A defensive Trump tries to limit the fallout of the Arlington clash

JOHNSTOWN, Pa. — Former President Donald Trump grappled Friday with the lingering fallout from his visit to Arlington National Cemetery this week, offering an extended defense of his campaign’s actions leading up to an altercation between a Trump 2024 staff member and a cemetery official.

Over a digressive 13 minutes, Trump insisted that he had not been seeking publicity Monday when he posed for photographs in a heavily restricted area of the cemetery where veterans of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars are buried. He accused the news media of stoking the controversy and said baselessly that his political opponents had manufactured it.

Accusing President Joe Biden of being responsible for the deaths of the service members whose graves Trump was visiting, the former president said at a rally in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, “They tell me that I used their graves for public relations services, and I didn’t.”

He said conspiratorially at one point, “That was all put out by the White House.” He repeated the accusation at an event in Washington on Friday night hosted by Moms for Liberty, a conservative activist group focused on education.

The controversy over the cemetery photographs has overshadowed the political intent of Trump’s visit: He and his allies have made the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan a central focus of their criticisms of the Biden administration’s handling of national security and foreign policy.

Instead, Trump has found himself struggling this week to fend off new criticisms of his long-scrutinized treatment of America’s veterans and fallen service members. At the same time, he has been twisting himself in knots to navigate the politics of in vitro fertilization and abortion rights, and has confronted negative headlines for making obscene attacks on Vice President Kamala Harris.

The confrontation between Trump’s campaign team and an official at the cemetery was first reported by NPR on Tuesday, the day after his visit. The military cemetery later confirmed the altercation.

At issue was the presence of a campaign photographer in a restricted area of the cemetery, Section 60, where American troops who were killed in recent wars are buried. Federal law prohibits filming or photography there for campaign purposes.

Trump visited the cemetery for a wreath-laying ceremony honoring 13 service members who were killed in a suicide bombing outside the Kabul airport in 2021 during the United States’ withdrawal from Afghanistan. In his telling, families of two Marines killed in the attack had invited him to Section 60 and asked him to pose for photos at their grave site.

“We’re there, and they said a prayer,” he said at the rally in Johnstown. “Different graves, one here, one there. And they said to me — you know, I’m not surprised, I’d never even thought about — ‘Sir, would it be possible for you to have a picture with us, on the, by the tombstone of my son?’ I said, ‘Absolutely.’”

Trump insisted he had not taken the photos for the publicity. But earlier in the week, his campaign posted photos and footage from the visit on social media. A spokesperson for the campaign also insisted that it had received permission to have a photographer at the grave site, a notion the cemetery rejected in statements.

Trump said twice in his Pennsylvania speech that his advisers had suggested he should not bring up the cemetery dispute. But he said that he felt compelled to give his account, a shorter version of which he had shared Thursday, to rebut reports in the mainstream news media.

“I said, ‘I think I have to talk about it now.’ My people said, ‘Don’t do it, sir, don’t do it,’” Trump told the crowd. “But if I don’t tell you the story, you’re going to read — it was the front page of The Washington Post.”

During his speech, Trump also made familiar attacks on Harris and reiterated his pledge to invest in production of American steel and coal, industries that have historically dominated western areas of Pennsylvania, including Johnstown.

Trump and Harris have ramped up their efforts in Pennsylvania, perhaps the most crucial battleground state. The rally in Johnstown was Trump’s first in western Pennsylvania since July 13, when he survived an assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania.

During his 90-minute speech in Johnstown, Trump coined a term for his meandering off-the-cuff remarks — and insisted that they were strategic.

“You know, I do the weave,” he said. “You know what ‘the weave’ is? I’ll talk about like nine different things that they all come back brilliantly together. And it’s like — and friends of mine that are like English professors, they say, ‘It’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen.’”

His appearance at Moms for Liberty’s national summit, where he took part in a discussion with one of the group’s founders, Tiffany Justice, was similarly wide-ranging. Though the organization is heavily focused on education, taking particular issue with gender issues in schools, Justice’s questions ran the gamut and included one about how his reality show “The Apprentice” had been so successful.

Trump made very few comments specifically about education, and he did not speak extensively about his education policy. He opened by talking about immigration, an issue that he has tried to make the center of political debate.

Trump said the country was “being poisoned” by illegal immigration, adding that “schools and children are suffering greatly” because migrants in some cities had been temporarily sheltered in schools. “They are going into classrooms and taking their seats, and they don’t even speak English,” he said.

Trump, who often refers to “transgender insanity” on the campaign trail, spoke admiringly about conservative parents who have become active in school board politics across the country around gender issues, sometimes disrupting meetings.

He spoke critically of transgender athletes, a fallback from his rallies that draws significant applause, and falsely claimed that a female Olympic boxer who is not transgender had undergone a gender transition.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, a left-leaning human rights organization, has labeled Moms for Liberty an “extremist group,” accusing it of “hateful imagery and rhetoric” about LGBTQ people.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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