Trump Tries New Excuse for Messy Fight at Arlington National Cemetery

Donald Trump is desperately trying to respond to the blowback after his campaign staff got into a verbal and physical fight with staff at Arlington National Cemetery Tuesday.

Trump was participating in a wreath-laying ceremony, and a cemetery official tried to stop Trump staffers from taking pictures and videos in Section 60, where recent military casualties are buried. The cemetery says taking photos in that section for political purposes is a violation of federal law, and one source told NPR that cemetery officials had stressed to the campaign that only cemetery employees would be allowed to film or take photographs in the section.

Campaign staffers didn’t take kindly to being told they couldn’t film or photograph, and they reportedly pushed the cemetery official aside and called them names.

Late Tuesday night, Trump posted a graphic with words of thanks from some family members of Marines buried in the cemetery, saying they had given permission to the Trump campaign to photograph and take video of the section.

The rest of Trump’s team is also busy trying to clean up the mess. Trump’s spokesperson, Steven Cheung, rejected NPR’s account of events, noting the campaign is “prepared to release footage if such defamatory claims are made.”

“The fact is that a private photographer was permitted on the premises and for whatever reason an unnamed individual, clearly suffering from a mental health episode, decided to physically block members of President Trump’s team during a very solemn ceremony,” Cheung added.

In another statement to CNN, Trump campaign manager Chris LaCivita further laid the blame on the cemetery official.

“For a despicable individual to physically prevent President Trump’s team from accompanying him to this solemn event is a disgrace and does not deserve to represent the hallowed grounds of Arlington National Cemetery,” LaCivita said.

NPR didn’t receive any footage from the campaign, and the cemetery had a different account, telling the news outlet that it “can confirm there was an incident, and a report was filed.”

“Federal law prohibits political campaign or election-related activities within Army National Military Cemeteries, to include photographers, content creators or any other persons attending for purposes, or in direct support of a partisan political candidate’s campaign. Arlington National Cemetery reinforced and widely shared this law and its prohibitions with all participants,” the statement read.

All of this seems to have overshadowed the reason that Trump made the appearance at the cemetery in the first place: to mark the third anniversary of an attack on U.S. troops at Kabul Airport’s Abbey Gate, which killed 13 U.S. soldiers. But however Trump wants to try and cover up the incident, it won’t help his reputation towards veterans. Earlier this month, he sparked anger by denigrating the military’s Medal of Honor, and later doubled down. He has also called military veterans “suckers and losers” in the past. One can be sure that Kamala Harris’s campaign will seek to highlight this incident and as an example of Trump’s disrespect.

J.D. Vance flung several weak digs at Kamala Harris Tuesday in Big Rapids, Michigan, during another one of his awkward, hostile speeches.

The Ohio senator opened his remarks by blaming the so-called “Harris administration” for a recent revision from the Labor Department, which found that the U.S. had added 818,000 fewer jobs in the year ending in March than initially reported. Employers had added 2.1 million jobs during the previous 12 months, as opposed to the 2.9 million they’d originally counted. 

While the significant reduction hardly put a dent in the 14 million jobs Joe Biden has created over the last three years, especially in comparison to net loss of jobs during Donald Trump’s term, Vance called it “the biggest heist in America’s history.”

“You may not have heard this, because our friends in the back, the media, doesn’t like to talk about it,” Vance griped, another hostile remark toward the press, of which Vance has made many. 

But there was “one job that is definitely going to vanish,” Vance said, before weirdly promising to send Kamala Harris back where she came from—San Francisco, of course.

As the crowd began to cheer for Trump, Vance gushed that Harris could never get a crowd this good on her own.  

“She needs a rockstar to get a crowd like this—we just come out here because we’re patriots and we wanna save this country,” Vance said. The crowd was moderately sized, a huge step up from the empty parking lots Vance typically circuits. 

Vance claimed that Harris’s advisers were considering copying Trump’s platform. 

“In fact, I’ve heard that for her debate in just a couple of weeks, she’s going to put on a navy suit, a long red tie, and adopt the slogan ‘Make America Great Again,’” Vance joked awkwardly.

“Now, I will confess that in some ways I have a soft heart … in some ways, I feel bad for Kamala Harris,” Vance said, as the crowd booed. 

“I’m not sure that this is a woman who knows what she actually believes,” said Vance, a former Never Trump Republican who once compared his own running mate to the leader of the Nazi Party. 

From there, Vance’s speech took on a strange, anachronistic framing, as he vaguely referred to some previous administration’s decision to send away manufacturing jobs, and falsely claimed that Harris had supported the reauthorization of NAFTA—and not for the first time. 

The reauthorization of NAFTA took place in 1992, when Harris was a young prosecutor, and Vance was just eight years old. Biden, however, had been a senator at the time and had supported the reauthorization of NAFTA, so it’s possible that Vance is trying to use an old barb on a new candidate. In 2020, Harris actually voted against Trump’s United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which replaced NAFTA. She was part of a group of Democrats who opposed the new rule because it was too similar to the original—which is supposedly tantamount to supporting it. 

Vance also claimed some distant administration had opened the border to immigrants in order to gain “millions of voters for Democrat policies, and millions of cheap laborers,” once again pushing the great replacement theory, a conspiracy theory that insists global elites are attempting to replace the white population. Vance wasn’t specific about which administration he was referring to, but it didn’t matter because his winding remarks were about to get personal. 

“Now I have lived, and I know a lot of us in this crowd have lived the consequences of these failures. And I saw it very personally,” Vance said. “My parents divorced, my parents began to struggle.”

Vance lauded his mother’s recovery from drug addiction, and then awkwardly chastised her for spoiling his kids “a little bit too much.” 

“Mom, no more Pokemon cards,” Vance joked to a silent crowd. “In front of a thousand people, no more Pokemon cards. Kids have got enough.”

This isn’t the first time Vance has made a strange attempt to complain about his kids loving Pokemon. Vance previously said he told his young son to “shut the hell up for 30 seconds about Pikachu” while he tried to speak on the phone to Trump, another strange misstep. 

Vance trotted out his worn-out “stolen valor” jabs at Tim Walz, and accused the Minnesota governor of lying about “how his kids were conceived.” Walz has said his kids were conceived through fertility treatments, and they … were conceived through fertility treatments. Vance then turned his attention back to Harris.

“She said there are going to be ‘extremely serious consequences’ for voting for Donald Trump. Kamala, I’ve got two responses to that. First of all, that’s not a very presidential thing to say. Is she the vice president or the vice principal?” Vance joked to the crowd, again not earning a single laugh. “Warning about ‘very serious consequences,’ whining at people for telling a joke instead of trying to persuade them that she should be their president. I’m sick of people like that!” 

Again and again, Vance’s blatant hostility seeped through his badly delivered one-liners. While he tried to rely on his charisma to amp up his crowd, Vance sounded like someone complaining that you’re not allowed to give your female coworkers a compliment anymore. 

Donald Trump has finally given a clear “yes” on debating Vice President Kamala Harris on September 10 on ABC News, but made sure to first call the channel the “nastiest and most unfair” network toward him.

Posting on Truth Social Tuesday afternoon, Trump said he had “reached an agreement with the Radical Left Democrats for a Debate with Comrade Kamala Harris. It will be Broadcast Live on ABC FAKE NEWS, by far the nastiest and most unfair newscaster in the business, on Tuesday, September 10th, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.”

“The Rules will be the same as the last CNN Debate, which seemed to work out well for everyone except, perhaps, Crooked Joe Biden,” Trump added.

The Republican presidential nominee has been whining about the upcoming debate for weeks, most recently complaining late Sunday night on Truth Social about why he would even participate. Earlier in August, he tried to cancel the debate, arguing that he had only agreed when “Sleepy Joe Biden” was the Democratic nominee, but was shamed into backtracking when #TrumpIsACoward” began trending on his Truth Social platform.

Later, he continued to make excuses and waffled on committing to any debates, and tried to force a debate on friendly Fox News on September 4, only to be rebuffed by the Harris campaign. On Monday, the Harris campaign posted a video of Trump complaining about the debate with chicken sounds playing in the background.

Despite his complaints, Trump has taken extra efforts to prepare for the debate, enlisting former Democratic representative Tulsi Gabbard to help him prepare, perhaps because the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate effectively attacked Harris in a July 2019 debate, going after the then-senator’s prosecutorial record in California.

But will that be enough to help him? Trump was aided by President Biden’s poor debate performance on CNN back in June, but now the convicted felon will be going up against a former prosecutor riding a wave of positive momentum from the Democratic National Convention and a surge in the polls. Trump’s campaign has yet to land any substantive attacks, or even nicknames, on Harris or her running mate Tim Walz. If he wants to win over voters, he’ll have to bring back his old magic on September 10, or he’ll be even further in the hole. 

Special counsel Jack Smith filed a superseding indictment Tuesday in the election interference case against Donald Trump, which prosecutors claim respects the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity.

While the 36-page indictment doesn’t drop any of the four original charges against Trump, it does remove some of the specific allegations and emphasize how Trump’s actions fell outside of the bounds of “official conduct,” following the Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. United States, which found that the president could not be tried for most “official conduct.”

In the high court’s majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts had specifically mentioned the indictment’s allegation of “several conversations in which Trump pressured the Vice President to reject States’ legitimate electoral votes or send them back to state legislatures for review,” ruling that “whenever the President and Vice President discuss their official responsibilities, they engage in official conduct.”

The decision dealt a heavy blow to Smith’s case, which relied on such conversations to argue that Trump had unlawfully attempted to interfere with the 2020 presidential election.

In a government’s notice, prosecutors wrote that the new indictment “reflects the Government’s efforts to respect and implement the Supreme Court’s holdings and remand instructions in Trump v. United States.”

Evidence for the indictment had been “presented to a new grand jury that had not previously heard evidence in this case,” and that jury had separately charged Trump with the same crimes, according to Smith’s team.

In removing some of the evidence from the original indictment, Smith may be attempting to spare himself a lengthy evidentiary hearing, hoping to expedite the process.

Tuesday’s indictment, like the original, alleges that Trump “pursued unlawful means of discounting legitimate votes and subverting the election results” following the 2020 presidential election, by engaging in three separate conspiracies: a conspiracy to defraud the government, a conspiracy to obstruct and impede the counting of votes on January 6, and a conspiracy against the right to vote and have one’s vote counted.

The filing comes just before a deadline set by the Justice Department, which would forestall the filing of charges against the former president within 60 days of the upcoming presidential election.

The indictment sparked a major meltdown from Trump, who promptly published a 500-word diatribe across four lengthy posts on Truth Social.

“This travesty is now on Comrade Kamala Harris, who is actively pushing it, rather than immediately calling for its dismissal, as should be done,” Trump wrote in one post.

“For them to do this immediately after our Supreme Court Victory on Immunity and more, is shocking,” Trump wrote in another post. “I’ve also been informed by my attorneys, that you’re not even allowed to bring cases literally right before an Election—A direct assault on Democracy!”

This story has been updated.

Donald Trump has added two ex-presidential candidates to his transition team: former Representative Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

The move comes after the two endorsed the former president and convicted felon’s 2024 campaign for president. Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii, initially endorsed Trump in July and joined him on Monday at a National Guard Association event in Detroit. Kennedy suspended his presidential campaign and endorsed Trump last week.

As members of Trump’s team, the two will help the Republican nominee craft policy and choose staff members for his administration should he win in November. Both Gabbard and Kennedy have reputations as conspiracy theorists.

Gabbard has expressed skepticism about the Syrian government’s use of chemical weapons during its civil war, putting her at odds with the U.S. government view, and even had two secret meetings with Syrian President Bashar Al Assad. She has also defended Russia in its war against Ukraine, and tried to claim that press freedom in Russia is similar to the United States. Since leaving Congress, Gabbard has shifted heavily to the right, promoting transphobia, spreading Russian propaganda, and unsuccessfully endorsing Republicans. Trump even brought her aboard to help with debate preparations.

Kennedy meanwhile, is best known for anti-vaccine and public health skepticism. His quixotic presidential campaign revealed more bizarre stances, such as a pledge to not “take sides” on the 9/11 attacks. In the weeks leading up to his withdrawal from the presidential race, Kennedy was revealed to have once had a worm in his brain, and to have dumped a bear cub carcass in New York’s Central Park. In another resurfaced interview from 2012, his daughter Kick recounted an instance when Kennedy cut off a beached whale’s head with a chainsaw in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, tied it to the roof of his car, and proceeded to drive it and his family five hours home to New York.

Having Kennedy and Gabbard on his transition team doesn’t bode well for what a future Trump administration would look like. Right-wing foot soldiers are already devising plans of what they want to do, and these two ex–presidential candidates will likely revive the old Trump days of amplifying crackpot theories.