On sacred ground

Three years ago this week, the twenty-year U.S. war in Afghanistan came to an ignominious end. There are a lot of different feelings about the way it went down: the fall of Kabul to the Taliban, the sudden collapse of the U.S.-client government and Afghan National Security Forces, the chaotic but ultimately heroic airlift of more than 125,000 people out of the country. My dime-store take is the same as it was: We should have never occupied Afghanistan, President Biden showed real courage in belatedly pulling out, and there is ultimately no good way to lose a war.

Third anniversaries aren’t usually occasions for big commemorations, especially when the first and second went almost entirely ignored. But this is an election year. Since it is an article of faith that the withdrawal from Afghanistan was Bad for Biden — the start of the decline of his approval rating and the first occasion for major media criticism of his administration — it was all but inevitable that Donald Trump (who still desperately wishes he was running against Old Joe) would try to capitalize on it in some way. The way he chose to capitalize on it though, was more demented than I think anyone could have foreseen. It was also telling, in a host of ways, about both Candidate Trump and the weirdness of the relationship between the U.S. public and military.

On Monday, the twice-impeached, multiply-convicted-and-indicted ex-president visited Arlington National Cemetery, to hang wreaths in honor of thirteen U.S. troops who were killed at a side entrance to the Kabul Airport during the evacuations.¹ More precisely, Trump went to film a campaign ad of himself hanging wreaths and hobnobbing with a couple of the families of the slain troops who support his election bid — an ad that, it turns out, is a probable violation of federal law. (The ad, which Trump’s team posted on TikTok two days ago, has since amassed 1.5 million likes and 9.4 million views. More on it in a moment.)

We should note first that the choice to elevate those 13 deaths above the rest of the 2,352 U.S. military personnel killed during the Afghanistan War—65 of whom died under Trump² —is an inherently political choice. So too is the choice—a choice made over a much broader scale throughout U.S. society and the media—to center them over the 169 Afghan civilians who died in the Aug. 26 attack. Or the ten Afghan civilians—including seven children— mistakenly murdered by the U.S. in what was supposed to be a revenge drone strike. Not to mention the estimated 70,000 Afghan and Pakistani civilians who died as a result of two decades of U.S. occupation and war.

Not only that, Trump’s ceremony singled out two slain Marines for their own wreaths — Staff Sgt. Darin Taylor Hoover and Sgt. Nicole Gee — both of whose families accompanied him to the event.

The message of all of this is clear: American lives matter more than other lives. And deaths that are politically and personally useful to Donald Trump matter most of all.³

That message was so important to the Trump campaign that they broke federal law and military policies to get it out. After the brief ceremony, Trump, his campaign staff, a camera crew, and some of the family members tramped off to Section 60 of the cemetery, the space housing servicemembers who died during the post-9/11 wars. This was a violation of several policies and laws, including a Title 32, section 553.32(c) of the U.S. Code, which prohibits “partisan political activities” at Army National Military Ceremonies, and a prohibition by Arlington cemetery bylaws against filming for “partisan, political, or fundraising purposes.”

Further, while those families had given Trump’s team permission to visit and film at their loved one’s gravesites, the families of those buried alongside them—who also appeared in the videos, and in some cases had their graves trampled on by the visitors — did not. (The family of an Army veteran whose headstone ended up in the shot, Sgt. Andrew Marckesano, obliquely criticized Trump, saying: “We hope that those visiting this sacred site understand that these were real people who sacrificed for our freedom and that they are honored and respected accordingly.”)

When a cemetery official, identified only as a woman, tried to enforce those policies and stop the campaign staff and camera crews from going to the gravesites, she was shouted at and physically pushed aside by Trump’s aides. The New York Times reports that she has declined to press charges because “she feared Mr. Trump’s supporters pursuing retaliation.”

This assault was tripled down on by Trump spokesman Steven Cheung’s out-of-nowhere claim that the employee was “clearly suffering from a mental health episode,” and vice-presidential-candidate JD Vance’s exhortation that Kamala Harris should “go to hell” for supposedly criticizing Trump’s visit to the cemetery (in fact, as of then, she had done no such thing). As Marisa Kabas writes in her newsletter today, they are all part of the seemingly infinite string of Trump and Trumper’s aggressions against women and non-masculine figures in general that go back to Trump’s brag about “grab[bing] ‘em by the pussy” that, had it not been for an exceedingly well-timed dump of hacked emails, would likely have sunk his campaign eight years ago.

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