In his 2019 memoir, Sacred Duty: A Soldier’s Tour at Arlington National Cemetery, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) recounts the 16 months, beginning in early 2007, he spent as an Army officer assigned to The Old Guard, the fabled unit that oversees a grassy expanse made holy by American heroes.
During this time, Cotton periodically filled in for his commanding officer and personally supervised several interments in Arlington National Cemetery’s Section 60, where the dead from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are buried.
“I understand why some people call this bucolic patch of land the saddest acre in America, but I prefer to think of Section 60 as the noblest acre in America,” he writes in Sacred Duty. “The nobility of Section 60 runs deep in the soil of Arlington and in the soul of our nation.”
ADVERTISEMENT
“Over the years, I have noticed something about Arlington. Although a sign welcomes visitors to ‘our nation’s most sacred shrine,’ no rules are posted. Yet visitors somehow understand a proper code of conduct,” Cotton continues. “Arlington elicits instinctive reverence from citizen and soldier alike because this land is more than a cemetery… Arlington truly is sacred ground for our nation.”
One recent exception to this decorum came during former President Donald Trump’s visit to Arlington this week for a wreath-laying ceremony marking the third anniversary of a suicide bombing that killed 13 American service members at Kabul airport amid the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan in 2021.
The dead included Marine Staff Sgt. Taylor Hoover, who is buried in Section 60. Trump accompanied Hoover’s parents at the ceremony.
”I gave my permission,” Hoover’s mother, Kelly Barnett, later told NBC News. “My son was murdered under the Biden-Harris administration.”
Gold Star parents are free to say whatever they want in such circumstances. But such hard-won exemptions do not apply to others, including Trump, who was accompanied by an entourage that included a photographer. (In a graveside photo, Trump was joined by Hoover’s parents in giving a thumb’s up—but he was ultimately honoring only himself, as always.)
Donald Trump leaves Section 60 of Arlington National Cemetery on Aug. 26, 2024.
Kevin Carter/GettyThe Army had anticipated that this might be one of those rare instances where visitors needed to be explicitly informed of the proper code of conduct. Trump’s campaign had been told in advance that electioneering and other partisan political activity at Arlington was against federal law.
That law did not change because a Gold Star mother had invited Trump.
A cemetery official correctly surmised that the Trump crew intended to film scenes for political purposes. She moved to intervene and was “abruptly pushed aside,” the Army’s public affairs office said in a statement released Thursday. “Consistent with the decorum expected at [Arlington National Cemetery], this employee acted with professionalism and avoided further disruption.”
A Trump spokesman crassly proposed that the official was “suffering a mental health episode.” Trump himself pleaded ignorance—even after the cemetery footage appeared on social media with his narration.
“I don’t know what the rules and regulations are,” he told NBC. “I really don’t know anything about it… All I do is I stood there and I said, ‘If you’d like to have a picture, we can have a picture.’”
He later outdid himself, claiming during a political rally in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, on Friday that “I don’t need publicity,” and raising the possibility that “this was a setup by the people in the administration.”
Imagine how young Lt. Cotton of The Old Guard—and a Harvard Law School graduate—would have responded to people acting as if the law did not apply to them in a place where almost everybody seemed to understand the rules without having to be told.
“Old Guard soldiers follow these rules scrupulously; I cannot recall a single infraction during all my time in the cemetery,” Cotton writes in his book.
But in response to a former commander in chief violating the law along with simple decency in the most sacred section of holy ground, Cotton tweeted his approval: “Good for President Trump to honor the service and sacrifice of those fallen heroes and their loved ones.”
“The scandal is not that Pres. Trump honored 13 brave Americans killed in Afghanistan,” he added. “The scandal is Biden and Kamala sent those heroes into a needlessly dangerous situation.”
In truth, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris could have done more to comfort the families. Biden, in particular, could have taken more responsibility for the deaths, even though the bombing occurred during a withdrawal whose timing had been set by Trump before he left office. That said, it should be noted that an extensive Army investigation found that nobody could likely have prevented an attack by a fanatic wearing a 25-pound suicide vest.
But wherever the ultimate responsibility lies, Cotton is either deceiving himself or seeking to deceive everybody else when it comes to Trump’s intent on the ground The Old Guard takes such pride in protecting.
Another Gold Star parent with a son in Section 60 told the Daily Beast this week that he sees Trump as a manipulator with an ever-hungry ego.
“He manipulates and he lies and he misguides,” Khizr Khan, father of fallen Army Capt. Humayun Khan, said.
It’s not the first time Cotton has debased himself to cover for Trump. He also defended the indefensible two weeks ago, saying Trump had been “taken out of context” when he told a golf club gathering that the civilian Presidential Medal of Freedom he presented to GOP megadonor Dr. Miriam Adelson was “much better” than the Medal of Honor.
“Everyone gets the Congressional Medal of Honor, they’re soldiers,” Trump said. “They’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets or they are dead.”
In Sacred Duty, Cotton writes movingly about stopping beside the grave of a Medal of Honor recipient in Arlington.
“I paused, came to attention, and saluted,” he writes. “The Medal of Honor is the nation’s highest decoration for battlefield valor. By military custom, all soldiers salute Medal of Honor recipients irrespective of their rank, in life and in death.”
If Cotton ever stops there again, he will do so as a Trump accomplice, a blind defender of somebody who has disrespected both the nation’s highest honor—and its most hallowed ground.
