Legacy media have found their latest hoax to run about Donald Trump, and this time it’s to convince you that he hates America’s fallen troops.
The entire non-troversy began earlier this week, when anti-truth NPR ran an anonymously sourced article with claims that members of Trump’s team “had a verbal and physical altercation” with an Arlington National Cemetery official during the former president’s Monday visit. Trump was there at the request of Gold Star families whose loved ones were killed during President Joe Biden’s disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal three years ago this week.
Rather than probe why both Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris only issued meaningless statements and did not visit Arlington to honor the troops who died on their watch, NPR hack-tivists Quil Lawrence and Tom Bowman apparently felt it was their job to run interference for their Democrat allies’ negligence by making Trump’s Arlington visit appear problematic.
The anonymous source cited by the authors allegedly claimed the aforementioned Arlington official “tried to prevent Trump staffers from filming and photographing in a section where recent U.S. casualties are buried” and that cemetery staff “had made clear that only cemetery staff members would be authorized to take photographs or film in the area, known as Section 60.” The unidentified official further contended members of Trump’s campaign “verbally abused and pushed the official aside.”
The authors attempted to paint the Trump team’s efforts to photograph the commemorations as an “election-related” campaign activity that violates federal law. Funny how neither bothered to raise concerns about Biden using shots of military grave markers in actual political campaign ads.
Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung rejected the claim there was a physical altercation, telling NPR, “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.”
Of course, nowhere in their article do Lawrence and Bowman indicate if they bothered to reach out to any of the Gold Star families in attendance for comment on the alleged matter. If they had, they might have learned how appreciative these families were for Trump’s attendance and that the former president’s team had their permission to document the event.
In their joint statement, several of the families thanked Trump for appearing at Arlington to honor their loved ones and affirmed the former president and his team “conducted themselves with nothing but the utmost respect and dignity for all of our service members.”
“We had given approval for President Trump’s official videographer and photographer to attend the event, ensuring these sacred moments of remembrance were respectfully captured and so we can cherish these memories forever,” the statement reads.
Darin Hoover, whose son Staff Sergeant Taylor Hoover died in Afghanistan, separately confirmed to The Daily Caller it was the Gold Star families who “extended the invitation to President Trump” and “asked him to come.”
“President Trump didn’t come to us. His team didn’t come to us and say, hey, this would be good for business. Business? No. President Trump has stood by us from day one,” Hoover said. “He has been compassionate. He has been loving. He’s been understanding. He’s taking the mantle of our outrage a little bit. Because to be quite honest with you, being very frank, we haven’t heard diddly squat from the current administration in three years.”
While the NPR hit piece bears similar hallmarks to The Atlantic’s debunked “suckers” and “losers” hoax, that didn’t stop left-wing propaganda outlets from rushing to regurgitate the outlet’s hit piece in an attempt to smear Trump. New York Times “reporters” Chris Cameron, Maggie Haberman, and Eric Schmitt took their Democrat activism a step further by seemingly calling up members of Gold Star families whose loved ones’ gravestones appeared in photographs of Monday’s commemorations.
The media’s gambit could not be more obvious. They are attempting to create a nonexistent controversy based on the bogus notion that Trump disdains America’s troops. The truth is that they are more outraged about Trump honoring these 13 heroes’ memories than they are Biden’s role in their deaths or his continued neglect of their families.
If only these same defenders of “democracy” bothered to care as much about the fact that those 13 lives never made it home.