They’re trying to inflate the Arlington Cemetery nonstory into ‘Trump might as well have urinated on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.’
I’m glad Labor Day is finally over, and not because I disdain America’s “fake May Day,” not at all. No, I am to the manner born when it comes to sloth, so I’ll always appreciate an extra free day to lazily stretch my legs while I ponder Kamala Harris’s terrifying, soul-swallowing smile. (Furthermore: As a strategic late 19th-century sop to the potentially revolutionary masses, a federal holiday certainly beats Bismarckian state socialism.) Instead, I’m eager to get past Labor Day purely as a calendar date because, as we all know, the real presidential campaign only begins now.
Or does it? That is of course the cliché. “The real campaign starts after Labor Day; voters aren’t seriously paying attention before then.” As with all such political clichés formed by our shared experience of American politics before the advent of internet social media (see: “debates don’t matter”), I think it’s time to discard that maxim. This is an election cycle that, even had it not already been anomalous in its own right and then subsequently rocked by a series of political earthquakes unlike any seen in a half century, is also one of the first of a new era of extreme disconnection between elite media opinion and electoral reality: an era initially tolled in 2016 with Trump’s shock victory, perhaps delayed/altered in 2020 by Covid lockdown, and properly occurring now for the first time in 2024.
Trump may be a sui generis phenomenon, but I believe that the way the 2024 race has been conducted by Republicans, Democrats, and the media alike is a Dickensian vision of the Ghost of Campaigns Future. (That is to say, the most horrifying one.) So as we roll boldly in this home stretch toward November, let’s begin by discussing some tiresome, completely meaningless campaign nonsense. Yes, let’s talk about how Donald Trump supposedly defamed the memory of all 400,000 veteran souls buried in Arlington National Cemetery by taking a photograph with some Gold Star families.
Gold Star families are the surviving relatives of service members killed in the line of duty. Trump met with them at Arlington Cemetery on the anniversary of their loved ones’ loss — the Kabul airport suicide bombing during the disastrously incompetent August 2021 surprise evacuation of Afghanistan — and posed for pictures with the families. This was apparently in technical violation of a federal Park Police regulation that says you cannot take photographs in one specific area (“Section 60”) where recent U.S. war dead are buried. Only federal staff members are allowed to do so — and they have done so frequently for Biden, Harris, Trump, Pence, Obama, Clinton, and many other political eminences (and for their reelection campaigns as well) over the years. But Trump, of course, is (currently) not president, just a nominee. So what Biden or Harris can do, he cannot.
That is the sum total of the purported scandal. “How dare he violate park police regulations; this disrespects the sacrifice of the boys of Pointe du Hoc and everyone at Iwo Jima as well!” The Gold Star families themselves of course feel differently. They asked Trump, Biden, and Harris to attend, and Biden and Harris declined for the same reason they refuse to even speak these men and women’s names aloud: because to do so is to remind America of their administration’s infamous behavior. (Biden even forgot our military dead’s existence in his one debate of the 2024 campaign, to give you a sense of how in denial he is.) Trump did not. And he took a photograph with the (evidently grateful) families. So for the past seven days now, a steady, tepid drumbeat has been thrumming along at a low level, trying to inflate this story into “Trump might as well have urinated on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.”
I’m not going to waste time explaining why this is neither a scandal nor even a “scandal” (note scare quotes) and why it will not move votes regardless of how much coverage the Harris campaign or the media devote to it. Trump’s actions aren’t the story here; while it is true that a preposterous media double standard applies to what Trump does versus other politicians, it is also so priced in by voters that they are now inured even to its excesses. No, the story as far as I’m concerned is the weird absence of substance. This happened last Monday. Why put a week’s worth of effort into making this a story?
And the reason for that is because the Harris campaign is clearly beginning to stall out in the polls without nearly enough altitude above Trump to glide in for a safe landing — only the knowledge that the tank is out of gas. Since they cannot afford to put their own candidate in front of unmediated cameras to juice the engines, the only tool in the Harris team’s kit is to get the media to collaborate with them in making Trump the engine of attention, even if to no concrete end: It still allows them to run the clock out and wait for a positive September 10 debate as their hoped-for final inflection point of the race.
This morning, polling analyst Nate Silver wrote eloquently about his own doubts concerning the 2024 race, given that his celebrated model narrowly gives Trump the advantage in November despite Kamala’s current nominal lead in the polls. After all, this is a race without precedent, and things won’t really have settled down until after the debate has been processed. But if you read his explanation — and take note of his reservations — his reasoning for why the race teeters on a knife-edge but structurally favors Trump not only makes sense but also explains why Harris is hiding from cameras and pointing at shiny objects.
For the polling right now — especially given Trump’s twice-demonstrated habit of sharply outperforming his averages — points to a replay of 2016 rather than 2020, and there is still yet time for a further descent by Harris from what now looks like her already dubious peak. The focus on non-stories like the Arlington Cemetery visit, or the “hot mic” kerfuffle last week, are evidence enough that the “vibes” of July and August are dissipating away internally as Harris and Walz awaken to the ugly reality that, for all their blustery optimism and aggressively vague campaign positioning, they’re still not winning Pennsylvania, Georgia, or North Carolina in their internal polling.