Mary Trump — Donald Trump’s lesbian niece and a clinical psychologist — excoriated her uncle over a campaign stunt he held at Arlington National Cemetary in Virginia, a military cemetery, on Monday.
Former President Trump attended a wreath-laying ceremony on Monday while his campaign staff filmed and took pictures in an area of the cemetery where recent U.S. casualties were buried. This is against the cemetery’s rules, and Arlington officials tried to stop Trump’s campaign staff from turning the military cemetery into a campaign ad.
NPR is even reporting that Trump’s campaign staff pushed and “verbally abused” an Arlington official who tried to stop them. The campaign denies that the incident occurred and said the Arlington official was “suffering from a mental health episode.” Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), Donald Trump’s running mate, later confirmed that there was a “disagreement” with the official but that it should not have been “a national news story.”
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Donald Trump mugged for pictures and gave a “thumbs up” to a camera over the graves of deceased Marines at what was meant to be a solemn ceremony honoring the dead. His campaign later shared a video on TikTok that included footage from the cemetery, possibly in violation of federal law.
“Why was this unpatriotic coward allowed to lay at a memorial wreath at Arlington National Cemetery?” Mary Trump asked in her newsletter. “His appearance there was a desecration doing the only thing he knows how to do with members of the military and their families—use them as props; the ridiculous grin and thumbs up made it worse—as if he were attending a photo-op at a local diner.”
“That cemetery is filled with Americans who gave everything in order to protect and defend the Constitution — a document Donald has never read, has attempted at every turn to shred, and will, if given the chance, set on fire. It is filled, in other words, with Americans who gave their lives to defend this country from people like him.”
Mary Trump explained that her grandfather and Donald Trump’s father, Fred Trump, had no respect for people who served in the military, including her own father (Donald Trump’s brother), Fred Trump Jr.
“My grandfather, in fact, had no respect for my dad’s National Guard service at all. Anything that took attention and effort away from the family business—whether serving his country or flying 707s for TWA at the height of the jet age as my dad did — was beneath Fred Trump, Sr.’s contempt,” Mary Trump wrote. “Donald, seeing the first of many openings to displace his older brother as their father’s successor, followed suit.”
She then brought up how her uncle avoided military service in the Vietnam War era with “a false diagnosis of bone spurs engineered by his father” and said that this makes him feel insecure around people who have served in the military.
“Donald knows that he does not in any way measure up to the men and women who have served this country, just as he knows he could never measure up to my father,” she wrote. “He’s a weak and insecure man who mocks his betters to compensate for his own inadequacies.”
“‘I like people who don’t get caught,’ he said about Senatore John McCain, who spent 5 and a half years being tortured in a prison camp while Donald lied about having bone spurs and received four deferments without any thought of who would go to Vietnam in his stead.”
“That’s who he is. And any time he’s allowed an opportunity to convince people otherwise is just another desecration.”
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