Trump’s Arlington Cemetery stunt was repulsive. The fallout is chilling.

Eighty years earlier, he’d gotten his first taste of combat as a line officer at the Battle of Midway. When I read the accounts of Donald Trump’s outrageous photo-op at Arlington, and his campaign staff’s altercation with a cemetery employee, I thought of my grandparents and the anger they’d have for a political candidate trampling on their graves for a campaign ad. I also thought of the cemetery employee, who according to The New York Times declined to press charges out of fear of “retaliation from Trump supporters.” (Politico likewise reported that the decision was “due to concern over retaliation.”) That employee’s fear is even more chilling if you consider Arlington’s history. What would become a national shrine to our country’s military heroes began as the estate of George Washington Parke Custis, the adopted son of the nation’s first president. By then, Lee was already a Confederate general, stationed well south of Washington, and his wife ordered the people enslaved on the property to pack up the family’s silver and papers before she abandoned the property ahead of Union troops. By 1864, according to Smithsonian magazine’s Robert M. Poole, Washington’s cemeteries were running out of room for the war dead. He did so not just to ease the burden on other cemeteries, but also to make Arlington uninhabitable for the rebels’ most prominent general at war’s end. Yet, even as Meigs did his part to make sure the Confederacy never rose again, the freedoms and rights Arlington’s dead had fought for were being undermined. Within a year of Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House, a group of Tennesseeans founded the Ku Klux Klan. “We are intimidated by the whites,” Black residents of Vicksburg, Mississippi, told the state’s governor in 1875, “We will not vote at all, unless there are troops to protect us.” The troops did not come. The Army told NBC News on Thursday that a Trump aide “abruptly pushed aside” a cemetery employee who was trying to enforce the cemetery’s restrictions on photos and videos. Military officials told The New York Times, “she feared Mr. Trump’s supporters pursuing retaliation.” If this isn’t intimidation, what is? It’s a campaign of thugs, led by a thug. The employee wasn’t acting arbitrarily: As the cemetery noted in a statement, “Federal law prohibits political campaign or election-related activities within Army National Military Cemeteries, to include photographers, content creators or any other persons attending.” And Trump’s campaign dispelled any doubts about the purpose of the visit when its TikTok account used footage from Arlington in a post. The woman’s fear is entirely reasonable, and not just because an aide to a former president felt emboldened to push her in the first place. Even without her identity being public, Trump campaign’s press secretary Steven Cheung accused her of “suffering from a mental health episode.” Trump senior adviser Chris LaCivita, best known for leading the smear of 2004 Democratic nominee John Kerry’s military service, called her a “despicable individual.” And at a Thursday rally, Trump linked the cemetery staff with the prosecutors of the multiple indictments against him — that is, he linked her to people he says have it out for him. More broadly, intimidation has been an essential feature of Trump’s campaigns. It’s a campaign of thugs, led by a thug. Recent decades have seen America tilt away from the idea that “might makes right.” But that principle reigned during much of our country’s history, and defeating Trump is a way to help keep this dangerous idea from roaring back. – This Summarize was created by Neural News AI (V1). Source: https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/trump-arlington-cemetery-employee-initimidation-rcna169063