WASHINGTON, DC, United States (AFP) — Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris said Saturday that her Republican rival Donald Trump “disrespected sacred ground” at a US military cemetery during a contentious pre-election visit.

Trump’s presence at the hallowed Arlington National Cemetery — intended to provide a campaign boost ahead of the November 5 vote — has instead mushroomed into a public dispute consuming the candidates and the military.

In Monday’s incident at the cemetery across the Potomac River from Washington, Trump broke rules barring photography for political purposes, posing with relatives of US service members killed in Afghanistan in content that was later shared by his campaign on social media.

“Let me be clear: the former president disrespected sacred ground, all for the sake of a political stunt,” Harris said.

In one image, he is standing with family members of a fallen Marine, posing among headstones while grinning broadly and giving a thumbs-up.

“If there is one thing on which we as Americans can all agree, it is that our veterans, military families, and service members should be honoured, never disparaged, and treated with nothing less than our highest respect and gratitude,” Harris wrote on
X.

On Thursday, the US Army issued a rare statement confirming that a cemetery staff member had been “abruptly pushed aside” after asking Trump’s team to stop filming in a burial section for those killed in recent wars, where photography for political purposes is banned.

Trump’s campaign team has gone on the offensive by describing the employee as a “despicable individual” and claiming she was suffering a mental health episode.

But the military said the staff member had “acted with professionalism” and it condemned the incident as “unfortunate”.

Trump spoke at length at a rally Friday night about the cemetery incident and Afghanistan and said it was families of fallen troops who asked to have their picture taken with him.

“I said ‘Absolutely.’ I wasn’t doing it for — I don’t need publicity, I get a lot of publicity. I would like to get a lot less publicity,” Trump said in Johnstown, Pennsylvania.

Trump blamed the White House for the criticism he is drawing.

“Joe Biden killed those young people because he was incompetent. And then they tell me that I used their graves for public relations purposes. And I didn’t. And I’ll tell you what, it was a disgrace,” Trump said.

Trump has made criticism of the Biden-Harris Administration’s handling of the US retreat from Afghanistan a keynote of his campaign, arguing that he would have managed it better.

He visited the cemetery with families of some of the 13 service members killed in a 2021 bombing in Kabul during the last, chaotic hours of the US withdrawal.

Trump’s relationship with the military has long spawned controversy.

While often touting his support for the armed forces, he privately mocked the war dead while he was president and did not want to be seen near military amputees, according to his former chief of staff.

Harris’s blunt response Saturday appeared to underline her determination to take the fight directly to Trump in what is shaping up to be a bruising presidential election.

Trump has repeatedly mocked Harris’s name, intelligence, appearance and racial identity, while the Harris campaign has replied that the former president is “weird,” an aspiring dictator, and “out of his mind.”

Harris earlier faced withering criticism over the cemetery incident from Trump’s running mate, Senator JD Vance.

Apparently responding to a mistaken report that Harris had already reacted to the visit, Vance accused her of feigning outrage and said, “She can go to hell.”

“Don’t focus on Donald Trump showing up to grieve with some people who lost their children. Focus on your own job. Don’t do this fake outrage thing,” he later told the
Washington Post.

At that point Harris had not publicly mentioned the cemetery visit.

Kevin Carroll, who served as a senior aide to Trump’s homeland security chief John Kelly, voiced scathing criticism of Trump’s behaviour in an opinion piece published Friday in The Guardian newspaper.

“The photo of a grinning Trump giving a jaunty thumbs-up over these patriots’ graves is an indelible image of narcissism risen to the point of sociopathy,” Carroll wrote.