Donald Trump on Tuesday blamed his presidential administration for rigging the 2020 election against him. But understanding why he did so requires some important background about the political moment — and how we got here.

Among the ways in which the 2016 presidential election upended American politics was the effect that it had on social media companies. While social media had existed before that contest, then-Twitter and Facebook emerged as central conduits for commentary and jokes about the candidates and their campaigns. Fans of Trump, particularly from the right-most edge of his support base, used social media to mock, mislead and at times harass his opponents. As we later learned, Russian actors were simultaneously using the platforms to sow division in the United States, to limited effect.

Those social media companies faced new pressure to crack down on abuse and falsehoods. They implemented more robust protections aimed at making it easier to sideline bad information and bad actors. And, in short order, they faced a new pressure: complaints, largely from the political right, that the mechanisms meant to foster a more positive community were disproportionately — and, many claimed, intentionally — muffling conservatives.

This was a classic example of conflated causes. Conservatives often saw content removed or their accounts demoted, but because of their content, not their politics. Prominent voices on the left were given similar limits, but at a smaller scale and without an overarching narrative of social media companies being out to get the political right.

Then 2020 arrived. The existing tensions over how social media companies policed content and users were supercharged by the coronavirus pandemic (which triggered a flurry of misinformation about the virus and, later, vaccines) and the election. Trump himself saw posts flagged as misinformation — because he was promoting misinformation.

None of this is to say that the social media companies were flawless in implementing their rules. The companies have said they made mistakes in limiting content, mistakes that were often obvious in the moment. But there’s no mystery about their motivations: trying to create environments in which people weren’t actively abused or misinformed.

Unfortunately for the companies, their efforts were already framed as partisan by the time 2020 arrived, both for the reasons above and for vaguer, based-in-lefty-California reasons. As Donald Trump was casting around to assert blame for his loss, the social media companies became rich targets. They temporarily limited the sharing of a news story about a laptop owned by Joe Biden’s son Hunter! They muffled claims that the election was being stolen or had been stolen! When Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) announced that he would block electors submitted by the state of Pennsylvania during the vote counting on Jan. 6, 2021, he cited the effects of “Big Tech” in the vote results.

Since Trump left office, the right’s attacks on social media companies have metastasized. They’ve been criticized (occasionally fairly) for their heavy hand in dealing with misinformation about the pandemic. That the companies had interactions with government officials centered on preventing election and vaccine misinformation has been presented as government efforts at “censorship.” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s efforts through his private foundation to improve election systems during the pandemic-affected 2020 election were isolated for their own misleading condemnation.

The actions of technology companies became a centerpiece of right-wing criticism, without a countervailing defense in the public conversation from the left. It is probably not surprising, then, that on Monday Zuckerberg responded to a request from the hard-right-Republican-led House Judiciary Committee with a letter broadly ceding the debate.

In his letter, Zuckerberg addressed three issues: Facebook’s approach to covid misinformation, the decision to limit sharing of the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop and the foundation’s contributions to the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) aimed at backstopping resources for elections administrators.

On the first point, Zuckerberg criticized the Biden administration for its efforts to get Facebook to address coronavirus misinformation — a political win for his Republican critics.

“Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own our decisions, including COVID-19-related changes we made to our enforcement in the wake of this pressure,” he wrote. “I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it.”

The line between what Zuckerberg describes as “pressure” and that the decisions were ultimately Meta’s will be blurred. What’s more, the Supreme Court recently rejected the idea that the administration had crossed an unacceptable line. But this is almost exactly what Republicans wanted him to say.

The second point, about Hunter Biden’s laptop, is not new. It’s been understood for years that the FBI, hoping to avoid a 2016-like scenario in which foreign actors flood the election with stolen or invented information, was advising private companies on what to watch out for. Zuckerberg himself has previously stated that warnings from the government led to Facebook’s decision to briefly limit the New York Post story, something he indicated he regretted.

But through some combination of amnesia and opportunism, this part of his letter became a point of celebration on the right. (Similar outbursts have occurred before.) The Post put the story on its cover. And then Trump offered that post on Truth Social, the social media company he helped found after he was banned from Facebook and Twitter following the Capitol riot.

“Zuckerberg admits that the White House pushed to SUPPRESS HUNTER BIDEN LAPTOP STORY (& much more!),” he wrote, apparently paraphrasing Rep. Laurel Lee (R-Fla.), after she appeared on Fox News. “IN OTHER WORDS, THE 2020 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION WAS RIGGED.”

Again, when the laptop story broke in October 2020, the president was Donald Trump. Also again, the response to that story was not demonstrably a factor in the election outcome.

The last point in Zuckerberg’s letter dealt with the contribution to CTCL, a contribution that included funding that aided elections administration across the country. That included underfunded blue cities and counties, becoming the basis of claims that Zuckerberg was trying to help Democrats win.

“I know that some people believe this work benefited one party over the other,” Zuckerberg wrote, even as he noted that this wasn’t the case. “My goal is to be neutral and not play a role one way or another — or to even appear to be playing a role. So I don’t plan on making a similar contribution this cycle.”

And with that the right’s victory was complete. An admission that the Biden administration had been overzealous — even as he said Facebook made the call. Identifying the FBI as the trigger for the laptop-story response — which he’d said before. And stepping away from bolstering election administration — even while saying that he was only doing so because of misinformed or bad-faith criticism.

It’s ironic: To alleviate pressure he’s felt from government actors, Zuckerberg once again sought to give them what they want.

A new Trump campaign ad this week has gone semi-viral in right-wing social media circles. The ad splices together clips of Vice President Kamala Harris citing the high costs of inflation at an event this month with her past comments extolling the virtues of “Bidenomics.”

“The debate we’ve all been waiting for,” the text on the screen reads, “Harris vs. Harris.”

The ad highlights something Republicans have been apoplectic about: how President Joe Biden’s unpopularity hasn’t seemed to weigh down Harris thus far.

She is, after all, his second-in-command. Doesn’t she also own the outcomes — on the border, on the chaotic 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal and yes, on inflation — that Americans have been so unsatisfied with?

The answer appears to be: Perhaps less than you might think — and certainly less than Republicans hope.

Whether she will maintain that distance between Biden’s liabilities and her candidacy remains to be seen; this is clearly going to be a battleground. But it’s worth drilling down on just how much voters actually do and could connect Harris to those outcomes.

Thus far, polling shows that Harris is performing better than Biden ever did in the 2024 cycle and appears a slight favorite to win the presidency. Her image ratings have improved significantly in recent weeks, making her more popular than both Biden and Donald Trump.

I noted this month that Harris also does better than Biden when you drill down on specific issues. She has significantly closed the gap on what have long appeared to be Democrats’ biggest issue liabilities: the economy and immigration.

It’s possible that’s a temporary sugar high owing to the sudden enthusiasm for having a non-Biden and non-Trump candidate in the race. But there is also reason to believe that she might not suffer too much from being tied to Biden’s policies.

A Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll this month got at this dichotomy in a really interesting and instructive way. It asked Americans how much influence they thought Harris had on the Biden administration’s economic and immigration policies. (On the latter issue, Republicans have sought to label Harris as Biden’s “border czar,” even though her role was more limited than that suggests.)

It turns out they don’t think Harris as vice president played a particularly central role.

On the economy, 64 percent of Americans said Harris had “just some” or “very little” influence within the administration, compared with 33 percent who said she had a “good amount” or a “great deal.”

It was closer on immigration, an area in which Harris took more of a high-profile role. But still Americans said 57-39 that she had only “some” influence or less.

And very few Americans believe she had a “great deal” of influence — just 11 percent on the economy and 15 percent on immigration.

What’s also interesting in these numbers is how the partisans break down. Republicans were actually less likely to say she had at least a “good amount” of influence than Democrats — despite their party trying to attach her to Biden on these issues. Perhaps some of that owes to them viewing her as generally incompetent.

But the group least likely to see her as influential? Independent voters. Fully 70 percent of them said she had relatively little influence on the administration’s economic policies, while 62 percent said she had relatively little influence on immigration.

Only 8 percent of independents said she had a “great deal” of influence on the economy, and only 13 percent said she had a great deal of influence on immigration.

There’s a real question in these numbers about precisely why Americans don’t think she has been more influential. Is it because they didn’t see her much until recently? Is it because they think she’s not particularly strong on policy? Or is it because they think the vice presidency just isn’t that instrumental?

The vice president, after all, has only a couple of major constitutionally defined roles: succeeding the president if need be and casting tiebreaking votes in the Senate.

But regardless, you begin to see how voters might look at Harris and believe that she might be better and even something of a “change” candidate. For now, that’s what they’re doing.

Former president Donald Trump said Tuesday he will participate in a debate next month against Vice President Kamala Harris, two days after he suggested he could skip it.

“I have reached an agreement with the Radical Left Democrats for a Debate with Comrade Kamala Harris,” Trump said on his Truth Social platform, confirming the debate will be Sept. 10 in Philadelphia.

Trump agreed earlier this month to take part in the ABC News debate, which will be his first debate against Harris since she replaced President Joe Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee. But Trump threw the debate into uncertainty Sunday when he criticized ABC as biased in a social media post and suggested people should “stay tuned” about his participation.

The campaigns spent Monday sparring over whether to preserve a rule from Trump’s June debate against Biden where the candidates’ microphones were muted when it was not their turn to speak. The Harris campaign said the microphones should be live throughout the Sept. 10 debate, while Trump’s campaign argued for the “the exact same terms” from the June debate with CNN.

Trump himself sent mixed messages, saying during a campaign stop in Virginia that the microphone muting “doesn’t matter to me” and that he would “rather have it probably on, but the agreement [for the Sept. 10 debate] was that it was the same as it was last time.”

Trump on Tuesday said the rules for the Sept. 10 debate “will be the same as the last CNN debate.”

The Harris campaign and ABC did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The Sept. 10 debate is the only debate to which Trump and Harris have both agreed so far. Trump has pushed for more debates, while Harris’s campaign has said she is open to that if Trump shows up for the Sept. 10 debate.

Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), is scheduled to debate Harris’s running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, on Oct. 1 on CBS News.

Like many North Carolina residents, Susan Hogarth visited her local school in March to vote in the primary election.

After filling in the ovals next to the names of two Libertarian Party candidates, Hogarth held the ballot under her chin and took a photo of herself with her phone. She posted the selfie from the voting booth on X.

The next week, Hogarth received a letter from the North Carolina State Board of Elections that accused her of committing a misdemeanor, according to a new lawsuit.

North Carolina is one of several states that prohibit taking photos or videos of filled-in ballots. The state’s board of elections said ballot photos “could be used as proof of a vote for a candidate in a vote-buying scheme.”

The state board asked Hogarth to remove her selfie from X, according to a copy of a letter shared by Hogarth’s attorneys. Hogarth refused, and on Thursday she filed a lawsuit arguing that the state’s ban on ballot photos violates voters’ First Amendment rights.

“I want the law to go away,” Hogarth, 57, told The Washington Post.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina, named members of North Carolina’s and Wake County’s boards of elections as defendants. Spokespeople for both boards declined to comment.

Hogarth voted on March 5 at Yates Mill Elementary School in Raleigh, where she entered a booth that was sectioned off on a table by a privacy screen. She filled in her votes for Libertarian Party presidential candidate Chase Oliver and Libertarian Mike Ross for the state’s governor.

Her selfie showed her ballot and a sign in the background that said photos were prohibited. She posted the selfie after leaving the polling place that morning, writing that she disagreed with the ban.

Hogarth, who previously served as the chair of North Carolina’s Libertarian Party, said she had posted a picture of herself on social media with her ballot in the past few years but didn’t receive pushback. She has hoped to promote her selected candidates and encourage others to vote outside the two major parties.

“We don’t have, you know, millions of dollars to put out signs to blanket an area,” Hogarth said. “So any little grassroots thing we can grasp at is important to us.”

Just over a week after posting her selfie, Hogarth received a letter from an investigator for the North Carolina State Board of Elections, informing her that she had run afoul of the law and requesting that she remove the photo from X, Hogarth’s lawsuit said.

Hogarth said she weighed her options: She could delete the post from X, she could leave the post online and see whether the board would pursue charges against her or she could fight the law. Her husband, Bill Knighton, was initially worried about Hogarth facing legal trouble, Hogarth said, but she wanted to try to abolish a law she felt was unnecessary.

Hogarth found that she wasn’t the only person to disagree with the regulations. Many states restrict what ballot photos are allowed and where they can be taken — an issue that came into the national spotlight in 2016 when singer Justin Timberlake removed a selfie of his Tennessee ballot from Instagram.

New Hampshire passed a law prohibiting ballot selfies in 2014, but two courts struck down the ban after calling it unconstitutional. California and Colorado began allowing ballot selfies in 2017 after reversing long-standing laws.

A federal judge in New York, meanwhile, refused to authorize ballot selfies in 2017, saying the absence of photos in polling places protects against fraud and prevents delays at the polls. Texas prohibits photographs within 100 feet of a polling station.

Photographing a voted ballot in North Carolina is a Class 1 misdemeanor, which carries a maximum penalty of 120 days in jail and a fine.

Karen Brinson Bell, the executive director of the North Carolina State Board of Elections, said in a statement in 2020 that instead of taking selfies at the voting booth, “there are legal ways to display your voting pride, such as wearing your ‘I Voted’ sticker or taking a picture outside of the precinct.”

On March 20, Hogarth posted a picture of the letter she said she received from the board and wrote the caption: “Absolutely not.” She began looking for legal representation and connected with attorney Jeff Zeman, who told The Post that voters should be able to take photos “without the fear of prosecution.”

“At the very center of the idea of political speech is, you know, telling people what you did when the rubber met the road — you put your money where your mouth is and you voted for the person; you took action to try to make change,” Zeman said. “And, you know, the picture itself does that and so much more.”

Hogarth didn’t reply to the letter from the state’s board of elections, she said, but charges have not been filed against her, and she plans to take another selfie when she votes in November. She’ll have extra motivation to endorse the candidates she selects: Hogarth will appear on the ballot as a Libertarian Party candidate running for a state Senate seat.

President Joe Biden approved the plan for delivering humanitarian aid to Gaza via a floating military pier despite warnings from within the U.S. government that rough waves could pose significant challenges and objections from officials who feared the operation would detract from a diplomatic push to compel Israel to open additional land routes into the war zone, according to an inspector general report published Tuesday.

The watchdog for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which oversees Washington’s humanitarian work abroad, cited various “external factors” that it said impaired the agency’s effort to distribute food and other supplies brought to Gaza over the pier. Among them, according to the report, were the security requirements imposed by the Pentagon to protect U.S. military personnel working aboard the structure just offshore.

“Multiple USAID staff expressed concerns” that the Biden administration’s focus on the pier undercut the agency’s advocacy for opening more land crossings — an approach, the report said, deemed “more efficient and proven.”

“Once the President issued the directive,” the report states, “the Agency’s focus was to use [the pier] as effectively as possible.”

The pier was attached to Gaza’s coastline in May amid rising concerns of famine that prompted the Pentagon to begin airdropping food into Gaza. But from the start, the mission was dogged by logistical and security setbacks, including rough seas that broke apart the structure, looting of aid trucks on land and a persistent logjam moving food from a staging area ashore due to worries that Israeli bombardment would kill the workers tasked with distributing it. The operation was halted for good last month.

The report is likely to embolden Biden’s critics who have questioned why he put U.S. troops in harm’s way for a mission that could have been avoided if he had successfully persuaded Israeli officials to curtail their blockade on Gaza established in October after Hamas militants led the deadly cross-border attack that triggered the war. While Israeli officials have said they are allowing aid into Palestinian territory, humanitarian groups assess that it is insufficient to feed the roughly 2 million people trapped by the violence.

A National Security Council spokesman, Sean Savett, said in a statement after the report’s publication that the pier was “part of a comprehensive U.S.-led response to the dire humanitarian situation in northern Gaza,” one that also included food deliveries made through border crossings and via airdrop.

“From the beginning, we said this would not be easy,” Savett said. “We were honest and transparent about the challenges. But the bottom line is that … the United States has left no stone unturned in our efforts to get more aid in, and the pier played a key role at a critical time in advancing that goal.”

Sabrina Singh, a Pentagon spokeswoman, said the Pentagon is aware of the new report. The pier, she said, “achieved its goal of providing an additive means of delivering high volumes of humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza.” USAID, the Defense Department and Israeli officials collaborated closely on the mission, she said, including about where along the Gazan coastline to attach the pier.

A senior administration official said there was “consistent interagency coordination and communication about the pier” as plans took shape and that internal concerns were taken into account. Like some others interviewed for this story, the official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

A USAID official said planning for the operation was a multiagency effort that included extensive discussions with the United Nations and humanitarian partners about how to reach the areas of greatest need. USAID staff advocated early in the planning process for additional personnel dedicated solely to the pier, to allow the agency to juggle issues about the land crossing and pier simultaneously, the officials said.

Critics have cast the pier project as a national embarrassment. “The only miracle is that this doomed-from-the-start operation did not cost any American lives,” Sen. Roger Wicker (Miss.), the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said earlier this summer as the mission faced one setback after another.

Within the U.S. government, discussions about employing the floating pier began before Biden announced during his State of the Union address in March that he was establishing a “maritime corridor” to assist starving Palestinians. While USAID officials initially observed that the pier system “was not an option USAID would typically recommend in humanitarian response operations,” they began looking for ways to use it “in a way that would maintain a separation between the military and humanitarian actors” inside Gaza, the report said.

Acting at Biden’s direction, USAID requested Defense Department support for a 90-day operation that cost roughly $230 million, the report said. The pier, ferried to the eastern Mediterranean Sea by U.S. Army vessels, was first attached to the Gaza coast May 16, but within days it broke apart in rough waves, causing about $22 million in damage and knocking it offline. U.S. troops repaired and reattached the pier days later but faced continued unpredictability about when weather would allow for aid deliveries.

“From the start, rough weather posed a major challenge,” the report said.

Defense Department guidelines for the sea-based pier make clear its usage is weather-dependent and that it cannot operate when waves are taller than two feet, but the Mediterranean often has “significant winds and waves” that exceed that, the report said. This factor surfaced during a planning meeting by a Defense Department official with expertise working on the system, the inspector general found.

“Ultimately,” the report said, “the pier operated for about 20 days and was decommissioned on July 17.”

The deployment also generated concerns that U.S. personnel, working from a fixed site in an active war zone, could be targeted by militants. Defense officials, consulting with USAID and Israeli counterparts, decided they could best protect the site if it was attached in central Gaza, but that conflicted with a “prerequisite” from the United Nations’ World Food Program to have it located in northern Gaza, where the need was greatest, the report said.

The World Food Program also sought independent security due to concerns about remaining neutral in the conflict, but no solution was ever found, the report said. Instead, Israeli forces protected the beachhead facility where food was brought ashore.

The watchdog found that despite USAID’s role as the U.S. government lead on humanitarian assistance in Gaza, the agency had “limited control” over the decision to use the pier, where it would be located and who would provide security. The agency, the report said, should look for lessons it can draw from the experience.

Alex Horton contributed to this report.

Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, will participate in a sit-down interview with CNN’s Dana Bash on Thursday, the network announced on Tuesday.

The broadcast will mark the first joint interview with Harris and Walz since he joined the campaign and the first time Harris will sit for an in-depth, on-the-record conversation since President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 race and endorsed her to be the Democratic presidential nominee.

The interview is expected to take place while Harris and Walz are traveling through south Georgia on Thursday on a bus tour of the battleground state. It is scheduled to air on CNN at 9 p.m. Eastern on Thursday.

Bash, a veteran of the network, was one of the moderators of June’s presidential debate between Biden and former president Donald Trump. Biden’s halting debate performance that night has largely been seen as the impetus for the broader conversations within the Democratic Party that led to his decision to bow out of the 2024 race.

Harris has faced growing pressure to participate in an on-the-record, in-depth interview since she emerged as the Democratic presidential candidate last month and, last week, became the party’s formal nominee. Since taking the mantle from Biden, Harris has been pressed to take part in a comprehensive interview to face difficult questions on a number of issues, including her major policy pivots. She told campaign reporters nearly three weeks ago that she wanted to “get an interview scheduled before the end of the month” — and CNN’s interview will come in two days ahead of her own deadline.

Harris has participated in sit-down interviews with Bash during other key political moments in recent years. She told Bash during a 2020 sit-down that Trump and then-Attorney General William P. Barr were living in “a different reality” by denying the existence of systemic racism. Harris sat with Bash for her first one-on-one interview with the network since being sworn in as vice president and gave the CNN anchor the first vice-presidential interview after Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022. In the latter interview, Harris made news when she said that she never believed Trump’s Supreme Court justices would preserve the landmark abortion law.

Brian Hughes, a Trump campaign senior adviser, said in a statement, “Since it’s all the American people can get, we will expect that CNN holds them accountable for their past failures and the constant disavowal of years of dangerously liberal policies they’ve supported right up until their pollsters took over a month ago.”

On the bus tour, the Harris campaign has said that Harris and Walz “will meet directly with voters in their communities.” The swing through south Georgia is expected to conclude with a rally in the Savannah area featuring Harris on Thursday night.

Arlington National Cemetery officials on Tuesday acknowledged an unspecified “incident” during Donald Trump’s visit on Monday on the three-year anniversary of the Afghanistan withdrawal, as dueling allegations of misbehavior overshadowed an event to honor American war dead.

An NPR report on Tuesday cited an unidentified source with knowledge of the incident who said Trump campaign staff pushed and verbally attacked a cemetery official who tried to stop them from taking photos and video in an area of the cemetery called Section 60 where many U.S. service members who died in recent conflicts are buried. The cemetery said in a statement that federal law bars photography for political campaign purposes at the site.

But Trump campaign communications director Steven Cheung said that “there was no physical altercation as described,” that the campaign was given permission to bring a photographer, and that they are “prepared to release footage” to defend against “defamatory claims.”

Cheung also claimed, without providing evidence or details, that “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.”

Responding to an inquiry about an alleged altercation during Trump’s visit, Arlington National Cemetery issued a statement that read: “We can confirm there was an incident, and a report was filed.” The organization did not share more details. It was not immediately clear to whom the report was filed, but the incident occurred on U.S. Army property. Army headquarters and the service’s criminal investigation division did not immediately respond to requests Tuesday night for clarification.

Visitors have long taken graveside photographs in Arlington National Cemetery, including in Section 60. But in a statement released on Tuesday, defense officials drew a distinction between Trump’s actions and those of typical visitors.

“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,” the cemetery’s statement said. “Arlington National Cemetery reinforced and widely shared this law and its prohibitions with all participants.”

The Trump campaign did not immediately share the footage they claimed to have.

They shared a statement from Cheryl Juels, whose niece Nicole Gee died in the Afghanistan exit and who joined Trump at the cemetery on Monday. Juels said she and her family “absolutely welcomed and appreciated having video and photography there with us during the time we spent with President Trump.” She praised Trump for visiting Section 60 to lay flowers at gravesites, talk with family members and discuss Gee’s life.

Trump visited the cemetery on Monday on the third anniversary of an Aug. 26, 2021, suicide bombing that unfolded outside the Kabul airport as the U.S. pulled out of Afghanistan, killing 13 American service members and scores more Afghans.

As president, Trump struck a deal with the Taliban to exchange prisoners and set a timetable to withdraw American forces from Afghanistan. But he criticized the ultimate exit during the Biden presidency, saying the execution was botched.

The GOP presidential nominee joined a wreath-laying ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknowns and spoke with relatives of those slain in the Kabul bombing, as his campaign attacked the Biden administration’s handling of the Afghanistan exit.

“This month marks the three-year anniversary of the most embarrassing moment in the history of our country,” Trump said in a video posted to his Truth Social account that day.

The allegations published by NPR come as Trump pitches himself as a champion of the military but also faces scrutiny of his comments on veterans. Trump’s former chief of staff, John Kelly, has publicly accused him of referring to American War casualties as “suckers,” an allegation Trump denies.

Trump also drew fire earlier this month for saying that an award recognizing civilian contributions to society is “much better” than one bestowed on members of the military because many of those who receive that award are wounded or killed in combat.

Top campaign adviser Chris LaCivita said in a statement Tuesday that Trump went to the Arlington Cemetery at the invitation of Gold Star families who lost loved ones in the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and added: “For a despicable individual to physically prevent President Trump’s team from accompanying him to this solemn event is a disgrace and does not deserve to represent the hollowed [sic] grounds of Arlington National Cemetery.”

LaCivita, who was wounded in combat as Marine, has led GOP efforts to criticize Democratic vice-presidential nominee Gov. Tim Walz’s descriptions of his military record and previously helmed the Republican campaign to attack John F. Kerry’s military service in the 2004 election.

Arlington National Cemetery is considered hallowed ground in the U.S. military, and is managed by the Army. Section 60, where Trump visited Monday, is the final resting place for many U.S. service members who were killed in recent conflicts, including some of the U.S. service members who died in the Afghanistan suicide bombing.

Hau Chu contributed to this report.

Former president Donald Trump leveled partial blame against President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris for the assassination attempt against him, suggesting without evidence that they personally made it more difficult for the Secret Service to better protect him.

“When this happened, people would ask, whose fault is it?” Trump said in an interview that aired Tuesday night with Phil McGraw, who is known widely by his TV nickname, Dr. Phil. “I think to a certain extent it’s Biden’s fault and Harris’s fault. And I’m the opponent. Look, they were weaponizing government against me, they brought in the whole DOJ to try and get me, they weren’t too interested in my health and safety,” he added, reprising his claim that Biden used the Justice Department to go after him through legal charges. Biden has said he has never involved himself in decisions about charging individuals.

“They were making it very difficult to have proper staffing in terms of Secret Service,” Trump said.

Trump’s comments marked an escalation in accusations against a sitting president and vice president, the latter of whom is his current opponent. Although Trump has previously written on social media that the “Biden/Harris administration did not properly protect” him, his comments in the interview took his claims a step further by personally blaming Biden and Harris, even though both have condemned the assassination attempt.

Trump’s aides have had a tense relationship with Secret Service leadership over the former president’s security after top officials repeatedly denied requests for additional protection before the attempted assassination. Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle resigned last month amid anger over the agency’s inability to prevent the attempted assassination.

The attempted assassination at a rally in Butler, Pa., highlighted the significant challenges the agency has faced in protecting Trump. The Secret Service recently approved a plan to increase Trump’s protection at outdoor campaign events, including using bulletproof glass. Some members of Biden’s protective detail have been dispatched to Trump and Harris ahead of the November election.

But no public evidence has emerged that Biden or Harris were personally involved in decisions about Trump’s protection.

The FBI has said that the shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, appears to have acted alone and have found little evidence that ideology drove his actions. Yet Trump and other Republicans have baselessly blamed the assassination attempt on Democratic rhetoric warning that Trump would undermine democracy. Trump echoed those claims in his interview with Dr. Phil.

“They’re saying I’m a threat to democracy,” Trump said. “They would say that, that was standard line, just keep saying it, and you know that can get assassins or potential assassins going. That’s a terrible thing … Maybe that bullet is because of their rhetoric.”

Trump has repeatedly made baseless accusations about the weaponization of government, ranging from claims about his legal cases to his recent suggestion that the Bureau of Labor Statistics revised economics data because of a whistleblower. A special counsel acting independently of the Trump White House brought the two federal cases against him.