Trump and Vance Honor Veterans at Arlington Ceremony
President Trump and Vice President Vance pay tribute to veterans at Arlington National Cemetery on Veterans Day.
3 min read
President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance joined War Secretary Pete Hegseth and veterans from across the country at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia to lay wreaths and deliver remarks in honor of Veterans Day.
President Trump places a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery on Veterans Day. Watch OAN on OAN Live for more updates. pic.twitter.com/dBQwJoYwPC
Trump was welcomed to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier by the Armed Forces Honor Guard and the United States Army Band at the commencement of the ceremony on Wednesday.
President Trump, Vice President Vance, and Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins salute as Taps is played at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Watch OAN on OAN Live for more updates. pic.twitter.com/QGuW0Sm2N0
The president placed a red, white and blue decorated wreath before the 1932 monument, which honors a World War I soldier whose remains were unidentifiable. The band played “Taps,” a solemn military bugle call often played at military memorials and funerals across all branches of the U.S. Armed Forces.
The wreath-laying took place near the site of President Trump’s proposed 250-foot “triumphal arch,” which he said would be dedicated to America’s veterans.
First Lady Melania Trump, Second Lady Usha Vance, Attorney General Todd Blanche and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Kash Patel were also in attendance.
Vance, the first Marine Corps veteran to serve as vice president of the United States, took the podium to highlight President Abraham Lincoln’s remarks likening the veterans of his time — the Revolutionary War fighters who had begun to pass away — to a beautiful forest that began to lose its oak trees.
“The first memorial to our nation’s freedoms and the wars that made them possible were our veterans,” Vance stated.
“To our generations who served in the military, our most important monuments are you,” he continued. “It is the people who had the courage and the willpower and the fight to put on the uniform of the United States of America and say ‘Don’t send my neighbor, send me.’”
This phrase from Vance harkened back to the War Department’s “Send Me” Tour, which references the Bible verse Isaiah 6:8, in which the prophet Isaiah recounts a vision of God saying, “Whom shall I send?” to which he replied, “Here am I. Send me!”
Vance called upon the current and future generations of Americans to “pick up the torch” in response to previous generations of veterans aging and passing.
“Let me say, as one veteran to the next, we are picking up that torch every single day. We will never leave our veterans behind,” Vance said. “Ladies and gentlemen, that is my most sacred promise to every person here today.”
Vance then invited the president to speak.
“A nation without heroes is like a sky without stars or a heaven without angels, but in America, we’ve never known that darkness,” Trump remarked.
Trump praised Corporal Wilbur Jackson “Jack” Myers, a 103-year-old World War II veteran in attendance, for his service during the Battle of the Bulge, when he helped to liberate the Dachau concentration camp, Nazi Germany’s first regular concentration camp. Trump described this mission as Myers “coming face-to-face with the evil he risked his life to destroy.”
The president said he was proud to have “done more to improve care for American veterans than any president in modern history.” He highlighted his signing of the Veterans Affairs (VA) Accountability and Whistleblower Protection Act of 2017 and the VA Home Loan Program Reform Act of 2025.
“America’s veterans have always fulfilled their duty to us and while I’m president of the United States, we will always fulfill our duty to them,” Trump stated.
Source: OANN
