Former President Donald Trump raised eyebrows while speaking to NBC News’s Dasha Burns on Thursday evening about the simmering scandal surrounding his recent visit to Arlington National Cemetery and photos from that visit being used as campaign materials.
“Should your campaign have put out those videos and photos?” Burns asked, regarding photos taken at Section 60 of the cemetery.
“Well, we have a lot of people, you know, we have people, TikTok people, you know, we’re leading the internet. That was the other thing. We’re so far above her on the internet,” Trump replied as Burns pressed, “But on that hallowed ground. Should that they have put out?”
“I don’t know what the rules and regulations are. I don’t know who did it. And it could have been them. It could have been the parents. It could have been somebody else,” Trump said, seeming to blame the Gold Star parents who invited him to the cemetery for breaking its rules.
“It was your campaign’s TikTok though, that put out the video,” Burns pushed back.
“I really don’t know anything about it. All I do is I stood there and I said, if you’d like to have a picture, we can have a picture if somebody did. If this was a set up by the people in the administration that, oh, Trump is coming to Arlington, that looks so bad for us,” Trump replied, again trying to shift the blame for the scandal.
MSNBC host Katie Phang reacted to the exchange and said, “Oh, wait, wait, wait. Trump is now saying that his campaign’s photo op was a setup.”
“Joining me now is MSNBC Pentagon correspondent Courtney Kube. Courtney, thanks so much for getting us started. This evening. You obtained the rules, the rules and the regulations at Arlington National Cemetery put forth to be able to be present there and specifically dealing with section 60. I mean, it seems pretty clear that there was a violation of those rules?” Phang asked Kube.
Kube then offered a lengthy explanation of the scandal and explained exactly which federal statutes Trump’s campaign appeared to break:
Yeah. I mean, the rules are simple. It is that, number one, there is no allowance. You are never allowed to have a campaign event or any kind of campaign, a partisan event that happens on Arlington National Cemetery grounds. It’s simply not allowed. Now, this is where this got a little bit gray, Katie. And that is the fact that former President Trump was invited to this wreath laying event by the families of several of the service members who were killed at Abbey Gate three years ago. And he was there in his capacity as the former President of the United States.
Now, for that reason, he was allowed to be there to participate with the families in the memorial event. He was allowed to have official photographers and videographers at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. That’s actually pretty common. There’s there’s frequent media coverage there. You frequently see video and photos of that that that part was was not at issue here. After that event, though, Katie, they moved on to Section 60, the motorcade and several of the family members of those fallen service members.
And that’s where this incident occurred. Now, the rules are very clear. You are not allowed to have videographers or photographers at Section 60 collecting any kind of images. But not just that you cannot, anything that you, that anyone does there, whether it’s the staff or former President Trump, none of the video or content that they collect is allowed to then be used in the capacity of his campaign, though that’s also very clearly written into the rules.
The issue here, though, is that’s very difficult to enforce at the time. So what we’ve learned in the last 48 hours or so is that that was where this incident occurred, when some of the staff got out of the Trump motorcade to take photos and videos. One of the Trump staff members, when he was confronted by the Arlington National Cemetery employee, telling them that they could not take photos and videos. The staff member then pushed that Arlington Cemetery employee.
Now the Army put out a statement today that is frankly more forceful than we tend to hear from them. And it was clearly in defense of this Arlington Cemetery staff member saying that she acted professionally, really defending her actions here and saying that what she did was to maintain the dignity and the respect of those hallowed grounds, as you called them. Katie.
Watch the clip above via MSNBC.
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