Trolling With Dead Soldiers

Created
Fri, 30/08/2024 - 03:00
Updated
Fri, 30/08/2024 - 03:00
Josh Marshall on the Arlington scandal is really good. He makes the important point that the whole thing was designed as a campaign stunt to make Harris look bad for supposedly failing to honor the dead. We all know how that worked out: Three days ago, the Trump campaign held a campaign event at Arlington National Cemetery. The idea was to lay a wreath honoring the 13 members of the U.S. military who were killed during the evacuation of Kabul in 2021 and film a political ad. They would distribute the video and attack Vice President Harris and President Biden for not “showing up” for their campaign event, which they sought to portray was an established memorial. As soon as the video circulated, military policy experts I know said right off the bat they were shocked that the campaign had been allowed to hold a campaign event on the grounds of the cemetery and circulate video of it. It isn’t just unseemly. It’s against the law. How were they allowed to do that? That turned out to be a good and prescient question. The first hint that anything else had happened on the visit came in a brief NPR article, published a day later, which reported that cemetery staff had sought to prevent the campaign from violating the law by holding a political event on the cemetery grounds. The details were limited but it seemed a verbal altercation became violent and two Trump campaign staffers physically assaulted a cemetery employee.…