Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris said on Saturday that her Republican rival Donald Trump “desecrated sacred ground” at a US military cemetery during a controversial pre-election visit.
Trump’s appearance at the hallowed Arlington National Cemetery — meant to boost the campaign ahead of the Nov. 5 vote — instead spiraled into a public spat between the candidate and the military.
“Let me be clear, the former president desecrated sacred ground for a political stunt,” Harris said of Monday’s event at a cemetery near Washington, where Trump flouted rules and posed for photos with relatives of American soldiers killed in Afghanistan.
In one photo, he stands with family members of a fallen Marine, smiling and giving a thumbs-up as he stands among gravestones.
“If there’s one thing all of us Americans can agree on, it’s that our veterans, military families, and service members must be honored, never disrespected, and treated with nothing less than our highest respect and gratitude,” Harris wrote in X magazine.
‘Suddenly sidelined’
On Thursday, the U.S. military issued a rare statement confirming that a cemetery employee was “abruptly pushed aside” after he asked Trump’s team to stop filming in the section containing burials of those killed in recent wars, where photography for political purposes is prohibited.
Trump’s campaign team has taken an aggressive stance, calling the staffer a “disgusting individual” and claiming he suffers from mental health issues.
But the army said the staff member had “acted professionally” and condemned the incident as “unfortunate”.
Trump has made criticism of the Biden-Harris administration’s handling of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan a central plank of his campaign, arguing that it could have managed it better.
He visited the cemetery with the families of some of the 13 military members killed in a 2021 bombing in Kabul during the final, chaotic hours of the US withdrawal.
Trump’s relationship with the military has long been a subject of controversy.
According to his former chief of staff, he often proclaimed his support for the armed forces, but when he was president, he privately mocked war dead and did not want to be seen near military invalids.
Harris’ sharp reaction to the cemetery incident on Saturday made it clear that she is determined to take on Trump directly in the upcoming presidential election.
Trump has repeatedly mocked Harris’s name, intelligence, looks, and racial identity, while the Harris campaign has responded that the former president is “weird”, an aspiring dictator, and “out of his mind”.
Earlier, Harris faced sharp criticism over the cemetery incident from Trump’s fellow Senator JD Vance, who launched a series of scathing attacks against the Vice President.
Apparently responding to an erroneous report that Harris had already reacted to the cemetery visit, Vance accused her of harboring resentment and said, “She can go to hell.”
He later told The Washington Post, “Don’t pay attention to Donald Trump condoling with people who lost their children. Focus on your job. Don’t show anger by pretending he’s angry.”
Until then, Harris had not publicly mentioned the visit to the cemetery.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
