Trump campaign staff had altercation with official at Arlington Cemetery. Pushed and yelled at cemetery staffer. Tried to turn military graveyard into press event.

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Dude fuckin charge him

It's a violation of federal law? Go arrest him. Let people who served with the people buried nearby serve the warrant. Let him sit in custody until he explains to a judge why he should be free.

Fuck him. You don't have to charge him with anything above and beyond what happened, but just stop treating him special. Oh, go after the campaign staff who laid hands on the official, too. Pretty sure that's a felony in most jurisdictions.

Probably can't charge Trump. As usual, he used his lackeys to break the law. Do you even mafia bro?

Clearly, as it was part of his campaigning, this was an official act designated by someone who was at one point, and hopes again to be this election season, the President of the United States, in direct relation to the Office of the Presidency, which therefore bars any form of prosecution taking place.

God I am fucking sick to my stomach that what I just wrote is a mostly valid statement these days.

"We are prepared to release footage if such defamatory claims are made."

Well, fat fuck. We're waiting.

"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 in the statement.

Seems like the comment about a mental health episode is defamatory. So, once again, it's projection.

He just had to throw in the “mental health episode” comment didn’t he? Lying motherfucker.

As if those chucklefucks know the first thing about solemnity

Yup. Also, "permitted onto the premises?" Arlington is open to the public.

We are prepared to release footage

Thereby proving they broke the law:

Federal law prohibits political campaign or election-related activities within Army National Military Cemeteries, to include photographers, content creators or any other persons attending for purposes, or in direct support of a partisan political candidate's campaign

This went viral an hour ago. It is reprehensible. They tried to stop them from taking photos and film. There's even federal law which prohibits this. This would destroy a presidental candidate, but we're talking Trump.

Yup, this is the rabble that voted for the man who said he could shoot someone in Times Square and get away with it.

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50 bucks says that the instant that Arlington staffer's info gets made public, s/he'll be inundated with death threats from Cult 45ers.

Tough to take that bet now that death threats seem to be part of the playbook

When the cemetery official tried to prevent Trump campaign staff from entering Section 60, campaign staff verbally abused and pushed the official aside, according to the source.

Yet his idiot base cling to the idea that he loves this country.

Trump did that stupid "thumbs up" thing again at Arlington while posing for pictures with the families. He always does that at the most inappropriate time and place.

Exactly where do you think you ARE, Donald? You're not opening a mall. It's like someone playing a kazoo at a funeral.

He always thinks he is the most important person in that place and time, like all narcissists do.

Exactly where do you think you ARE, Donald? You’re not opening a mall. It’s like someone playing a kazoo at a funeral.

Maybe old Donny does think he's at the mall. Dementia can really confuse people.

It's just his default "people are taking pictures of me" move. I guess it was a habit developed at a time when he was just a celebrity. But, it's telling that he either can't learn to do something different now and doesn't have staff who step in front of the cameras and say "dude, you can't do that thumbs up move here".

Maybe he's just super happy to be visiting Robert E. Lee's former historical home?

The families of the men in the graves were also giving a thumbs up, which I think is much, much worse.

Reading that article and the snarky comments from his campaign staff really pissed me off. They can all go fuck themselves for disrespecting Arlington like that.

They assaulted someone for doing their job. Not just anyone - a federal employee protected under 18 USC 111, on account of that federal employee's performance of their duties, in violation of 18 USC 111, and then make a statement acting like they're the reasonable party in this incident.

i'd say they act like a bunch of 8 year old bullies but most kids are wise enough not to draw this kind of heat

And claimed the person was "clearly suffering from a mental health issue".

Fuck these people.

There sure are a lot of mental health issues leading to violence. Well, that's a shame, nothing to do about that.

Well no sane, reasonable, good person would ever work for trump so of course he gets the assholes and bullies working for him since that is what trump is.

An 8 year old bully that slipped up enough times to realize that the rules are all talk and consequences don't come to them so they start acting like they're immune (because they have been), but since they're still 8 year old bullies, even if daddy doesn't spank them, they still get their fee-fees hurt when the social consequences of nobody wanting to play with you anymore come knocking.

... and because they're still 8 year old bullies they think the correct way to resolve that is to be really mean and nasty to everyone who doesn't like them in hopes that they'll just roll over and keep doing what the bully wants them to.

Disrespecting Arlington Cemetery is what PATRIOTS do! After all only Losers and Suckers are Buried there!

Ahh, an attempt at, let's call it, a "Paul Wellstone" press event. And like Wellstone's attempt, I'm very glad it failed and I hope people face at least some fines and Trump faces public backlash for it.

***For those that are too young or have never heard of it. Paul Wellstone DFL senator from Minnesota tried to hold a political rally at The Wall, Vietnam war memorial. He was widely panned and condemned for his total tone deafness by not only the opposition, but his own party and constituents. It almost cost him his re-election. But political memories being what they are, was swept under the rug for his advantage.

I am trying to find this event. Its the first time chat gpt outright called me a liar. I see his memorial service which was for all those who died in a plane crash in 2002 was used by Walter Mondale to use Paul’s death as a spring board for his election bid… was there some other event you are referring to?

Maybe use a search engine instead of an LLM? It's pretty easy to find. On a sidenote, ChatGPT and similar LLMs are known to be absolutely unreliable and error prone. Please do yourself a favor and don't rely on anything an LLM tells you.

That’s what i did. I looked it up and did not find what i was looking for. Closest thing i found was the event in 2002 which was eerily close to the event you mentioned, but i could not find what you said. So i asked you for more information. Jees! You snapped back at me like a stack overflow user.

I'm not the original commenter. And I didn't want to offend you, just wanted give some friendly advice, because it irks me how many people seem to use chatGPT for fact finding. Chill

Edit: If you look for "Paul Wellstone" and "Vietnam War Memorial" you'll find what the OC was on about.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-oct-26-na-wellstone26-story.html "Wellstone also staged a news conference in front of the Vietnam War Memorial on the National Mall, drawing the ire of many veteran groups. Wellstone later said the event was a mistake."

Just an example of many

I do not understand why people ask chatgpt for factual information

The same reason people use google to look something up instead of going to the library

Google returns sources that you can evaluate for accuracy.

Chatgpt just says things.

Every output of chatgpt should end with "source: just trust me bro".

Chat gpt said things you can evaluate, which i did by googling it. And when i could not find the event in question, i went back into Lemmy and asked for more information. So tell me where i err’d? Was it not taking the posters word on it? Or trying to get context in the first place?

You err'd fucked-up twice.

Once when you flat out failed to find anything using Google, when other people clearly had no trouble at all. If you're telling the truth, this just means you suck at Google. There's no reason to be googling chatgpt's hallucinations instead of searching for the stuff an actual human told you about.

The second time was when you took chatgpt seriously. Just don't. It's a very expensive toy that occasionally does something cool. We're still trying to figure out if it's actually useful for anything, or if it's just really good at appearing useful.

Ok, one: chill the fuck out

Two: when google did not return anything useful, for WHATEVER REASON, i didn’t come back and assume the event didn’t happen, i asked for MORE info, like a good little netizen.

Three: the event chat gpt referenced was NOT a hallucination: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2002/10/paul-wellstone-s-memorial-service-turns-into-a-pep-rally.html Surprise! When i looked up Paul Wellstone and filming at a memorial , this is the event i found for the first page.

Four: me bringing up chat gpt was due to just how uncharacteristic it shut down my query. So i did my due diligence. Chill out.

You can retrieve sources from chat gpt. And that is besides the point that i didn’t simply rely on gpt. Even without prompting, i did my own digging on google, found his wiki page looked up articles about Paul and filming at a memorial and only found the incident from 2002. Thats two more paths to sources that failed me.

Chat gpt is a tool that is useful if used right, but even i did not take its word for it.

Chat GPT often makes mistakes. They call them “hallucinations”. And at one point it completely made up court cases that got two lawyers sanctioned for using.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattnovak/2023/05/27/lawyer-uses-chatgpt-in-federal-court-and-it-goes-horribly-wrong/

Chat GPT is not a search engine no matter how much Bing tries to tell you it is.

Yep, no doubt. I have used chat gpt extensibly and have found it hallucinating on my own questions. It was not the case when it referred to the 2002 event, but i know it does that. It is a tool like google. And google puts pseudoscience and conspiracy theories at the top of the list sometimes too when trying to fact find. You have to know the limitations of what it is capable of. Case in point, when i asked about this event, i didn’t assume gpt answer was correct, google gave links exclusively to coverage of the the 2002 event, completely ignoring the Vietnam portion of my query. And i still returned to ask the poster for more info to get context. I don’t know what more people could have wanted from me.

“Wellstone also staged a news conference in front of the Vietnam War Memorial on the National Mall, drawing the ire of many veteran groups. Wellstone later said the event was a mistake.”

Fair enough, though editing the comment made it difficult to realize you did provide what i asked for. I never called any one a lier. Just that when i went to chat gpt for context to what the other said it flat out told me it didn’t happen, which is uncharacteristic of chat gpt sycophantic tendencies. Usually talking a passive voice, or assuming i am making up a scenario and rolling with it. So i did google it and found that he was not considered controversial, and if the wiki mentioned it, it was only as a foot note.

Everything i looked up pointed to the 2002 incident. Not sure why i am being dog piled here.

Either way it seems odd to reference this as a Paul Wellstone ‘event’

sidenote

You snapped back at me like a stack overflow use

His spelling suggests he's more Reddit.

I mean i was on reddit before the api thing, so ehh. Maybe i interpreted it harsher then it was meant.

While I agree with what others are saying about not using LLMs for fact checking. It is a useful tool to gain context before gathering more research, so I think the downvotes are a bit harsh. I’d recommend using a different LLM - GPT4o had no issues providing me with some context.

I think that the issue was how i was asking for context on Paul Wellstone using the Vietnam memorial. Here was the response i initially received:

“Wellstone did not attempt to film or hold a political event at the Vietnam War Memorial. The controversy you're thinking of might be related to the backlash following his 2002 memorial service, where the event was criticized by some for taking on a political tone.

Wellstone himself was known for his deep respect for veterans and did not engage in actions like filming political content at war memorials. The Vietnam War Memorial is a solemn site, and there hasn't been any documented attempt by Wellstone to use it for political purposes.

If there’s something specific you’d like to discuss or clarify about this, please let me know!”

As you can see it shut down the thought in a manner gpt does not do lightly. So i googled, and found his wikipedia page, and a lite skim painted him as uncontroversial. And i got a lot of google hits on the 2002 plane crash memorial being co-opted for political gains. So i returned here for more context.

I am surprised trump did not try to take a leak on some graves.

Pretty sure Trump just rehired the rapey guy who likes to put his hands on people back to his campaign so this tracks.

Let Trump be Trump.

Trump rehired himself to his campaign?

Just another mini me. Cory Lewandowski I think.

If Arlington is full of real heroes, then why are they all dead? I prefer my heroes ALIVE!!!! SAD!!