Trump Blames Gold Star Families, Military For His Arlington Cemetery Campaign Ad

Of course he did! Nothing is ever his fault.

The actual cemetery images are cursed, so have a meme recreation.

Welp, Bonespurs J. Hairweave’s sure stepped in it now, like a spiked heel into a fresh-dug grave. The story of the Trump campaign’s alleged assault on a cemetery worker to illegally film a campaign ad at Arlington National Cemetery is not going away, and like all things in Trumpland, every new detail about it that comes out makes it worse. Has he ever found a hole deep enough that he’ll stop digging?

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Previously!

Ghouls Just Want To Have Fun At Arlington National Cemetery

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Latest development, Dongnard says that the whole “filming a campaign commercial in violation of federal law” thing was not his fault! Those families cooked the whole thing up themselves, then they practically Candid Camera-ed him like Allen Funt or Ashton Kutcher, then somebody posted that campaign ad on his campaign’s official account on TikTok, but he doesn’t know anything about it. Maybe it was the BAD PEOPLE at the cemetery, or in the Deep State, and whoever they are, you can’t call them because they don’t have a phone.

These creative excuses made their debut at his rally in Michigan on Thursday night. His new version of events starts with “those incredible parents and sisters and brothers, they asked me to go yesterday to Arlington and I did.”

The families already had a wreath ceremony scheduled and they just rang him up, he had nothing to do with scheduling it, MM HM. (Also he said this on Thursday, and he was actually at Arlington last Monday. Is he maybe too old and forgetful to be president?)

Then Trump went on to gripe about how hard it was for him to get there for a while, before getting to, “and while I was there, those families had asked me to be there, they said, three families, plus one soldier who was horrifically injured, both legs and and arm, and they asked me if I would be there, so I went, and while we were there they said, could you take pictures over the grave of my son, my sister, my brother, would you take pictures with us, sir? I said absolutely, I did, then I said farewell, I said goodbye. Last night I read that I was using the site to politick. This all comes out of Washington, just like all these prosecutors come out of Washington.… These are bad people we’re dealing with. They asked me to take a picture, and they say I was campaigning,” he seethed. You can watch these words come out of his own puckery little wet little mouth-hole while he sweats off his bronzer below, if you want.

Then his teleprompter told him to shift to REALLY ANGRY MODE and he shouted, “Joe Biden killed their children!”

First of fucking all, Joe Biden did not. A suicide bomber killed their children, a guy named Abdul Rahman al-Logari, who would have still been in prison if Trump hadn’t made a deal to release him in August of 2021, along with 5,000 other ISIS prisoners. And those people’s children, plus 65 other American military families’ children, plus almost 20,000 Afghan civilians, might still be alive if Trump had pulled out of Afghanistan during his first week in office, instead of waiting until the end of his term. Why did he wait?

Trump also was responsible for closing down all of the airports in the country except for the one in Kabul, which is why everyone was there at the gates to try to escape the country in the final weeks of the war. Trump also refused to brief Biden’s team on the situation in Afghanistan before leaving office, probably because he did not give a damn and was too busy stuffing boxes with our military’s secrets to take to his Mar-a-Lago shitter.

After his speech, Trump got lightly grilled by NBC’s Dasha Burns. You can watch the tiny little gears of lies, excuses, and displacing blame spinning around in his brain.

“Should your campaign have put out those photos and videos?”

“Well, we have a lot of people, TikTok people. You know, we’re leading the Internet. That was the other thing, we’re so far ahead of her on the Internet.”

“But on that hallowed ground, should they have put out those images?”

“I don’t know what the rules or regulations are, I don’t know who did it. It could have been them! It could have been the parents. It could have been somebody.”

Sure, Jan, the Gold Star parents professionally produced the video and then broke into the Trump campaign TikTok, or maybe it was the cemetery workers. Maybe they also made Chris LaCivita’s Twitter call the Secretary of the Army’s office “hacks,” too! He thinks his supporters are super dumb, and who are we to disagree.

Picking a fight with the Army, add it to his pile of former-president firsts! Also, the campaign was informed in advance of the rules, claims the Army.

Sounds pretty clear what actually happened here. Trump cooked up this propaganda stunt, and pressured House Speaker Mike Johnson to let them jump the line for wreath-laying ceremonies, which are usually scheduled months in advance. Then, Trump planned to squeal that Biden and Harris were “skipping” some official event that was never official and they were never invited to. This was the blatantly false narrative Fox News was pushing on Friday. And even after getting Twitter-community-notes’d about, they still didn’t delete it!

Anyway, back to Thursday! After Trump’s speech, Dasha Burns pointed out to him:

“It was your campaign’s TikTok that put out the video.”

“I really don’t know, I don’t know anything about it. All I did is I stood there and I said, ‘if you would like to have a picture, we can have a picture.’ If somebody did it, this was a setup, by the people in the administration, that oh, Trump is coming to Arlington, that looks so bad for us,’”  he ramble-sputtered.

Uh huh. Did the Gold Star families also slap that wildly unsettling, bizarre grin on his face? Did they make him stick his thumb up for the picture, like Lynndie England?

This could all be cleared up real quick! Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said there was footage of the incident that they were going to release, featuring the cemetery worker, an “unnamed individual, clearly suffering from a mental health episode.” Where is it, HM?

Irskomely, the Army says that it considers the matter closed, because “the employee subsequently decided not to press charges.” As if the employee is a prosecutor, and the one solely in charge of that decision! Video could be subpoenaed, and charges could be pressed without her. You best believe if it was like, a TikToker filming an episode of #Pimpmygrave there, then refusing to stop or to leave, then shoving a worker, asses would have gotten hauled to the can in one hot minute.

Military officials also told the New York Times that the employee “feared Trump’s supporters pursuing retaliation,” and that is surely true. And the last thing mourners at the cemetery need is a bunch of MAGA “patriots” taking angry dumps on graves. But it is disheartening that not even the Army is apparently willing to stand up to this felon/rapist/con man.

But at least Democrats aren’t letting it go! Senator Tim Kaine and Representative Gerry Connolly, both Democrats of Virginia and members of the Senate and House Armed Services committees, respectively, have called on the Army to provide the report and release more information. So maybe we’ll at least find out who the actual shover was someday?

Yep, Trump campaign, going just great!

[Rolling Stone/ Washington Post/ New York Times]