SALT LAKE CITY — Utah Republican Gov. Spencer Cox came under criticism Wednesday for sending a campaign email that included a photo of him and Donald Trump at Arlington National Cemetery during a wreath-laying ceremony.
Federal law prohibits campaign or election-related activities within Army National Military Cemeteries and that rule was widely shared before the Monday ceremony, Arlington National Cemetery said Wednesday.
Cox’s campaign apologized for using the photo and politicizing the graveside ceremony, which honored Sgt. Darin Taylor Hoover of Utah who was one of 13 who died in Afghanistan three years ago. The email was soliciting donations for his reelection bid.
“This was not a campaign event and was never intended to be used by the campaign,” the governor wrote in a post on X. “It did not go through the proper channels and should not have been sent.”
Trump’s campaign faced its own blowback after an altercation between his staff and cemetery works. Trump’s campaign was warned about not taking photographs before the altercation at Arlington National Cemetery during a wreath-laying ceremony earlier this week to honor service members killed in the Afghanistan War withdrawal, a defense official told The Associated Press on Wednesday.
Cox is expected to comfortably win his reelection in November in the Republican-dominated state after breezing to victory in the primary over an ardent Trump supporter, Phil Lyman, who espoused false claims of election fraud following the 2020 presidential election.
The Republican governor recently surprised voters when he pledged his support to Trump after the president’s July assassination attempt, despite saying days earlier on CNN that he hadn’t voted for Trump in 2016 or 2020 and would not cast a ballot for him again this year. Cox’s sudden embrace of Trump, who has not endorsed him back, represents a puzzling departure from his carefully curated persona as a Mitt Romney-esque moderate.
In addition to critiques in the comment thread of his social media accounts, Cox’s opponent in November, Democratic state Rep. Brian King, said it was disrespectful for Trump and Cox to use a veterans’ memorial event as a campaign photo-op, and he called on the Republican governor to rescind his Trump endorsement.