Cemetery Staffer Declines To Press Charges For Fear Of Retaliation

INSIDE: Donald Trump ... Jack Smith ... Kamala Harris

ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA - AUGUST 26: Republican presidential nominee, former U.S. President Donald Trump stands alongside Misty Fuoco, whose sister Sgt. Nicole Gee died in Abbey Gate Bombing, at a wreath laying ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery on August 26, 2024 in Arlington, Virginia. Monday marks three years since the August 26, 2021, suicide bombing at Hamid Karzai International Airport, which killed 13 American service members. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.

The Thuggery Continues …

The fascist overtones from the Arlington National Cemetery incident are unmistakeable: a presidential campaign run like a gang, with enforcers shoving aside a public servant enforcing the rules and a mob of millions of supporters with a track record of doxxing, harassing, intimidating, and threatening anyone who gets in their candidate’s way, all the while being egged on by the candidate himself.

You can’t blame the cemetery official for declining to press charges rather than put herself in the line of fire for continued and unending abuse. She didn’t sign up for that. She’s already been baselessly accused by the Trump campaign of having a “mental health episode,” being “despicable” and a “disgrace,” and not deserving to have her job. That all happened within the first 48 hours of the apparent confrontation at the national shrine to fallen service members.

But what about the Army? It oversees Arlington National Cemetery and is a victim of Trump’s bullying, too, so I hesitate to blame it for its predicament. But some of the reporting suggests the staffer on the ground was effectively if inadvertently set up by higher-ups who themselves wanted to avoid a confrontation with Trump. According to the WaPo:

Pentagon officials were deeply concerned about the former president turning the visit into a campaign stop, but they also didn’t want to block him from coming, according to Defense Department officials and internal messages reviewed by The Washington Post.

Officials said they wanted to respect the wishes of grieving family members who wanted Trump there, but at the same time were wary of Trump’s record of politicizing the military. So they laid out ground rules they hoped would wall off politics from the final resting place of those who paid the ultimate sacrifice for their nation.

Rather than mount a full-throated defense and take any kind of remedial action, the Army has closed the matter after the cemetery official declined to press charges. But the fecklessness doesn’t end there. This paragraph in the NYT is an all-timer for weak-kneed kowtowing to a bully:

Several Army officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential aspects of the matter, on Wednesday sought to keep the politically charged issue from escalating. But at the same time, they defended the cemetery official and pushed back on attacks from the Trump campaign, with one official saying that the woman at the cemetery was just trying to do her job.

Officials purporting to defend their person on the ground by offering some “push back” on the Trump campaign attack, but doing so anonymously while trying to keep it from “escalating.” Escalating into what? You’ve already been run over, so that leaves the only obvious conclusion: The Army itself is trying to avoid being the target of MAGA attacks. This is untenable acquiescence to bullying.

Is that really going to be the end of the story? No consequences, no new measures to enjoin Trump from doing the same thing again at Arlington or another military cemetery, no price to pay for his thuggery. It’s a familiar pattern.

The erosion of any kind of strong, unified, national, countervailing force to Trump’s public bullying and nastiness only enables and emboldens the thuggery that is central to his appeal and that he has already notoriously used on Jan. 6 to try to retain power.

If you don’t think a Trump win in November will unleash a reign of thuggery against anyone who stands in his way – not just political foes but innocent bystanders and regular folks just doing their jobs – then I don’t know what else to tell you. He’s doing it right now, he’s promised to do it if he wins, and his minions are poised and eager to follow through.

He’s not a schoolyard bully. He’s a public menace, and if he wins back the White House, he will be a public menace with vast official powers and Supreme Court-sanctioned immunity.

Trump’s Digital Deluge

The former president went on a social media bender Wednesday morning:

In total, Trump’s digital deluge contained 50 posts, including 19 written by the former president and a slew of retruths. Much of the content was explicitly conspiratorial and authoritarian.

It included reposting a sexually denigrating meme about Kamala Harris.

Trump Prosecution Watch

• Jan. 6 case: The grand jury that Special Counsel Jack Smith used to issue a superseding indictment this week against Donald Trump was new to the Trump case, but it was not newly formed. It was empaneled in 2023 and had issued indictments of other Jan. 6 riot defendants.

• Arizona fake electors case: In a Monday hearing, a state judge in Arizona seemed open to the claim by the defendants in the fake electors case that they are the victims of political persecution. The defendants are seeking to have the case dismissed using the state’s unusual anti-SLAPP law, which is the only one in the country to include include protection from politically motivated criminal prosecutions. Trump is an unindicted co-conspirator in the case.

2024 Ephemera

• The Harris-Walz ticket does its first joint interview with CNN’s Dana Bash. It will air at 9 p.m. ET today after being taped in Savannah, Georgia, where the Democratic duo is on a bus tour through the southern portion of the swing state.

• Fox News poll: Kamala Harris has closed the gap Joe Biden faced against Donald Trump in the Sun Belt swing states. Among registered votes, Harris leads in Arizona by 1 point, in Nevada by 2 points, in Georgia by 2 points; Trump leads by 1 pt in North Carolina.

Funny Business In Nebraska

The Republican attorney general in Nebraska is stymying a new state law passed on a bipartisan basis to allow felons to resume voting as soon as their sentences are served. Attorney General Mike Hilgers has also called into question the constitutionality of the existing state law on the books since 2005 that allowed felons to vote two years after their sentences are completed.

SCOTUS Leaves Biden Student Debt Relief Plan On Hold

The Supreme Court declined to remove a temporary pause on the latest Biden administration program to eliminate student loan debt.

Still Just A Horrifying Case

AP: “A Democratic former Las Vegas-area politician is guilty of murder and has been sentenced to life in prison with parole eligibility at 20 years for the killing of a journalist who wrote articles critical of his conduct in office, a jury in Nevada ruled Wednesday.”

Palin Defamation Case Against NYT Reinstated

The U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals threw out a 2022 jury verdict in favor of the NYT and ordered a new trial on Sarah Palin’s defamation claims against the newspaper. Palin had sued the NYT over an editorial that falsely accused her campaign of inciting the 2011 shooting of then-Rep. Gabby Giffords (D-AZ).

The Worst Of The Worst

Your occasional reminder that this toxic, racist, eliminationist propaganda is being aired nationally by a major corporation all the damn time:

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