A Gold Star mother named Karen Meredith rebuked former President Donald Trump for posting a video of a wreath-laying ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery this week.
Trump was invited to the Monday ceremony to honor 13 service members, who were killed during the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, by the families of some of the deceased.
However, Trump has drawn criticism after posting a video of the ceremony to TikTok, along with a narration criticizing the Biden administration for the withdrawal, despite a federal law prohibiting “partisan political activities” at military memorial services. Critics say the video was inappropriate and disrespectful to the more than 400,000 service members buried at the cemetery.
Meredith, whose son First Lieutenant Kenneth Ballard was killed in Iraq in 2004 and was laid to rest in Section 60 of the cemetery, responded to Trump’s video in an interview with Forbes published on Friday.
Former President Donald Trump speaks in New York City on January 11. Trump has been rebuked by a Gold Star mother for his post of a video of a wreath-laying ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery this week.
Spencer Platt/Getty Images
She said the “most important thing” about ceremonies in Section 60, which is largely reserved for soldiers killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, is that there is “no politicization involved at all, ever.”
“You can go, you can take pictures. My family takes plenty of pictures when we go visit my son on the anniversary, but you cannot use it for political purposes,” she said.
The ceremony itself “was fine,” she said, but she took issue with videos from the ceremony being used in the post to social media.
“It makes me sick. I’ve been distraught all week,” she said.
She also criticized past remarks Trump has made about the military, saying, “Going back to former President Trump’s comments about John McCain, was his first shot across the bow with how he feels about the military. Then all of the comments going further, when he attacked Captain Khan’s father and mother when they appeared at the [Democratic National Convention]. When he accused Gold Star families of giving him COVID, when it was the day after the Amy Coney Barrett celebration.”
Newsweek reached out via email to the Trump campaign for comment.
On Thursday, the U.S. Army released a statement saying that participants of the wreath-laying ceremony were “made aware of federal laws, Army regulations and [Defense Department] policies, which clearly prohibit political activities on cemetery grounds.”
“An [Arlington National Cemetery] employee who attempted to ensure adherence to these rules was abruptly pushed aside,” the statement reads. “Consistent with the decorum expected at the ANC, this employee acted with professionalism and avoided further interruption.”
Steven Cheung, Trump’s campaign communications director, told the Associated Press that Trump’s team was allowed to have a photographer and denied the allegation that a campaign staffer pushed a cemetery official.
“The fact is that a private photographer was permitted on the premises and, for whatever reason, an unnamed individual, clearly suffering from a mental health episode, decided to physically block members of President Trump’s team during a very solemn ceremony,” Cheung said.
Meanwhile, Trump posted a letter to his social media platform, Truth Social, signed by five family members of the deceased service members. It said that he and his team “conducted themselves with nothing but the utmost respect and dignity for all of our service members, especially our beloved children.”
He also discussed the Arlington visit during a campaign event in Pennsylvania on Friday. He said that the families of the soldiers asked him to go with them to the graves and that he agreed to it because “those people are the loves of our lives.”
“They said to me—I’m not surprised, I never even thought of it—’Sir, would it be possible for you to have a picture with us by the tombstone of my son?’ You know, the beautiful white tombstones, marble, beautiful things. Carved, engraved with the names on it? I said, ‘Absolutely.’ “I wasn’t doing it for…I don’t need publicity. I get a lot of publicity.”
Trump said he later heard that the campaign was “using the graves of those soldiers for public relations purposes.”
“And I didn’t,” he added.
