The ugly truth we’re missing on Trump, Arlington | Will Bunch Newsletter

There’s an old saying: Never take any time off in 2024. OK, I just made that up, but no sooner did I decide to skip a few column slots to recover from the joy, or whatever, of Chicago’s Democratic National Convention, than all heck broke loose. We’ll catch up with some of Donald Trump’s many foibles today, but then there is also tragedy and chaos in the Middle East. Did I mention I’m not taking any more days off between now and Nov. 5?

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In this wackadoodle election cycle conducted to the thundering pace of a clickbait media, most stories seem to have a shelf life of a few hours. One big exception has been Donald Trump’s campaign gambit last month to visit Arlington National Cemetery with several Gold Star mothers of soldiers killed in the 2021 explosion during the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The Trump strategy seems to have been this: Lay a wreath at the gravesite of the fallen heroes in Section 60 — burial site for the most recent war dead, considered hallowed ground — but also take pictures and film the ex-president’s solemn display of patriotism. That notion was undercut as Trump mugged for the camera and gave a big thumbs-up as he stood with family members near the grave of a fallen Marine. The staged photo event provoked unquestioning and arguably positive news coverage for a Republican who sees a misleading critique of President Joe Biden and now Vice President Kamala Harris over Afghanistan as a winning issue.

When the event took place on Aug. 26 — the third anniversary of the bombing that killed 13 U.S. service members — just one journalist raised questions. Esquire’s Charlie Pierce — a relic from journalism’s lost golden era — wrote a scathing piece headlined: “How The Hell Was Trump Allowed To Use Arlington National Cemetery As A Campaign Prop?” Two NPR reporters — Quil Lawrence and Tom Bowman — went to work answering Pierce’s question and learned two things, one of them stunning. They reported a) no one except cemetery staff is allowed to take pictures or shoot video in Section 60, and b) a woman staffer from Arlington who tried to enforce those rules said she was physically confronted by Trump campaign staffers and shoved aside during the altercation.

More than a week later, Democrats on Capitol Hill are calling for more public information about what actually happened, veterans groups are expressing outrage over the idea that fallen heroes were used for props by a politician who’s long shown disrespect for soldiers and their sacrifices, and Team Trump has fought back with statements of support from pro-Republican Gold Star Mothers. The mainstream media that botched the initial coverage should be pushing for answers on key unanswered questions, including the identity of the alleged shover. But despite a week of headlines, there’s one critical aspect to this story I feel is being ignored, even though it is central to the very essence of Trump’s warped campaign.

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. It runs the gamut from taking away reproductive rights and ridiculing any female who doesn’t become a “tradwife,” to the inner circle’s 100% tolerance policies toward sexual harassment, to the ultimate goal of creating doubts that any woman — first Hillary Clinton, now Kamala Harris — is fit to lead the United States.

In the Arlington affair, the circumstances and setting are different, but the Team Trump response carries powerful echoes of practically every time Trump or his subordinates have been accused of misconduct involving women. Consider the best-known case: that of Manhattan writer E. Jean Carroll, who accused Trump of sexually assaulting her in a department-store dressing room in 1996 and has won civil court judgments over both the assault — which the judge characterized as a rape — and the campaign of defamation surrounding it.

In both the Carroll case and the physical attack at Arlington, Trump insisted the woman was making it all up. And you can hear the echoes of what Trump and his lawyers falsely said about Carroll — that she was a lying political operative — in spokesman Steven Cheung’s outrageous claim about the cemetery employee that she was “clearly suffering from a mental health episode” and in campaign chair Chris LaCivita branding her as “despicable.”

These aggressive deny-and-defame tactics have enabled a billionaire-turned-president to brush off more than two dozen credible allegations of sexual harassment or assault over his career, and — in a demoralizing moment of clarity about the brute force of misogyny in America — defeat the first major-party woman nominee in 2016, even after he was caught on tape bragging about his propensity for grabbing female private parts.

No wonder Trump surrounds himself with the likes of resurrected top campaign aide Corey Lewandowski, rehired despite 2021 allegations that he groped and made lewd sexual comments to a woman at a Las Vegas charity event, or strategist Jason Miller, accused in a lawsuit of rape by the former Trump campaign staffer whose child he fathered, or longtime attorney Rudy Giuliani, also sued by a former assistant who charges she was coerced into sex.

You could write this off as “loyalty” (as did the Washington Post headline about Lewandowski’s comeback) but how to explain Trump’s July running-mate pick of Sen. JD Vance? His over-the-top comments against “childless cat ladies” and series of denigrating remarks about women who’ve spurned motherhood by choice or by circumstance have revealed a political party that wants to take America back not to 2020, but to the gender imbalances of the 1950s or maybe the 1840s, before the Seneca Falls Convention.

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.

Even though Trump clearly preferred to run against 81-year-old Biden, he and his campaign know their best chance of stopping Harris’ summer surge in the polls probably hinges on boosting the paranoia among too many men (and not an insignificant number of conservative women) that a woman is not ready for the pressure of the Situation Room — the winning formula from a 2016 campaign drenched in chants of “Lock her up!”

In fact, we’ve become so used to the deeply ingrained sexism of Trump’s movement that the unvarnished scorn for women that comes across yet again in the Arlington fracas has received little attention. I’d urge reporters to relentlessly press for the identity of the Trump staffer who allegedly pushed this women around and verbally abused her, and for any videos that can confirm or dispute what really happened that day. We need to shine a constant light upon a political movement that reeks around the clock from the gaslighting of America’s women, to help voters end this seemingly endless cycle of abuse for good on Nov. 5.

Question: Why did a true labor party never develop in the US, and why is it William Jennings Bryan’s fault? — Richard McGovern

Answer: It’s true that Democrat Bryan’s near-miss against GOP capitalist darling William McKinley in 1896 is one of the great what-ifs of American history, but labor’s U.S. problems run a lot deeper. For much of the 19th and early 20th century, workers demanding fair pay and safe conditions were met with the big stick of violence from Haymarket Square to Homestead to Matawan. The Great Depression brought the carrots of a pro-labor FDR, union recognition, and the promise that an alliance with the Democratic Party was the way forward in a two-party system. When the “new Democrats” after the Reaganite 1980s failed to stand up for unions, workers were left politically homeless. For now, union bosses are betting that new, new Democrats can channel their inner Roosevelt.

Last week’s newsletter criticizing the political media and requesting your comments brought a record-shattering response with close to 40 replies, most of them deep and thoughtful. I wish there was a way to publish every one. Many of you have abandoned hope in the mainstream media, believing that the time constraints and profit incentives that drive shallow clickbait journalism, as well as big-corporate ownership of key outlets, have triggered an unstoppable downward spiral away from useful in-depth reporting. Many called for breaking up conglomerates, or suggested smaller independent news sources they’ve come to rely upon. “Perhaps media co-ops, nonprofits, etc., could replace today’s media corporations,” wrote Jim Jacobs, without “with the demands to either serve the owner’s plutocratic desires or the needs to show daily increases in revenue.”

📮This week’s question: The late summer surge of Kamala Harris’ surprise candidacy has turned what looked like victory for Donald Trump into a dead heat, with the election just two months from Thursday. What does Harris need to do now to get over the top? For a chance to be featured in my newsletter, email me your answer. Please put “Harris strategy” in the subject line.

It’s weird that with the election little more than two months away, Donald Trump is having so few rallies. But here is something just as odd: His most recent campaign events have all been held in communities with deeply troubling histories. During last month’s Democratic convention, Trump traveled to Howell, Mich., for an event on “crime and safety” — a hot button issue in a town which received national attention in the 1970s for Ku Klux Klan rallies and as recently as July drew white supremacist marchers chanting, “We love Hitler. We love Trump.”

Trump’s next rally was in La Crosse, Wisc., whose mayor has acknowledged its history as a “sundown town” — a community where Black people could work menial jobs but had to leave by nightfall — that drove away its African American population. On Friday night, the GOP nominee came to Johnstown, Pa., where in 1923 the mayor ordered all Black and Mexican-American residents to leave after a shooting of police officers. The streak of rally sites with such disturbing pasts drew no mainstream media attention but became a hot topic on X/Twitter and other social media platforms. Given Trump’s own difficult history with race, people asked, could these locations really be a coincidence?

It’s complicated. There’s no easy way to prove that Trump — who in the past triggered controversy by launching his campaign in Waco, which is practically hallowed ground to extremists, and scheduling a rally in Tulsa, site of an infamous 1921 race massacre, on Juneteenth — is picking his campaign stops around a city’s racial past. It may just be the overlap between a recent focus on energizing his base in small Rust Belt cities with largely white electorates and the tangled history of such places. When I boosted a post about Trump’s attraction to former “sundown towns,” a commenter noted that President Joe Biden has also visited all three of these communities as president.

The real problem is this: America’s history of racial repression runs much deeper than most of us care to admit. Experts on the history of the nation’s “sundown towns” have estimated there were as many as 3,000 — and perhaps 10,000 or more — communities that intimidated Black citizens and subjected them to violence to keep them out. As the Associated Press wrote in a 2020 “road trip” to “sundown towns”: “These towns were an open secret of racial segregation that spilled across much of America for at least a century, and still exist in various forms, enforced more today by tradition and fear than by rules.” In other words, this controversy may or may not speak to the character of this Trump campaign, but here’s what is clear: This country needs to do a much better job of teaching our racist past to the next generation, to avoid repeating it.

When a young unarmed Black man named Michael Brown was shot and killed by a Ferguson, Mo., police officer in August 2014 and his body was left out on the street for four hours, I sensed that this was going to become a much bigger story. In many ways, the protests that broke out there and in other cities were the flashpoint for the tumultuous decade to come. On Sept. 3, 2014, I looked at Ferguson and rising protests over low wages and wrote: “And now, just 24 days after Brown’s killing, it feels like something has changed in America. The stakes have been raised. Not everybody feels that way yet, but many do.” Read the rest: “Fast food, Ferguson, and “heightening the contradictions” in 2014 America.”

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