The reason you're not allowed to campaign at Arlington National Cemetery is because people who aren't you are buried there

I really do not understand how Normal People tolerate Donald Trump's antics—or that's what I'd like to say, if it weren't already widely known that at least half of all Normal People would light you on fire if someone offered them twenty bucks and a cheeseburger to do it, had we not specifically passed laws against that sort of thing.

The grotesquery of the Trump campaign's Arlington National Cemetery stunt was Too Damn Much even by seditionist crapsack standards, now that we've learned someone on Trump's team physically assaulted a member of Arlington's staff who tried to stop it and that the assaulted woman is declining to press charges specifically because she fears retaliation from Trump's oozing fascist base. So of course Trump campaign spokesthing Steven Cheung took even that opportunity to be an odious human toad:

Military officials said that the cemetery worker feared that pursuing the matter with the authorities at Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall in Virginia, which has jurisdiction over the cemetery, could subject her to retaliation from Trump supporters. Mr. Cheung said in a statement on Wednesday that “that is ridiculous and sounds like someone who has Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

I defy you to name anyone in America who surrounds himself with gross, disgusting creeps with the unfailing skill of Donald J. Trump. The man is an Asshole Magnet. Assholes are sucked to his side from all over America and the world; it is possible that Trump's birth sent out some sort of asshole-creating gamma-ray event that ended up doubling or tripling the number of assholes that would be born in later decades, all of them compelled to somehow find their way to the side of the one silver-spoon failson asshole who would reign supreme over them all. Even cannibalistic murder cults I'm sure manage to have one or two slightly okay people who have joined on, but entering the gates of Mar-a-Lago is like entering Dracula's Castle Of Assholes. Not one person has ever escaped without being bitten and transformed.

But there's another part of this story that the New York Times, to their (sigh) actual credit, focuses a good chunk of their article but which keeps getting lost in the revulsion over Trump being Trump. If you look at the many pictures of Trump's graveside stunt—and I'm not going to show them here—you'll note that in almost all of them, you can clearly see the names on the surrounding headstones.

And that is why campaigning is flatly not allowed at Arlington National Cemetery and why it is very specifically not allowed in Section 60, the resting place for those killed in recent U.S. military campaigns. Because you do not get to stage a photo-op that implies that those buried under all those other nearby headstones were your supporters too. You don't get to snap pictures of the grave that somebody else's loved ones consider a sacred space, borrowing that valor, so you can stick your little thumb up and grin after pushing aside those who would try to stop you. Because f--k off, that's why. The reason Section 60 is considered an especially sensitive place is because, as the cemetery section with the most recent graves, it is the place where fallen soldiers are most certain to have surviving family members. Those families might not want their son or daughter or father or mother's grave used as a f--king billboard for whichever political figure is grotesque enough to want such a thing. The family may very well hate that politician's guts. Their buried loved one may have had absolute contempt for the political figure now using their grave as a prop.

Publishing pictures of yourself posing at a nearby grave while putting all those other names of the dead in full view is pointedly designed to suggest that not just this one family, but the families of this other soldier, and that one to the right, and those others to the back are all on your campaign bandwagon, and again: Who the eff do you think you are to even dare such a thing—and would you dare it if you didn't have Secret Service protection to ward off any groups of passing vets who had an issue with you decorating your campaign with their fallen friend? And don't give me any nonsense about the family that gave Trump cover for the stunt not deserving blame here, because they clearly didn't give one damn about those other families or their grief.

The Hoover family granted permission to the Trump team to film and take photographs at the gravesite; the Marckesano family did not, and filming and photographing at the gravesite for political purposes is a violation of federal law, according to cemetery officials. Yet Sergeant Marckesano’s grave was shown in photos from the visit that were published online. A video was posted to Mr. Trump’s TikTok account featuring footage from the Section 60 visit and the gravestones from behind, with narration criticizing the handling of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.

So yes, this other family is pissed, as they well should be. They should also sue Trump for the suffering they're going to have to endure now that the name of their own deceased family member, an 8-tour combat veteran, is to be dragged back into public view whenever these infamous photos are hauled out again by the press, the campaign, or future historians tasked with chronicling History's Greatest Assholes.

Well, at least Trump's campaign was kind enough to post video proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that the trip was indeed for campaign purposes. That should simplify any future lawsuits.

While everyone's talking about Trump's new attempt to burrow under the bar of basic human decency, I think we ought to be saving some scorn for the professional photographers who've released these pictures and sold them onto the frontpages. I've yet to see any of these press or Trump-issued photographs blur out the names on those other graves, which is itself gross because, again, these photographers are getting paid for taking pictures of these graves against the wishes of these families and they can't even be bothered to blur the names out.

Nobody thought to care. Not the photographers, not the journalists, not the editors who used the pictures to sell papers. Trump pulled his stunt and everyone just snapped their pictures, playing along as he gave his little campaign speech next to other people's graves in a military cemetery where families thought they could count on protections against that. And now those pictures are omnipresent. You can't not see them, with those other gravestones infringing on Trump's little scene and nobody even caring that they're there.

Jackasses.