The Trump-Arlington Cemetery controversy.

I’m Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle: an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum on the news of the day — then “my take.”

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Today's read: 13 minutes.

Reminder.

Quick hits.

1. A Russian airstrike on a Ukrainian military institute and nearby hospital killed at least 50 people and wounded 270 others. It is the deadliest single attack in the war this year. (The strike) Separately, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba submitted his resignation, the latest in a series of shake-ups in President Volodymyr Zelensky’s wartime administration. (The resignation)
2. Federal prosecutors charged a former aide to New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) and Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) with acting as an illegal agent of the Chinese government. (The arrest)
3. The DNC and the Harris campaign said it is directing $25 million of their fundraising to down-ballot races. (The funds)
4. The United Kingdom suspended 30 of its 350 arms export licenses with Israel. (The suspension) Separately, the U.S. Justice Department charged Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and five other militants with terrorism. (The charges)
5. Kamala Harris is expected to propose a $50,000 tax break for small businesses as part of her economic plan. (The plan)

Today's topic.

The Trump-Arlington Cemetery controversy. Last week, NPR reported that an official at the Arlington National Cemetery (ANC) had a confrontation with Trump campaign staff members who were filming and taking photos in a restricted area of the cemetery. That area, named Section 60, is reserved for soldiers killed while serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. Arlington has strict rules against photography and filming for political purposes in the cemetery, and NPR reported that ANC officials told Trump staffers that only ANC staff were permitted to take photos in Section 60. 

Trump was invited by a group of Gold Star families to attend a wreath-laying ceremony at Arlington Cemetery to commemorate the third anniversary of the attack at Abbey Gate in Afghanistan. The attack occurred during the Biden administration's widely criticized withdrawal from Afghanistan, when a suicide bomber set off an explosive device that killed 13 members of the U.S. military and about 170 Afghan civilians.

After NPR’s report on the incident, the Army released a statement saying that a staffer was trying to enforce rules prohibiting political activities in Section 60 when she was pushed aside.

"Participants in the August 26th ceremony and the subsequent Section 60 visit were made aware of federal laws, Army regulations and DoD policies, which clearly prohibit political activities on cemetery grounds," the statement said. "An ANC employee who attempted to ensure adherence to these rules was abruptly pushed aside. Consistent with the decorum expected at ANC, this employee acted with professionalism and avoided further disruption.”

The Trump administration described the incident differently.

“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,” Steven Cheung, the communications director, said in a statement. Cheung also posted a screenshot on social media of a message that he says showed confirmation Trump was granted permission to have “an official photographer and/or videographer outside of the main media pool.” 

In a brief statement, Arlington National Cemetery confirmed that “there was an incident, and a report was filed.”

Vice President Kamala Harris issued a statement over the weekend saying Arlington Cemetery is “not a place for politics" and that Trump “disrespected sacred ground, all for the sake of a political stunt.” Several Gold Star families of service members killed in the Abbey Gate attack responded by defending Trump and criticizing Harris, saying she was using the incident for political gain and accusing the Biden-Harris administration of dodging accountability for the deaths of their children.

"How do you sleep at night knowing it was you, this administration, you and Biden, you, being the last one in the room, are responsible for the death of our 13 kids," Jim McCollum, Gold Star father of Lance Corporal Rylee McCollum, said in a video. "You have failed for three years and eight months to acknowledge our kids, to acknowledge me… You have failed in your duty as vice president."

Today, we are going to break down some arguments about the incident and Abbey Gate from the left and right, then my take.

What the left is saying.

• The left is outraged by the story, arguing Trump blatantly disregarded the law for a political stunt.
• Some suggest the Army was unwise to allow Trump any level of access to the cemetery.
• Others say Trump’s actions are consistent with his past disrespect of the military.

In The Guardian, Kevin Carroll called the incident “shocking but not surprising.”

“Donald Trump and his staff knew – and were reminded of – federal regulations specifically prohibiting the misconduct their campaign engaged in at Arlington’s section 60 this week. But the law aside, only a gross lack of manners, decency and humility could incline a person to film a fundraising appeal over the resting places of dead men and women who cannot decline to participate in the coarse spectacle. The photo of a grinning Trump giving a jaunty thumbs-up over these patriots’ graves is an indelible image of narcissism risen to the point of sociopathy.”

“This ugly incident would have derailed the candidacy of any presidential nominee before Trump’s crude emergence on the American political scene in 2016… But it is part of a pattern of disrespect for and misuse of the United States military that bears upon Trump’s fitness to serve again as president,” Carroll wrote. “Trump sees the armed services as yet another entity to be misused for his personal benefit, damaged and then discarded just as he has with his bankrupt businesses, the evangelical Christian churches and the Republican party… His poor form at Arlington this week therefore shocks but does not surprise, as the idea of serving others, much less giving one’s life for others, is anathema to Trump.”

In Bloomberg, Francis Wilkinson said “blame Trump’s Arlington disgrace on the Army’s naivete.”

“Federal law, Army regulations and Defense Department policy prohibit political campaigning or election activities within Army cemeteries. Yet the Army allowed the Trump circus, video camera in tow, on cemetery grounds. Since the chances of Trump engaging in good faith were negligible, that was the Army’s first mistake. Predictably, Trump then used Arlington as the set for a partisan attack on President Joe Biden over the 2021 US withdrawal from Afghanistan,” Wilkinson wrote. “Consistent with the degradation that flows daily from Trump environs, high-ranking Trump campaign officials described the cemetery employee who had tried to enforce the law as a ‘despicable individual’ who was ‘suffering from a mental health episode.’”

“The Trump campaign breaks the law to perpetrate a cheap political hit. The Pentagon retreats. Trump thugs engage in an ‘altercation’ with a cemetery employee trying to honor both the law and the dead. The Pentagon acquiesces,” Wilkinson said. “Perhaps the Army has grown morally flabby since the end of the Cold War, incapable of articulating democratic principles or of denouncing depravity. Or perhaps, with Trump running within the margin of error of a return to the White House, the Army is hedging its political bets.”

In MSNBC, Brandon Friedman, a combat veteran, wrote about “why Trump’s Arlington stunt was so insulting.”

“I am old. But I have friends who are still in their 20s. Friends who should be in their 40s. Some of them are buried at Arlington National Cemetery. That is what makes Arlington a special place. And for those of us who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, Section 60 — the burial site of hundreds of service members killed in those wars — is the inner sanctum,” Friedman said. “And that is why Donald Trump’s recent behavior is so repulsive. Trump was so eager to use Arlington’s Section 60 as a backdrop for a campaign event this week that he may have broken federal laws against politicizing the burial ground to do it.”

“Of course, Trump’s disregard for military tradition and his disdain for military service members is well documented. This incident was only the latest in a long line,” Friedman wrote. “This man harbors deep resentment toward the military and those who’ve sacrificed in service. Even when he poses with a family — as he did at Arlington this week — he only does so to enhance his campaign or his political prospects. Trump’s use for the military and our dead extends only as far as it suits him.”

What the right is saying.

• The right mostly backs Trump, viewing the incident as a ginned-up controversy. 
• Some say Democrats and the media are being deliberately deceptive about the facts of the story.
• Others criticize Trump for the political nature of the visit. 

The New York Post editorial board said “Arlington incident shows media falling into same old Trump derangement syndrome.”

“You’d think after a decade of covering Donald Trump’s political career, the media would have learned some lessons. You’d be wrong. The coverage of the Arlington National Cemetery ‘controversy’ shows the press using the same overwrought language, anonymous sources and liberal critics that they constantly return to, despite being proven wrong time and again,” the board wrote. “The family members of the fallen soldiers are the ones who matter most in this scenario. If they aren’t angry or offended, how is this even a story?”

“​​In the end, this turned out to be a single disagreement between one Trump staffer and one Arlington employee. The press nonetheless turned it into the scandal of the month. This has happened so often, it has become a cliche,” the board said. “The media have not changed, but voters have. They’ve stopped believing the blindly sourced conspiracies and the vaunted claims about broken norms. And journalists have only themselves to blame.”

In PJ Media, Matt Margolis argued “Democrats are the ones politicizing Trump’s visit to Arlington.”

“Former President Donald Trump's visit to Arlington National Cemetery on August 26 was a poignant gesture meant to honor the 13 servicemembers killed in the disastrous Abbey Gate terrorist bombing during Joe Biden’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan,” Margolis wrote. “And the left just couldn’t handle it. True to form, the left couldn’t resist the opportunity to scandalize Trump’s visit, spinning up a story about an alleged altercation with Trump’s staff at Arlington, which the families present immediately debunked.”

“Naturally, Harris decided to add fuel to the fire. She took to X to condemn Trump, accusing him of politicizing Arlington. She invoked the debunked ‘suckers and losers’ hoax, repeating the same tired lies in a transparent attempt to paint Trump as someone who disrespects the military,” Margolis said. “This isn’t just hypocrisy; it’s an attempt to cover up her own failures. Instead of owning up to the mistakes that led to the deaths of these servicemembers and the fall of Afghanistan, she’s trying to deflect and distract by scandalizing the visit and attacking Trump.”

In The Dispatch, Nick Catoggio said the incident is “persuasion-proof.”

“The subject of Donald Trump’s toothy thumbs-up photo op amid the fallen at Arlington National Cemetery is persuasion-proof. There are already a thousand reasons to despise him; either you came around to doing so long ago or you’ve managed to rationalize away each of them, in which case this latest one won’t pose any problem,” Catoggio wrote. “Years ago, it was possible to believe there might be something he could do to alienate his apologists. Callousness toward the military was an obvious one… How naive we were.”

“All of this feels familiar, no? Not the setting, that is, but Trump’s M.O. It’s the classified documents fiasco all over again. He wanted something he couldn’t have; that something was minor enough that he calculated the relevant authorities wouldn’t go to war with him to block him from getting it; so he simply ignored the rules and dared them to do something about it,” Catoggio said. “If Trump was there to honor the dead rather than to cut a commercial, he could have attended, saluted, consoled the families, and left the cameras and campaign flunkies at home, and no one would have had any problem. But character, alas, is destiny.”

My take.

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• There was definitely a real altercation in Arlington, and it’s hard to interpret it in any way that’s favorable to Trump.
• Regardless of the details, the Trump team was breaking the rules by filming for campaign purposes, full stop.
• This is obviously not as big of a deal as the Abbey Gate attack itself, but we should be able to critique both Biden’s withdrawal and Trump’s team’s behavior.

Based on all the reporting and the competing claims, here's the most neutral summary I can offer of what happened: The Abbey Gate anniversary was coming up. Gold Star families invited Trump to a wreath-laying ceremony at Arlington Cemetery. Trump accepted the invitation. Trump's team hoped to document the event for a campaign video of some kind. Arlington allowed Trump to have a photographer outside the media pool at the event, but Trump campaign members also took personal photographs and videos. An Arlington staffer tried to stop the filming — either from the campaign members or professionals (we don’t know) — in Section 60, a sacred area where photography was prohibited for this event. There was an altercation (physical or verbal, also unclear), and that story made its way to NPR.

You can decide whether this story is a controversy or a nothingburger; different people will have different sensitivities. Some in the media probably blew this out of proportion, while others underplayed or dismissed it. To be clear, though: This is not some “anonymous” hearsay — the Army released a statement confirming the altercation as well as the Trump team’s attempt at taking some kind of photography in Section 60. Something clearly happened.

Perhaps the biggest issue in trying to figure out exactly what that was is that you just can’t trust anything former President Donald Trump says.

In just the last few weeks, Trump has made dozens and dozens of absurd claims: that he won his classified documents case in Florida (he didn't), that Kamala Harris met with Vladimir Putin before Russia invaded Ukraine (she didn't), that he passed the biggest tax cuts in U.S. history (he didn't), that China is paying billions in tariffs (they aren't), that "everyone wanted Roe overturned" (what do you even say to that?), that Harris used artificial intelligence to fake crowd sizes (she didn't), that Latin American prisons are being emptied to send people to the U.S. (they aren't), or that global warming will cause the oceans to rise just “an eighth of an inch in 355 years” (oceans are rising an eighth of an inch every year). He even told a bizarre story about being in an emergency helicopter landing with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, who told him negative stories about Kamala Harris during their flight (he appears to have confused Brown with a different black politician from San Francisco).

Harris is a flip-flopper, and Biden often tells incomprehensible and lie-filled stories, but Trump is the Babe Ruth of exaggeration, falsehoods, and lies — or he genuinely believes things that are detached from reality. I don’t know which is true, but either way, Trump is a prodigy of distortion. This is not a judgment on his presidency or his policies, but an honest read on the topic of discussion. Yes, all politicians lie; but no politician I've ever seen says untrue things with the ease, frequency, and repetitiveness that Trump does.

All this is to say: When the Army releases an official statement saying something happened, and the Trump campaign releases a statement saying it didn't (and smearing an ANC worker to boot), it's hard not to be skeptical of the Trump team's story. Doubly so when the Trump team initially promises to provide video evidence to support their story and then never does.

Whether the Gold Star families wanted the pictures to be taken, or whether the altercation was physical or verbal, doesn't meaningfully change my opinion. Section 60 does not just belong to a few families who lost loved ones in Abbey Gate. It is a sacred place for all Gold Star families from Iraq and Afghanistan, some of whom I'm sure wanted nothing to do with a camera or a campaign stop. For instance, one Gold Star family member said her brother’s grave was clearly visible in images the Trump campaign released where he is smiling and giving a thumbs up. She was (predictably) not thrilled. 

Arlington National Cemtery’s rules are publically accessible: Photography is generally allowed in Arlington, but never for political or campaign material. And according to the ANC, the Trump campaign was informed that only cemetery staff members were authorized to take photos in Section 60. 

Of course, because it's election season, Kamala Harris tried to make political hay out of what happened and promptly got eviscerated by the Gold Star families who are Gold Star families because of the Biden administration’s disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal. Harris also got called out for refusing to meet with those families over the last few years, and Trump got praise for continuing to give their story attention. This is all as it should be. 

It’s a good thing that Trump continues to honor the victims of Abbey Gate, especially given his role in the Afghanistan withdrawal. The withdrawal left 13 Americans and 170 Afghans dead (and turned the country over to the Taliban), which is a controversy and failure far more grievous, offensive, and unforgivable than campaigning in Section 60. If you are someone who got more upset about this controversy than about those failures under Biden, it's worth a gut check on your own partisan bias. 

At the end of the day, none of that excuses Trump, or his campaign officials, for doing something that is obviously disallowed and disrespectful. We should all be capable of calling out the Biden administration’s failures without using those failures to excuse the actions of Trump and his team. 

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Your questions, answered.

Q: What is your position on whether to publish or not publish the leaked Trump campaign emails? Presumably, you would be in favor, as was done with Clinton and the DNC in 2016. If not, what is different now?

— Steve from Riverwoods, IL

Tangle: Just as a quick catch-up, we recently learned that Iranian agents hacked the Trump campaign’s internal documents, releasing them to Politico. This story has been corroborated by the FBI. So far, Politico has reported on a top-level summary of the documents it received, but it has not published them in full. I think that’s the right thing to do.

I also think that would have been the right thing to do in 2016.

As a journalist, I’m caught between a rock and a hard place here. On the one hand, I believe “information wants to be free,” and I’m often rooting for leaks so that I can read and learn as much as I can. On the other hand, a lot of privileged information is privileged for a reason, and releasing leaked documents without context can easily be unethical or dangerous.

If I were to receive an email from a source I couldn’t vet with a trove of documents on the Trump campaign, I would do a few things. First, I’d try as hard as possible to vet and talk to the source to satisfy myself as much as I could that what I had received was real. Second, I would read all of the documents. Third, I would reach out to the Trump campaign for comment on the documents, attempting to verify their authenticity and contextualize what was inside. Then I’d announce what I’d received to everybody, give a summary of the documents I received, and detail any bombshell findings within those documents with the full context of how I received them.

Reporters always have to do more than just detail facts; they must also provide as much context as possible to help readers understand those facts. When it comes to document leaks, the person who leaked the document is just as much part of the context as the subject of the leak itself. You mentioned the Democratic National Committee getting hacked in 2016, and I think the lessons from that incident should be fresh in our minds coming into the 2024 election: Be prepared for foreign meddling, and don’t assume the motive is for one side or the other to win. We know that Russia’s playbook is to sow discord, distrust and chaos by pitting us against each other, and I think the same may be true with Iran.

I’m glad you asked this question, because I have a suspicion this won’t be the last we hear of this story.

Want to have a question answered in the newsletter? You can reply to this email (it goes straight to our inbox) or fill out this form.

Under the radar.

In Pennsylvania, it could take days for the presidential election results to be counted. Election officials are blaming state politicians in Harrisburg for the delay, saying an update to the state's election code is needed to expedite the results. Under current law, election officials cannot open mail-in ballots until 7 a.m. on Election Day, which puts stress on the system. In-person ballots often aren't counted by the time polls close at 8 p.m., which creates a major bottleneck. Pennsylvania House Democrats advanced a bill that would have allowed for an additional week of pre-canvassing ahead of Election Day, but it stalled in the GOP-controlled state Senate, where Republicans wanted to tie the change to new voter ID laws. Meanwhile, litigation over what mail ballots to count and reject is still working its way through the courts. The Philadelphia Inquirer has the story.

Numbers.

• 1864. The year the first military burial was conducted at Arlington, the confiscated former estate of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. The estate became Arlington National Cemetery later that year.
• 624. The approximate area, in acres, of Arlington National Cemetery. 
• 14. The area, in acres, of Section 60 at Arlington.
• 2003. The year the first U.S. service member killed in the Iraq War was buried in Section 60.
• 900. The approximate number of U.S. service members buried in Section 60. 
• 400,000. The approximate number of veterans and their eligible dependents buried at Arlington National Cemetery. 
• 28. The average number of funerals at Arlington each day.
• 6,900. The approximate number of burials conducted at Arlington each year.

The extras.

• One year ago today we had just written a Friday edition close-reading Andrea Mitchell’s interview with Vivek Ramaswamy.
• The most clicked link in yesterday’s newsletter was Oregon ending the decriminalization of certain drugs.
• Nothing to do with politics: An emu was on the loose in the Pittsburgh area.
• Yesterday’s survey: 1,078 readers responded to our survey on the Harris-Walz interview with 30% saying they did neither well nor poorly. “I'm a Harris/Walz fan. But let's get to the point. Harris should agree to do a wide open press conference to show she's got it. Maybe even agree to go on Fox!,” one respondent said.

Have a nice day.

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