The U.S. Army has disputed a claim from Donald Trump’s campaign that nobody on his staff got physical with an employee of Arlington National Cemetery on Monday.
Instead, the military branch confirmed Thursday that a member of Trump’s staff “abruptly pushed” a woman employee after she sought to “ensure adherence” to cemetery rules that bars recording for political purposes.
The Army said the woman reported the incident to local cops but ultimately decided against pressing charges. It remains unclear who in Trump’s orbit did the alleged pushing.
Navy vet here. If I can offer an alternative interpretation: I can assure you that the Army is not actually afraid of retaliation (source: they have cluster bombs), I think it is a strategic move on their part to keep him from playing the victim. Trump is putting a lot of work every single day into ensuring that he loses this election. This is widely regarded as “tight”, and “super cool”, but he is also really good at playing the victim. Even if the Army press charges, and even if they got a conviction before the election somehow, it wouldn’t really change anything. Public perception is doing all the work that needs to be done about this, but if he successfully phrases this as a political attack so close to the election, it could throw a wrench in the roller coaster which is currently about to start going downhill really fast for him. I agree with you that this is not the correct outcome for such behavior, but I think it’s the best course of action currently available to ensure that he loses fair and square, and has no legitimate recourse after the votes are counted. He’s definitely going to dispute the results, but we need to make sure that he has no shadow of an actual, real, foothold to build a case of unfairness around.
That’s a reasonable take for Army as a whole in this instance, though I think you’re underestimating just how concerned they are about white nationalist and far-right violent extremism in their own ranks. They’ve been quite candid about it, though it doesn’t seem like they’ve done much to fix the problem–or that they even have a solution to work towards other than the broader national strategy of really hoping it just goes away one day.
It is also nevertheless true that people fear for their safety if they become targeted by the MAGA mob. The cemetery official, who specifically said she fears reprisal from Trump supporters, is one example of that sad phenomenon.
Army seemed pretty unwilling to give her cover by taking up the violation themselves, so she was left to cower as she was accused of having a “mental health episode,” the Army was characterized as being a bunch of hacks, and she basically just had to hope her identity didn’t come out in the media.
While you may be right about Army playing the political optics game instead of enforcing the federal laws designed to protect the sanctity of where soldiers that have made the ultimate sacrifice are laid to rest, I would say their decision didn’t make them look particularly good.
The Army can’t press assault charges on her behalf. She’s elected not to, which in this unique situation, is probably reasonable if she wants to continue having a normal life after this. Being an institution, and not an individual, the only real recourse the Army have would be to pursue a federal charges relating to misuse of the land and photography and such, but not doing so is the whole point of my initial post. In addition, even if they did, it would be a challenging case to prove that he was using it for campaign purposes given that he did not give a campaign speech or anything quite so flagrant. I’m not saying that anybody except for that poor staffer is completely in the right here, but it is probably the best case scenario: Trump and his team did something aggressively anti-patriotic, it was widely reported, and he has no way to possibly play the victim here.