President Trump made a rare admission that he made a misstep this week when he should have paid a visit to Arlington National Cemetery on Veterans Day.
Trump did not make the traditional presidential trip to Arlington to visit the Tomb of the Unknown soldier, which Bill Clinton did every year of presidency.
“I should have done that, I was extremely busy on calls for the country,” he told Chris Wallace of Fox News today. “We did a lot of calling as you know.”
The White House has not disclosed to whom the president was calling.
Trump acknowledged he was wrong not to go to the cemetery that’s three miles down the road.
“I could have done that, as you know I just left the day before the American Cemetery and I probably think, and that was one where it was raining as hard as you can imagine,” he said of the persistent drizzle. “I probably, you know, in retrospect I should have and I did last year and I will virtually every year.”
Trump suggested that he was also a tad jet-lagged, having arrived at the White House at nearly 8:30 pm EDT after leaving France.
“We had come in very late at night and I had just left, literally, the American Cemetery in Paris,” he explained to Wallace. “I really probably assumed that was fine and I was extremely busy because of affairs of state — doing other things.”
Trump couldn’t get out from under the scrutiny this Veterans Day, after courting controversy in France when they missed an event at a WWI cemetery and memorial site dedicated to Americans.
Their trip to Belleau Wood, just outside of Paris, was called off amid a light rain when the Secret Service assessed it was too dangerous for the president’s helicopter to take off in France.
Critics pounced, with one calling the president “low energy.”