National Review senior editor Charles C. W. Cooke, on today’s edition of The Editors, said the criticism of Donald Trump’s Arlington cemetery visit is in large part an example of “what David French used to call Trump law.”
This is, Cooke said, “where everyone else is allowed to do something except Trump.” The “rule, insofar as it is a rule [to not campaign in Arlington], seems from what I’ve seen to be a little bit like the Hatch Act or the Logan Act: something that people talk about indignantly, but doesn’t really exist or if it does exist is enforced extremely rarely and only against people we don’t like.”
Cooke said that he “wouldn’t be surprised if [the Trump team was] inappropriate. . . . And if that’s the case, it does deserve criticism. But the criticism has primarily been about Trump being there at all. Publicizing his presence at all. Using it for campaigning at all. Not that there was an argument.
“I have an extremely cynical view of this,” Cooke said. “I think what has happened here is that the Democrats understand that one of the groups that they need to either swing to Harris or persuade to stay at home is military veterans and serving military personnel and that they thought this would be a good way of doing it.
“This is an op, effectively. And I think that Harris went out over her skis. I think that she thought that the press would back up whatever she said and broadcast whatever she said. And she was right about that. And I don’t think she expected to get videoed pushback from eight Gold Star families on the internet.”
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