OPINION: Blame Trump’s Arlington disgrace on the Army’s naivete

For millions of Americans who recognize Donald Trump for the human and political grotesque that he is, it has been a long wait for a “decency” moment. Their hopes of catharsis have been stymied again.

It was the US Army, in the person of Army lawyer Joseph Welch, who delivered the famous retort to Trump’s demagogic forebear, Senator Joseph McCarthy, at a Senate hearing in 1954. Welch’s demand of McCarthy - “Have you no sense of decency, Sir?” - has lived in popular culture as the death knell of McCarthyism. But it was also a testament to a US Army committed to democratic principles and, yes, to a certain baseline human decency. There was political risk in confronting McCarthy, but Welch refused to be bullied by a seedy and inveterate liar.

Welch’s Army now equivocates before Trump’s thuggish campaign. Trump handed the Army its “decency” moment earlier this week, showing up Monday to campaign graveside at Arlington National Cemetery. Federal law, Army regulations and Defense Department policy prohibit political campaigning or election activities within Army cemeteries. Yet the Army allowed the Trump circus, video camera in tow, on cemetery grounds. Since the chances of Trump engaging in good faith were negligible, that was the Army’s first mistake. Predictably, Trump then used Arlington as the set for a partisan attack on President Joe Biden over the 2021 US withdrawal from Afghanistan. (On CNN, Trump’s former national security adviser, retired Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, said Trump’s own fecklessness as president helped precipitate the debacle.) The Army failed to halt the political exercise.

Although it seems one diligent employee tried.

The New York Times cited “three US military officials” who said that members of the Trump campaign pushed past a cemetery official when she tried to stop them from taking photos in Section 60, where veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are buried. A photo of Trump at a gravesite, smiling, thumbs up, oblivious as ever to the price and pain of a sacrifice that he is too broken to comprehend, subsequently appeared on social media. Video of the visit was used in a Trump political ad.

Consistent with the degradation that flows daily from Trump environs, high-ranking Trump campaign officials described the cemetery employee who had tried to enforce the law as a “despicable individual” who was “suffering from a mental health episode.”

The Times reported: “A woman who works at the cemetery filed an incident report with the military authorities over the altercation. But the official, who has not been identified, later declined to press charges. Military officials said she feared Mr. Trump’s supporters pursuing retaliation.”

So, there you have it. The Trump campaign breaks the law to perpetrate a cheap political hit. The Pentagon retreats. Trump thugs engage in an “altercation” with a cemetery employee trying to honor both the law and the dead. The Pentagon acquiesces. And because Trump’s MAGA movement is steeped in violence, and because Trump routinely sics deranged followers on private citizens who have limited capacity to protect themselves, the cemetery employee opts not to file charges for fear of MAGA retribution.

On Thursday, after nearly a week of sewer-trawling by the Trump camp, the Army issued what passes for a sternly worded statement, noting that Arlington conducts 3,000 public events annually “without incident,” and citing the “professionalism” of the employee who attempted to halt the partisan hit on hallowed national ground. However, given that the employee is unwilling to file charges, the Army said it considers the matter “closed,” which is convenient for the people who behaved inappropriately in the course of behaving what appears to be criminally.

Trump’s cult of personality, with its promise of vengeance, lawlessness and unrestrained aggression, far surpasses the movement that owes its name to Joe McCarthy, a surefire thug in his own right. With an assist from future Trump lawyer Roy Cohn, McCarthy terrorized people more decent than himself in the 1950s, evincing pathologies similar to Trump’s, including his reckless personal behavior, incessant lying and casually vicious assaults on democratic governance and values.

But McCarthy never sunk to Trump’s depths of criminality, never achieved Trump’s creepy, cultish control of the Republican Party, never scaled the heights of American politics to the presidency. By every conceivable measure, Trump is more corrupt, dangerous and powerful than McCarthy at his nadir. Since his freak-show campaign of 2016, Trump has moved in only one direction - more authoritarian, more criminal, more violent, more unhinged from anything resembling moral responsibility. His party has likewise moved to accommodate and endorse every authoritarian accent and despicable lie that he advances.

Perhaps the Army has grown morally flabby since the end of the Cold War, incapable of articulating democratic principles or of denouncing depravity. Or perhaps, with Trump running within the margin of error of a return to the White House, the Army is hedging its political bets, fearful of a violent force too deranged and unscrupulous for a mere army to defeat.

Francis Wilkinson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering U.S. politics and policy. Previously, he was executive editor for the Week and a writer for Rolling Stone. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

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