Criticizing Trump, Harris says Arlington is ‘not a place for politics’

Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for president, at a campaign rally in Eau Claire, Wis., Aug. 7, 2024. Harris and her Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump, have promised to fix America’s affordable housing crisis, but their plans have drawn skepticism from outside economists. (Jenn Ackerman/The New York Times)

By Neil Vigdor and Nicholas Nehamas

Vice President Kamala Harris excoriated former President Donald Trump on Saturday for his visit last Monday to Arlington National Cemetery, where his campaign’s filming of him in a heavily restricted area caused a confrontation between one of his political aides and a cemetery official.

In her first public comments on the situation, Harris said Trump had desecrated a solemn place that should be free of politics when he appeared there for a wreath-laying ceremony for 13 service members who were killed in a suicide bombing in Afghanistan during the withdrawal of U.S. troops three years ago.

“Let me be clear: The former president disrespected sacred ground, all for the sake of a political stunt,” Harris wrote on the social platform X.

Harris wrote that she had visited Arlington National Cemetery several times as vice president and that she would never attempt to use that setting for activities related to the campaign.

“It’s not a place for politics,” she wrote.

Trump, in recent days, has hit back hard at critics of his visit to the cemetery, saying that families of some of the fallen service members had asked him to take photos with them there.

Representatives for the Trump campaign did not immediately respond to requests for comment Saturday, but his allies rushed to his defense, including his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio.

“President Trump was there at the invitation of families whose loved ones died because of your incompetence,” Vance wrote on X, responding directly to Harris. “Why don’t you get off social media and go launch an investigation into their unnecessary deaths?”

The Trump campaign has repeatedly criticized the chaotic withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan in 2021 during the Biden-Harris administration, which the former president has sought to cast as weak and dysfunctional.

President Joe Biden made the final decision to end America’s nearly 20-year military occupation in Afghanistan. But it was Trump who clinched a deal with the Afghan Taliban, setting a timeline for the U.S. exit.

At a campaign event Thursday in Potterville, Michigan, Trump said he was honored to take photos with the family members of some of the fallen service members at the cemetery and that Biden and Harris had “killed their children” with their “incompetence.”