Donald Trump shared statements from the relatives of 13 soldiers killed during the chaotic US evacuation from Kabul as they hit out at Kamala Harris after she criticized the former president’s involvement in a ceremony honoring the service members.
The dispute over the ceremony at Arlington national cemetery, during which Trump campaign aides allegedly shoved a cemetery worker so they could film Trump laying a wreath, contravening rules against political activity at the site, escalated after the vice-president said Saturday that Trump “disrespected sacred ground, all for the sake of a political stunt”.
But eight members of the “Gold Star” families who lost relatives posted messages on Trump’s Truth Social platform Saturday saying they had invited Trump to the ceremony and criticized the Biden-Harris administration for the Afghanistan pull-out three years ago.
“Why did we want Trump there? It wasn’t to help his political campaign,” Mark Schmitz, father of Marine lance corporal Jared Schmitz, said in one video. “We wanted a leader. That explains why you and Joe didn’t get a call.”
Darren Hoover, the father of Marine staff Sgt Taylor Hoover, said Harris lacks “empathy and basic understanding” about the event, and emphasized that Trump’s appearance was respectful.
The army said this week that a cemetery official was “abruptly pushed aside” while interacting with Trump’s staff.
On Saturday, congressional Democrats called on the army to deliver a report on what had taken place at the cemetery on Monday. Harris later posted on Twitter/X that the military burial site is “not a place for politics”.
“Let me be clear: the former president disrespected sacred ground, all for the sake of a political stunt,” Harris added, and said she would “never politicize” such an event.
The dispute continued on Sunday, when former Democratic congresswoman and Iraq veteran Tulsi Gabbard, now a member of Trump’s transition team, told CNN’s State of the Union that she was at the ceremony and saw “a very grave and somber remembrance and honoring of those lives that were lost”.
Gabbard said she saw Trump “spending time at the invitation of these Gold Star families with them” and did “not see or hear about any kind of altercation until something came out in the news later on”.
Gabbard rejected Harris’s statement saying she stood with the veteran’s families.
Senator Tom Cotton continued the Republican pushback, telling NBC’s Meet the Press that the Gold Star families had invited Trump, but also Joe Biden and Harris, and he disputed that photos and video were meant for political purposes.
“Joe Biden was sitting on a beach. Kamala Harris was sitting in her mansion in DC … She was four miles away. Ten minutes. She could have gone to the cemetery and honored the sacrifice of those young men and women,” Cotton said.
As the political fallout from the Arlington ceremony continues, it has drawn in Utah governor Spencer Cox, a moderate Republican who kept his political distance from the Republican presidential candidate until the attempted assassination on Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July.
Cox, a Latter-day Saint, later said he believes God had a hand in saving Trump’s life, even calling it a miracle.
Cox attended the controversial ceremony and published photos from the event on his official account. Cox’s re-election campaign later issued an apology.
“Honoring those who serve should never be ‘political’,” it read, adding that the campaign was committed “to ensure that we run the best campaign possible and we’ll accomplish that by not politicizing things that shouldn’t be politicized”.