Graveyard Scene

Screen capture from Trump's Tik Tok campaign video shot illegally in Arlington National Cemetery, via. Just for the record, I know you probably know this already, there were 45 combat deaths of US troops during Trump's presidential term, 18 "non-hostile" deaths, and no 18-month period during which there were no deaths at all. I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere, but there actually were about 18 months with no US deaths in Afghanistan after Trump signed the deal with the Taliban in February 2020, but Biden was the president for eight of those months. (This is a key reason why Biden honored the deal, because he knew if he didn't the Taliban would go back to attacking and killing Americans.)

On that story about the shoving match last week at Arlington National Cemetery, where a ceremony meant to honor the last Americans to die in the Afghan War, with presidential candidate Donald Trump as a guest, was marred by the behavior of members of Trump's gang entourage, who insisted on violating the rules (and the law) by filming the event, for what turned out to be a Trump campaign Tik Tok commercial, to the point of using violence against the official who tried to get them to stop (it's not clear exactly how, whether they pushed her to the ground or just punched her—the Trump team apparently has some video, but they don't seem at all eager to let it out)—there's an angle that hasn't been covered directly, which has to do with the mourners, family members of the American dead.

There were 13 Americans, 11 Marines and one man each from the Army and Navy,  killed on August 27 2021, among 180-some deaths altogether in a suicide bombing at the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, where desperate crowds were trying to get flights out of the country as the US forces packed up and left under the disorderly arrangements negotiated by the Trump administration the previous February, and the Taliban assumed control. The Americans were there, at least some of them, to help Afghan evacuees process their papers to get out. The attacker detonating the suicide belt was affiliated with the Taliban's enemies from Isis-K (the Islamic State in Khorasan), but it's not ruled out that panicked American troops killed some of the victims as well. It was a terrible mess.

There were 13 American families who lost sons and a daughter in the incident, but only two families were represented in the third anniversary commemoration with Donald Trump on Tuesday; that of Nicole Gee, 23 when she died, represented in the recent coverage chiefly by her mother-in-law, Christy Shamblin, and that of Taylor Hoover, who was 31, whose spokesman was his grandfather, Bill Barnett. Trump is said to have been there by invitation, along with Utah governor Spencer Cox:

Shamblin said that the families of the Fallen 13 are close, and commemorate the anniversary at Arlington together. The Hoover family, whose son Taylor Hoover was killed in the attack, reached out to the Trump campaign and invited them to lay a wreath down on Taylor’s grave together.

but it's probably at least a little more complicated than that, if only because this is something that has been going on for a while, as some of them began leading increasingly public, and to some extent political, lives.

At the original "Dignified Transfer" of the remains of the 13, on August 29  2021, which President Biden, and the First Lady personally attended after meeting with the families, no notable incidents were reported in coverage by NPR and USA Today, except that Steve Nikoui, father of Lance Corporal Kareem M. Nikoui and a self-described Trump supporter, told Reuters that he blamed the military leaders for his son's death, and the president:

"I'm really disappointed in the way that the president has handled this, even more so the way the military has handled it. The commanders on the ground should have recognized this threat and addressed it."

There was a memorial service for Nicole that September in Roseville, CA, at which the mother-in-law didn't speak, or at least wasn't quoted in the account by the Sacramento Bee:

The work she did in the last days of her life helped save thousands of people from oppression, torture and death, said Mallory Harrison, a friend and fellow Marine. “Nicole died doing what she loved,” Harrison told mourners at Bayside. “She lost her life so others may live and — without a doubt — she died proud; proud of who she was, proud of what she was doing and proud to be a United States Marine.”

Equally unpolitical was the commemoration of the incident's first anniversary, in August 2022, by Coral Briseno, mother of Marine Corporal Humberto Sanchez, just 22 when he died:

Each flag on her front law[n] represents one of the military members killed in the airport bombing last August, including one for her son. Briseno said her son was helping move children to safety when he was killed in action.

While Taylor Hoover's mother, Kelly Barnett, told Fox something similar about him:

Taylor, unknowingly carrying out his final mission, was determined to save as many lives as possible. Shortly before the ISIS-K terrorist's bomb detonated, the staff sergeant helped lead a group to safety.

That family, the Kakaies, successfully escaped the grip of Taliban rule as a result. Taylor's photo hangs on their wall in honor of his sacrifice, the fallen Marine's parents told Fox News.

"He wanted them to have a chance at a better life," Barnett said.

Then in July 2023, something odd: Rep. Cory Mills (R-FL) told Fox News that Nicole Gee's family had been forced to pay $60,000 to move her body to Arlington from Roseville. That wasn't in any way true, as Christy Shamblin quickly announced, but it would clearly have been pretty offensive. What was that about?

And that August, as the second anniversary approached, another congressman, Darryl Issa (R-CA), convened a public forum in Escondido (Camp Pendleton, in his district, was the home base of many of the killed Marines) for the Gold Star parents; Hoover's father Darin Hoover and mother Kelly Barnett were both there, interviewed by Fox:

"We were told lies, given incomplete reports, incorrect reports, total disrespect," Barnett said. 

Darin agreed. He felt the Biden administration seeming satisfied with the Afghanistan withdrawal, a position he called "disgusting" and "ignorant." He accused the administration of immediately halting investigations into what he considered the failures of a hasty troop.

"Anything coming from the administration was all shut down. We have had nothing for the last two years," Darin told Fox News' Martha MacCallum after the Issa forum. "My anger is directed at them, at the State Department, the [Department of Defense], the administration." 

"I want answers," he continued. "I want accountability. I’ve said it before, and I will say it again."

Then some of them went to Arlington Cemetery to commemorate the second anniversary, and while they were in the neighborhood met with yet another congressman, Michael McCaul (R-TX, chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee), who invited them to participate in a panel discussion in the Capitol, and a week later three of the mothers—Shamblin, Briseno, and Kelly Barnett—turned up on ABC's This Week to tell Martha Raddatz a story I don't think they had publicly told before:

Three days after the bombing, the remains of all 13 service members arrived at Dover Air Force Base for the dignified transfer ceremony, where President Joe Biden was there to greet the families. Instead of feeling comforted, all three mothers described feeling disrespected.

"The administration didn't seem to know our story," Shamblin said. "They didn't seem to know Nicole's name, our names. People from the military certainly knew our story, Nicole's name, our names. And that was expressed to us in a way that felt very genuine and loving. But when it came to the people in suits, it felt disingenuous and hollow."

Briseno added that she felt the president made the encounter "all about him."

"We had decided as a family that we would not meet with the president, so we were actually in a room on the side," Barnett emphasized.

The family ultimately decided to go onto the tarmac, where Biden checked his watch multiple times.

"It was just total disrespect," Barnett said. "It's beyond disgusting."

Raddatz recalled a prominent moment during Biden's exit, where someone in the crowd screamed, "Burn in hell."

"That was my daughter," Barnett said. "And she meant it."

In March 2024, McCaul invited Shamblin to be his guest at the State of the Union address, and on July 17 she addressed the third night of the Republican convention in Milwaukee, apparently fresh from a visit to one of the ex-president's New Jersey homes/golf clubs:

"While Joe Biden has refused to recognize their sacrifice, Donald Trump spent six hours in Bedminster with us. He allowed us to grieve. He allowed us to remember our heroes." Shamblin said Trump spoke to the families "in a way that made us feel understood. Donald Trump carried the weight for a few hours with me," Shamblin said. "For the first time since Nicole's death I felt like I wasn't alone in my grief."

OK, I feel like a really bad person, but I'm not buying this. Nobody in history has ever told a story like this about Trump.

It's none of my business to criticize how parents process their grief for a lost child, a terrible, crushing thing, as Joe Biden has very frequently noted on the basis of terrible personal experience, convincing practically everybody he talks about it to of his deep sincerity, but that's not the only thing the story of the Arlington dustup is about. As we see when we fill in the three years' worth of background, it's a story of relentless politicization of a tragedy, ruthless exploitation of these parents as the Republican party works on them one congressmember at a time and Trump finally moves in for the kill, or of the parents' willing accommodation, depending how you want to look at it. Either way it's ugly as it gets.