The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery holds the remains of three, rather than just one, US servicemen. The first was repatriated from France. Another was brought back from Korea, following the USA’s conflict there. The third is a Second World War soldier, though no one knows whether he served in the European or Pacific theatre of conflict.
The Tomb is a burial place endowed with enormous symbolic weight. The men buried there represent the hundreds of thousands of Americans who gave their lives through conflicts in the 20th century and beyond.
It is a place for silent, solemn reflection on those who gave what President Abraham Lincoln described at the Gettysburg Address as “the last full measure of devotion” for the United States of America. And there is no moment at which the solemnity of the place is more apparent than on 11 November, marked in the USA as “Veterans Day”.
It would be a scandal for any official visitor to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier to disrespect the monument – but to do so on Veterans Day would grossly compound the insult. Ignorance would be, at best, a partial excuse: anyone attending an official event would be expected to know exactly how to behave, and how wildly disrespectful it would be to deviate from that.
All of this leaves Pete Hegseth – the former host employed as Donald Trump’s “Secretary of War” – to explain the unexplainable.
Hegseth, in his official capacity, was part of a small group attending a ceremony at the Tomb on Wednesday, where he had duly stopped to mark the moment. When the group relaxed, though, the tension broke and they almost immediately started posing for selfies – as if they were on holiday – their laughter ringing out.
The rebuke was immediate, and loud. The sentinel on duty barked, crisply but at shouting volume: “All visitors will maintain an atmosphere of silence and respect at all times.”
If a Democratic politician was reprimanded in such a way at the USA’s national war memorial, it would surely be career-ending stuff. Fox News would run the story around the clock, every Republican politician would talk about nothing else on camera for weeks, and Democrats would quickly condemn their colleague rather than risk guilt by association. It would surely prove career ending, possibly within hours.
To say there is a double standard in US politics is nothing new: Donald Trump routinely gets away with grossly insulting minorities, Democratic voters, women, and anyone else who annoys him in a given moment, usually without consequence.
But this moment might be different. Hegseth has built – or at least, tried to build – a huge amount of his personal brand around honouring the US military and its “warfighters”, claiming to be their biggest champion, fighting to get rid of any woke nonsense that stands in their way.
Laughing and joking around on Veterans Day at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier is fundamentally incompatible with that image. It is the sort of thing that active servicemen and veterans alike notice. Not much was asked of Hegseth: he simply needed to turn up, look respectful for a few minutes, and leave. He couldn’t manage it.
There is a risk that Hegseth, a thin-skinned operator who has sacked almost anyone who challenged his ideas and his chaotic operation, might try to retaliate against the soldier who reprimanded him – something the media would inevitably hear about almost immediately, and which would prove impossible to ignore even in the busiest of news cycles.
Hegseth has damaged his reputation with one of his few remaining bases of support just when he needs it the most. The articles of impeachment brought against him by Republican congressman Thomas Massie might have been kicked into the long grass for now, but Democrats will run Congress in a few short months, and they could bring them back at any time.
Politicians are good at smelling blood in the water, and Hegseth is the most vulnerable figure in Trump’s administration. Several of his senior colleagues – the ones angriest about the war in Iran, and its effect on the midterms – would like to see the back of him. The Democrats are gunning for him.
Hegseth will need every defender he can muster if he is to survive, and loyal Republicans were already going to be reluctant to go to bat for a man many of them regard as a lightweight and a liability. Hegseth has now reminded his party of how much of a liability he can be, and what a mess he can make of the easiest tasks.
The disrespect shown by Hegseth’s entourage at the Tomb is just one failure of judgement in a long series of them – but it might just be his last.