Vice President Kamala Harris on Saturday condemned the altercation that occurred this week at Arlington Nationwide Cemetery between Donald Trump marketing campaign staffers and cemetery officers.
“Let me be clear: the previous president disrespected sacred floor, all for the sake of a political stunt,” she wrote in a submit on X, previously Twitter.
The alleged incident occurred throughout a wreath-laying ceremony on Monday to honor U.S. troops killed in the course of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan three years in the past. NPR reported that two Trump staffers on Monday “verbally abused” and pushed apart an official who informed them to cease photographing part of the cemetery the place lately fallen U.S. service members are buried.
Federal regulation prohibits “political marketing campaign or election-related actions, together with images, inside Military Nationwide Army Cemeteries,” based on a press release from cemetery officers. Sources informed NPR that staffers had been knowledgeable forward of time that they couldn’t take pictures on the gravesite.
A couple of days later, Trump’s marketing campaign posted a video to TikTok that featured a montage of the previous president taking part within the ceremony and making clearly political statements, like boasting about how his administration “didn’t lose one particular person in 18 months” in Afghanistan and describing the Biden administration’s pullout as a “catastrophe.”
The cemetery, which is the resting place of over 400,000 service members, veterans and their households, is “not a spot for politics,” Harris mentioned. However the incident isn’t a surprise coming from Trump, she added, given the disparaging comments the previous president has made about service members.
“It is a man who has referred to as our fallen service members ‘suckers” and ‘losers’ and disparaged Medal of Honor recipients,” she wrote, referring to feedback the previous president made in 2018 about People killed in World Battle I and a comment he made this month.
“A person who, throughout a earlier go to to the cemetery, reportedly mentioned of fallen service members, ‘I don’t get it. What was in it for them?’ It is a man who’s unable to understand something apart from service to himself,” Harris went on.
Trump’s marketing campaign spokesperson has denied {that a} bodily altercation occurred. However Arlington Nationwide Cemetery confirmed that the incident occurred, as did the cemetery official who was allegedly pushed apart, although the official declined to press costs.
A number of veterans condemned Trump’s actions, whereas his working mate JD Vance brushed it off as a “little disagreement” that the media spun into one thing larger than it truly was.
“If there’s one factor on which we as People can all agree, it’s that our veterans, navy households, and repair members must be honored, by no means disparaged, and handled with nothing lower than our highest respect and gratitude,” Harris wrote.
“And it’s my perception that somebody who can’t meet this straightforward, sacred responsibility ought to by no means once more stand behind the seal of the President of the USA of America.”
