Vice president Kamala Harris blasted former President Donald Trump on X for an incident that occurred between a member of his team and Arlington National Cemetery staff, lamenting that Trump “disrespected sacred ground, all for the sake of a political stunt.”
Trump staffers got into an altercation with a cemetery employee who was trying to enforce rules against political campaign activity at the site on Monday, while Trump was honoring the 13 soldiers killed in Afghanistan during a 2021 attack.
“This is nothing new from Donald Trump,” Harris wrote on Saturday. “This is a man who has called our fallen service members ‘suckers’ and ‘losers’ and disparaged Medal of Honor recipients.”
Harris later added she will “never politicize” fallen veterans. Trump has always denied he made those comments.
Steven Cheung, the Trump campaign’s communications director, told the Washington Examiner earlier this week that the unnamed staffer was “clearly suffering from a mental health episode,” adding, “The fact is that a private photographer was permitted on the premises, and for whatever reason, an unnamed individual … decided to physically block members of President Trump’s team during a very solemn ceremony.”
The employee reported the incident but decided not to press charges. “This incident was unfortunate, and it is also unfortunate that the ANC employee and her professionalism has been unfairly attacked,” an Army statement said. “ANC is a national shrine to the honored dead of the Armed Forces, and its dedicated staff will continue to ensure public ceremonies are conducted with the dignity and respect the nation’s fallen deserve.”
The Washington Examiner reached out to the Trump campaign about Harris’s comments.
Trump’s running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), dismissed the event as a media overreaction. He blasted Harris’s response to the 13 service members who died in Afghanistan.
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“To have those 13 Americans lose their lives and not fire a single person is disgraceful. Kamala Harris is disgraceful,” Vance said while campaigning in Erie, Pennsylvania.
“We’re gonna talk about a story out of those 13 brave, innocent Americans who lost their lives; it’s that Kamala Harris is so asleep at the wheel that she won’t even do an investigation into what happened, and she wants to yell at Donald Trump because he showed up,” he added. “She can — she can go to hell.”
