11 soldiers were killed in Afghanistan in his last year in office, and his administration had itself negotiated the withdrawal. But such fabrications are incidental sins compared with what came next. A top Trump adviser, Chris LaCivita, and campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung talked to reporters and savaged the employee who had tried to stop the entourage. Cheung referred to her as “an unnamed individual, clearly suffering a mental-health episode.” LaCivita declared her a “despicable individual” who ought to be fired.
There was, of course, another way to handle this mistake. Governor Spencer Cox of Utah had accompanied Trump to the cemetery, and his campaign emailed out photos of the governor and the former president there. When challenged, Cox did what is foreign to Trump: He apologized. “You are correct,” Cox replied to a person criticizing the event on Twitter, adding, “It did not go through the proper channels and should not have been sent. My campaign will be sending out an apology.”
This was not a judgment call, or a minor violation of obscure bureaucratic boilerplate. In the regulations governing visitors and behavior at Arlington National Cemetery, many paragraphs lay out what behavior is acceptable and what is not. These read not as suggestions but as commandments. Memorial services are intended to honor the fallen, the regulations note, with a rough eloquence: “Partisan activities are inappropriate in Arlington National Cemetery, due to its role as a shrine to all the honored dead of the Armed Forces of the United States and out of respect for the men and women buried there and for their families.”
Anyone who expects the self-serving 78-year-old goon to comport himself with even the roughest facsimile of dignity in that most sacred of American places, is unaware that for Trump there are no sacred places… other than his bank vault. Meanwhile, he seems a little panicked by the reaction to having badly flubbed his messaging on IVF and abortion Thursday. Sahil Kapur reported he’s “in damage control mode.” Kapur wrote that “The backlash from anti-abortion advocates was fierce, with some warning that the Republican presidential nominee was risking losing support from a key bloc of the party’s base. Alarmed by what she saw, Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the influential anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, called Trump on Thursday to ask for clarity on his comments, according to a source with knowledge of the conversation. Trump told her that he didn’t state a position on an amendment on his home state’s ballot this fall, which would bar restrictions on abortion before fetal viability, around the 24th week of pregnancy. Dannenfelser told him that ‘it’s imperative that you’re clear because there’s confusion now that you may be in support of this,’ the source added. She also told him the amendment is ‘incongruent’ with his opposition to late-term abortion.”
Kapur added that “anti-abortion activists, who have provided critical support to Trump during his three presidential runs, piled on. Some also criticized his suggestion that he’d mandate that the government or insurance companies pay for in vitro fertilization treatments. ‘Former President Trump now appears determined to undermine his prolife supporters,’ evangelical theologian Albert Mohler wrote on Twitter. ‘His criticism of Florida abortion restrictions & his call for government funding of IVF & his recent statement about reproductive rights seem almost calculated to alienate prolife voters.’”
[S]ome Republicans now fear voter backlash from the majority of Americans who say in polls they want abortion to be mostly or always legal, particularly as Democrats seek to further capitalize on the issue. And Trump, who has bragged about appointing three of the five Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe, is still struggling to navigate it.
Abortion foes are caught in their own bind over whether to abandon Trump or to support him in the hope that Republicans will win in November and continue to pursue nationwide abortion restrictions, despite the former president's claims to the contrary. ‘If Donald Trump loses in November, it will be his improvisational approach to abortion that alienated the pro-life community that costs him victory,’ conservative radio host Erick Erickson said.
Some are finally figuring out that his word to them is as “sacred” as the traditions and ground at Arlington he trampled. Kapur noted that “Kristan Hawkins, the president of Students for Life— which has helped organize tens of thousands of anti-abortion activists, mostly on college campuses— wrote Thursday on Twitter: ‘My phone is blowing up with @SFLAction volunteers who no longer will door knock for President Trump if this is not corrected. With polls neck and neck, this is the last thing we need right now to defeat Kamala’s pro-abortion extremism.’ She told NBC News the Trump campaign ‘personally’ told leaders in her group that he’s undecided on the Florida measure. She said they expect him to vote ‘no’ and warned that Trump’s waffling on the issue would likely hurt his support with many volunteers. ‘When they hear the leader of the Republican Party, Donald Trump, walking back past pro-life statements, it’s devastating to them,’ she said. ‘And it’s shocking to them that Republicans would betray this very important part of the Republican Party. He needs to be very careful with his words, she added.”
Yep… or he’ll clumsily start hemorrhaging supporters. His crude actions at Arlington betrayed a profound disregard for what many of his followers hold sacred. For some, sacred spaces like Arlington are not just physical locations; they’re sanctuaries of collective memory and national values. These are places where the ultimate sacrifices made in service to the nation are honored, and any violation of the rules and traditions governing them is seen as a direct assault on the nation’s moral fabric, something someone like Trump has spent his whole life belittling and laughing at. But for Americans who revere military service and the rituals that commemorate it—many of his supporters— Arlington represents the highest ideals of duty, honor, and sacrifice. Lewandowski’s decision to use this hallowed ground as a mere backdrop for political gain is not just distasteful; it’s a desecration. By reducing a sacred site to a stage for his personal brand, Trump has shown that he sees nothing as inviolable except his own ambitions. And that’s not an isolated incident but part of a broader pattern where Trump treats the sacred elements of American life— traditions, symbols and norms— as if they were merely profane. He has consistently eroded the boundaries between the sacred and the profane in American civic culture and this week the backlash he’s facing, isn’t just from voters who cherish military traditions but also from his own anti-Choice base. Supporters who once believed in his promises are beginning to wise up as he continues to blur the lines between the sacred and the profane, alienating even those who once saw him as a champion of their values, unraveling the very coalition— not counting Putin— that brought him to power.
trump has never had to bother about boundaries. he's been violating them his entire lifetime. he's golden. and the supremes said so. I imagine life is easier when you don't have to bother with such things.
I was taught as a kid in school that societal norms and laws and things like the constitution were meaningful to maintain a coherent civilized society. And they ARE... for me. But never for trump. Nobody in our society ever dared to hold him accountable for anything he did to others or to the nation that elevated him to a deity.
To borrow some wisdom from Homer Simpson: "Here's to (Trump); the cause of and the solution to all of life's problems".