I’m still seeing updates on the Arlington scandal. Let’s start with this “fact check” article in WaPo by Glenn Kessler,  Trump appears to have misled Gold Star families on troop deaths in Afghanistan.

The gist of this is that Trump keeps saying that during his presidency there was an 18-month period with no hostile fire deaths of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. You can hear him saying this in the campaign video he made at Arlington. But that is not true. WaPo staff looked through DoD records. There was no such 18-month period during Trump’s administration. Even during the last 18 months of his presidency, which seems to be what he is talking about, 12 U.S. troops died from hostile action in Afghanistan.

The only 18-month period without hostile deaths was during the last 11 months of Trump’s presidency and the first seven months of Biden’s. Kessler carefully says that Trump merely “implies” that this period was all under his watch, but then quotes him saying things like  “We had no soldiers killed for 18 months while I was there because they knew — don’t play around with our soldiers.” (Rally in Asheboro, NC, Aug. 21, 2024). That’s more than “implying,” I believe.

Trump also is the one who set up conditions for the withdrawal by negotiating with the Taliban, which he still brags about in his rambling rally speeches. (Did you know the leader of the Taiban called Trump “your excellency”? Trump says he did. That makes Trump very special.)

Kessler doesn’t mention this, but Bill Scher at Washington Monthly documented last week that “65 soldiers died in ‘hostile action’ during the four years of the Trump administration, versus 13 under Biden through 2022, the last year tabulated.” I bet some of those 65 are buried in Arlington. Did Trump do his garish thumb’s up act over their graves?

Now let’s move on to David Kurtz at Talking Points Memo. Trump is now claiming that the altercation in which his staff shoved an Arlington employee never happened.

seems like it should be pretty easy to prove Trump is lying here given that the Arlington altercation was reported to police pic.twitter.com/xwZzJ9XIv2

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 3, 2024

Kurtz writes,

So now we have a situation where the Trump campaign disparaged the cemetery staffer as having a “mental health episode,” said she shouldn’t be in her job, suggested she suffered from Trump Derangement Syndrome – and now Trump himself is claiming nothing even happened.

At the same time, the Army seems desperate to make this all go away.

The Army is currently sitting on the police report filed by the cemetery staffer recounting her version of the incident where she was reportedly verbally abused and shoved aside by two Trump campaign staffers when she tried to enforce cemetery rules against political activities.

Democratic staffers in both the House and Senate are trying to get hold of the report. It seems to me that a police report should be public record.

Related to this, see Greg Sargent at The New Republic, from last week.

In his Michigan rant, Trump claimed he’d been invited to Arlington by the relatives of soldiers killed in the 2021 bombing at Abbey Gate, outside Afghanistan’s Kabul Airport. He then lashed out at the Arlington staffers who’d tried to prevent the Trump campaign from filming in a restricted area of the cemetery—in apparent violation of the law—which reportedly led a Trump aide to push aside one of those cemetery officials. In his speech, Trump linked the staffers—federal employees simply doing their jobs of guarding ground most Americans revere—to law enforcement prosecuting him for his various alleged crimes.

“These are bad people we’re dealing with,” Trump seethed. “They say I was campaigning,” he continued. “I don’t need the publicity.” Trump flatly dismissed the idea that he was at Arlington to “politick” in any way, and insisted he’d only been asked by relatives of the fallen to pose for pictures at a gravesite. 

Yes, there just happened to be a video photographer there, and somehow — nobody knows how — the video of Trump at Arlington was made into a campaign video with Trump himself doing the voiceover and posted on Trump’s vanity social media site within a few hours of the visit.

He’s changing the story as he goes along, in other words. Next he’ll deny he was ever in Arlington. And his culties will believe him.

And we still don’t know exactly how roughly the Arlington employee was treated and which Trump staffers shoved her.

The best thing I’ve read on the Arlington fracas is from Will Bunch at the Phileadelphia Inquirer.

The people closest to Trump allegedly shoved and verbally abused a woman — because that’s what they do.

And when the woman complained in a formal statement to the U.S. Army, Team Trump gaslit her by accusing her of being a psycho — seemingly part of an intimidation campaign which was meant to scare the accuser from pressing criminal charges.

This blatantly sexist bullying of the Arlington employee has worked — just as it’s worked so many times for Trump himself during his decades-long trail of sexual abuse and harassment allegations, and just as violence and gross mistreatment of women hasn’t thwarted the careers of Trump’s male-dominated inner circle.

We shouldn’t let the other unseemly aspects of Trump’s behavior at one of America’s most sacred places obscure the fact that rank misogyny is the lifeblood of this authoritarian crusade to retake the White House, and that contempt for women saturates everything they do.

This is taking us into a change in topic, but it cannot be denied that misogyny, more than anything else, is driving the American hard right. Racism is in there too, of course, but it’s there fear and loathing of women that’s pushing them into the extreme crazy these days, regarding abortion rights. Abortion criminalization is the hill they’re preparing to die on.

This fear and loathing appears to have taken a pure and undistilled form in J.D. Vance. Not a day goes by that someone doesn’t release some old quote of his that shows him disparaging women with careers and no children. He really does seem to think that civilization will fall apart if women’s aren’t kept barefoot and pregnant.

I confess I never read Hillbilly Eligy and don’t intend to do so now. But from others I have heard that it’s a very angry book. And he is especially enraged against his mother. The mother never had a chance. She was impregnated at age 13 and married off to the older man who had impregnated her. That infant was stillborn, and then the her husband turned out to be a violent drunk, and she was a mess for obvious reasons. And J.D. found refuge with his grandparents, the ones who had raised his badly damaged mother in drunkeness and violence and chaos but in their old age had settled down a bit and provided some semblance of normalcy to young J.D. Meanwhile his mother divorced his father and got sober. J.D. is still palbably furious with his mother, readers of the book says. Not so much his father, oddly enough.

And the lesson J.D. somehow got from this is that women must be forced to have children and be married and give up all other ambitions.  If anyone was a walking candidate for intensive psychotherapy, it’s J.D. And clearly he is projecting his mother issues onto all other women, which is the commonest thing in the world for men who hate women to do, in my experience.

Back to Will Bunch:

Vance’s open contempt for women is the force that gives meaning to Trump’s MAGA movement, and it permeates everything they do. It certainly weighs down the policy blueprint for a Trump presidency known as Project 2025, which aims to shrink federal dollars for abortion and proposes restricting contraception, would strip all references to “gender equality” from government documents, and demands that the Senior Coordinator of the Office of Women, Children, and Families be a “pro-life” political appointee.

It’s all of a piece.