trump's Violations of Norms and the Beltway's Inability to Cope

Ben Kesling at the Columbia Journalism Review has it right: 

On Tuesday, NPR’s Quil Lawrence and Tom Bowman broke the news that Trump and members of his campaign appeared to violate federal law during an appearance at Arlington to mark the third anniversary of the deadly attack on US troops that punctuated the deeply flawed withdrawal from Afghanistan. Members of Trump’s staff had sought to film the event for a campaign video, and got into an altercation with an Arlington National Cemetery staff member who tried to stop them. Steven Cheung, a Trump campaign official, strongly denied that any altercation had taken place and said the campaign was ready to release a video to prove his point. (They have yet to release it.) It wasn’t surprising that these two NPR pros with deep knowledge of the military, and sources among veterans, were the first with the news. The Washington Post followed with a story the same day, as did the New York Times. The public took note.

As more publications followed suit, the Arlington stories suffered a dreadful fate: they all started to sound the same. News outlets ended up with articles bogged down in parsing federal law, carefully defining what exactly counts as an altercation, and quoting milquetoast official statements like “There was an incident and a report was filed.” 

Lumped together, the reporting this week left readers and listeners, especially those with no knowledge of the military, at a loss to understand what actually happened—and, crucially, why it mattered so much. The Trump campaign team had successfully muddied the waters by alleging that the photographer had been invited to the event by family members of soldiers buried there. 

But as any veteran knows in their bones, the solemnity of the ceremony is exactly why the unauthorized photographer had no business being there—regardless of who invited them...

This is a very big reason why the veterans' organizations and a lot of veterans on social media are livid towards trump right now. And yet, the Beltway media doesn't seem to understand the fury:

Readers needed to know that, when you visit Arlington, you might not know exactly what you’re supposed to do when confronted by those rows of headstones, but you damn sure know what you’re not supposed to do. But the coverage this week left many readers with the impression that the whole thing might have been a bureaucratic mix-up, or some tedious violation of protocol. It focused on bland horse-race coverage so common during election season, rather than clearly stating what really took place: an egregious and willful violation of long-standing norms...

This has been one of the most obvious problems that our mainstream media suffers when it comes to covering trump, especially those moments when trump violates not only the established norms of political comity but also the long-established norms of common courtesy.

Put aside the well-told tales by now of trump's personal inability to understand military service, and his blunt disdain for those who suffered and died in that service. trump simply has no respect or diligence for anything he can't use or abuse.

Look at how trump himself behaved during this staged fiasco. Not only ignoring the cemetery's requirements to not bring his own campaign staff - he did - and not to bring his own photographer - he did, and promptly blamed it on the families he talked into hosting his appearance - and not to turn the memorial service into a partisan event - it became clear he was going to claim the moment was an official ceremony and accuse Biden and Harris of failing to show, in order to paint THEM as disrespectful to the military - trump proceeded to preen and pose at the gravesite of the fallen soldier with a grin and a thumbs up.

I refuse to show that photo on my blog. It is offensive and obscene. It's not that he's desecrating the burial grounds by urinating on the grave marker, it's that he's violating the common custom of treating cemeteries as a solemn and sacred location.

This is on him. This is how trump behaves for ANY photo op: standing with someone or a group who must act "grateful" to be in his presence, flashing that smile like he's happy instead of the dour bad boss he often is, and giving a thumbs up like "I'm perfect, I'm winning!"

And that's trump having no sense of place, no sense of humility, no sense of the gravity or gravitas of the situation, no sense at all really.

You damn sure know what you’re not supposed to do. And trump clearly doesn't know that.

The pity is the goddamned Beltway media doesn't know what to do with trump.

The media is unable to call trump out for his inhumane, clueless, selfish behaviors. They just can't, terrified of seeming biased and getting attacked by the Far Right for speaking the obvious that the GOP standard bearer - hell, the entire Republican Party leadership - is incapable of being a goddamned normal human being. 

This isn't just on the media owners, who are clearly in the tank for a Republican Party that's going to cut taxes for the uber-rich if they regain full control of government this 2024. This is on the editors and the writers and the reporters in the field just genuinely incapable of making the moral decision to point out how immoral trump truly is.

Gods help us.

I should mention how this is a personal matter for me. In the time that this scandal's percolated to this level of trump struggling to blame everyone else for his screwup, I've remembered that my father took me to Arlington a long time ago - probably on that week my older brother got married in Maryland when I was in my 20s - to visit the gravesites of his father and mother. I never met Grandpa Wartenberg - he died in 1968 before I was born - and dad rarely talked about him. Best I recall, my grandfather served as an officer on a Navy submarine during World War II in the Pacific (Grandma died when I was 8, and was buried in another spot in that region because of how the cemetery works). If the Naval records I've read is correct, Grandpa joined the Navy in 1917 and it looked like he served until 1946. If he was on the front lines of the Pacific War, he earned that spot in Arlington. (I need to find more about his duty during the big war).

When we visited, Arlington was a peaceful, calm, quiet place. There were others nearby visiting the graves of their family members, and everyone was solemn. Dad and I paid our respects at the markers, it might have been when dad talked about grandpa's service, but that was it. Nothing fancy. Nothing outlandish. That's all you're expected to do when you're honoring the dead.

trump just can't do that, can he.

/rage