There is video footage that totally exonerates Donald Trump and his campaign, his team claims, which if you only saw it would convince you that Democrats, the mainstream media and officials in charge of the nation’s most revered military cemetery are all lying when they suggest the former president’s MAGA entourage was abusive towards a woman who tried to stop them from filming a campaign ad on top of soldiers’ graves.
“We are prepared to release footage if such defamatory claims are made,” Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung told NPR on Monday — ahead of a report that campaign staff had violated federal law by filming in Section 60 of Arlington National Cemetery, where veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are buried. According the broadcaster, and subsequent reports from The Washington Post and The New York Times, Trump’s staff had been warned against using the cemetery for “partisan political activities,” a Department of Defense official confirmed, but then verbally harassed and physically brushed aside an employee who tried to enforce the same rules that apply to all visitors.
An Arlington National Cemetery official has confirmed that an “incident” took place, noting that filming political ads is expressly prohibited by federal law. But the Trump campaign playbook appears to be a mix of denial and “so what?”
“You guys in the media, you’re acting like Donald Trump filmed a TV commercial at a grave site,” Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, said at a campaign rally on Tuesday. “He was there providing emotional support to brave Americans who lost loved ones and there happened to be a camera there and somebody gave him permission to have that camera there. This is not a gross violation of federal law.”
For good measure, Vance also told Vice President Kamala Harris to “go to hell,” attempting to spin her campaign’s criticism of the Arlington visit as the actually shameful politicking.
But if there is indeed video that exonerates Trump and his entourage, proving as Cheung previously claimed that the cemetery official was suffering from a “mental health episode,” for some reason his campaign is not releasing it. Instead, on Tuesday the Trump campaign went ahead and released a commercial, if not for TV then for TikTok (at least for now). The 21-second clip shows the Republican candidate within the restricted area of Arlington National Cemetery, posing for photos with the family members of a soldier who died in the 2021 U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan — supporters who had invited him, to be sure, but who had no ability to offer the consent of other families who absolutely did not want Trump campaigning on their loved ones’ remains.
“And there you go,” the liberal veterans group VoteVets responded on social media. “Donald Trump is using footage and photos his campaign took at Arlington National Cemetery for political purposes,” it noted, describing it as “sickening” and an “affront to all those hundreds of thousands of families who never agreed to allow their deceased loved ones to be dragged into politics.”
Master Sgt. Andrew Marckesano, whose grave stone is visible in the clip, died by suicide in 2020 while suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, having served eight combat tours. He’s one of those whose families did not agree to becoming content for a Chinese social media site that Trump previously wanted to ban as a national security threat (one of his campaign megadonors, billionaire Jeffrey Yass, is a major investor in TikTok).
Marckesano’s sister, Michele, urged Trump and others to remember that dead soldiers are not campaign props.
“We hope that those visiting this sacred site understand that these were real people who sacrificed for our freedom,” she said in a statement, “and that they are honored and respected accordingly.”
Trump, however, is incapable of understanding the concept of sacrifice or engaging in normal human empathy — that’s not according to some liberal critic, laying it on thick, but those who worked with him when he was president and heard him repeatedly denigrate veterans (“suckers” and “losers,” per former Chief of Staff John Kelly).
“He never understood why would you do anything that doesn’t benefit you,” a former senior Trump White House official told the Post, reacting to the cemetery scandal. “I remember talking to him about death and sacrifice for the country and it was like talking Greek to him,” the official said, arguing that the military family that invited Trump to the cemetery in the first place could be forgiven for not knowing any better.
“They don’t know who he is and what he’s really about,” the official said.
But many others do know what Trump and his campaign are really like, having assessed the publicly available evidence: for example, the woman his campaign allegedly abused to get that TikTok video and photos of a grinning Republican candidate giving a thumbs-up beside soldiers’ graves.
According to the Times, that cemetery employee filed an incident report after the altercation with the Trump campaign but later decided against pressing charges. “Military officials,” the outlet reported, “said she feared Mr. Trump’s supporters pursuing retaliation.”
