Arlington photo op backfired

Over a digressive 13 minutes, Mr. Trump insisted that he had not been seeking publicity on Monday when he posed for photographs in a heavily restricted area of the cemetery where veterans of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars are buried. He accused the news media of stoking the controversy and said baselessly that his political opponents had manufactured it.

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In his telling, families of two Marines killed in the attack had invited him to Section 60 and asked him to pose for photos at their gravesite.

  NYT

I call bullshit. Although, the families in the photo seemed perfectly happy to join in.

“Different graves, one here, one there. And they said to me — you know, I’m not surprised, I’d never even thought about — ‘Sir, would it be possible for you to have a picture with us, on the, by the tombstone of my son?’ I said, ‘Absolutely.’”

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Mr. Trump insisted he had not taken the photos for the publicity. But earlier in the week, his campaign posted photos and footage from the visit on social media.

Also, why have a campaign photographer there in the first place if not for the photos?

A spokesman for the campaign also insisted that it had received permission to have a photographer at the gravesite, a notion the cemetery rejected in statements.

Trump and his folk have not an ounce of shame, and lying is just a part of their arsenal.

Mr. Trump said twice in his Pennsylvania speech that his advisers had suggested he should not bring up the cemetery dispute. But he said that he felt compelled to give his account, a shorter version of which he had shared on Thursday, to rebut reports in the mainstream news media.

His advisers never catch on, do they? Whatever they tell him, he'll do as he pleases.

“I said, ‘I think I have to talk about it now.’ My people said, ‘Don’t do it, sir, don’t do it,’” Mr. Trump told the crowd. “But if I don’t tell you the story, you’re going to read — it was the front page of The Washington Post.”

The former president’s remarks about Arlington at a rally in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and a subsequent appearance at a Moms for Liberty event in Washington, D.C., underscore how the incident has spiraled into a major embarrassment for his campaign.

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Army officials said they informed the former president’s team about a federal law prohibiting the filming of partisan political advertisements at national cemeteries, and when a Trump photographer attempted to accompany the former president to the grave sites, an Army official attempted to stop them only to be pushed aside.

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“They tell me that I used their graves for public relations services, and I didn’t,” he said at the rally in Johnstown.

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Trump faulted the White House for making his visit and photo shoot a political issue, saying he received a call from someone in the administration, who he did not identify, who told him the photos taken were for public relations purposes.

“It’s just so disgusting, and I’ll tell you, I get a lot of publicity and I don’t need that publicity,” Trump said.

  Politico

Says the guy to whom publicity is life itself.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 09/06/2024:

This week, Trump contradicted his own campaign with a post on Truth Social falsely calling the confrontation a “made up story by Comrade Kamala and her misinformation squad” that attacked Harris and Biden for not attending the private ceremony.

In an interview on Sean Hannity’s radio show Tuesday, Trump reiterated the false assertion that nothing happened at the cemetery, questioning the motives of the unnamed employee and downplaying the accusations as attacks over “publicity.”

“Do you notice that the person represented now doesn’t want to talk, he doesn’t want to speak or talk?” Trump asked, mislabeling the employee as male. “The nice thing, the beautiful thing, was all the parents and relatives got together and they said ‘That’s a false story, it was totally false.’”

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NPR is identifying both staffers after the campaign’s conflicting responses to the incident last week outside Section 60 of the cemetery, where many casualties of Iraq and Afghanistan are buried.

The two staffers, according to a source with knowledge of the incident, are deputy campaign manager Justin Caporale and Michel Picard, a member of Trump’s advance team.

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ANC rules, that had been made clear to the Trump campaign in advance, say that only an official Arlington photographer can take pictures or film in Section 60. When an ANC employee tried to enforce the rules, she was verbally abused by the two Trump campaign operatives, according to a source with knowledge of the incident. Picard then pushed her out of the way according to two Pentagon officials.

After NPR first reported the altercation last week, campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said they were “prepared to release footage” of the incident, and attacked the Arlington employee as someone “clearly suffering from a mental health episode.” Cheung also said they were granted access to have a photographer present, and pointed to a statement from Gold Star family members that invited Trump to attend the ceremony.

The campaign also released a TikTok video that included video footage from Section 60, including a smiling Trump flashing a thumbs up with family members at the gravesites. But other tombstones are visible in the picture, and at least one family of a fallen Green Beret has confirmed they did not give permission for his grave to be filmed or used in a campaign ad.

  NPR

Pretty sure it wouldn't matter if they did "give permission". The only permission that counts is from Arlington.

The Trump campaign has still not followed through on its pledge to release video of the incident, despite repeated requests from NPR.

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The Army released a statement last Thursday acknowledging that a cemetery employee “was abruptly pushed aside” and the campaign was warned ahead of time of the prohibition against photography and political activities at Arlington. The Army said the cemetery employee tried to de-escalate the situation after she was pushed, in hopes of not upsetting the Gold Star families in attendance.