President Donald Trump laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery to honor America’s fallen heroes on Memorial Day.
Trump, flanked by Vice President JD Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, solemnly saluted the tomb as the National Anthem played.
With silence shrouding Arlington National Cemetery, Trump laid the wreath before the tomb and took a prolonged moment before returning to Vance and Hegseth, where they saluted again to a rendition of “Taps.”
The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier is the final resting place of one of America’s unidentified servicemembers who was killed in action in World War I. The creation of the tomb traces back to legislation proposed in 1920 by Republican New York Rep. Hamilton Fish III (1888-1991), who himself was a World War I veteran.
“The purpose of the legislation was ‘to bring home the body of an unknown American warrior who in himself represents no section, creed, or race in the late war and who typifies, moreover, the soul of America and the supreme sacrifice of her heroic dead,’” Arlington National Cemetery notes.
The soldier who rests in the tomb was selected during a ceremony in France in 1921 from four fallen servicemen whose remains were not identifiable. From there, the unknown soldier was returned to the United States. He lay in state at the Capitol Rotunda before a state funeral at Arlington National Cemetery.
Delivering remarks after the wreath-laying ceremony, Hegseth spoke to the symbolism of the tomb:
It’s a uniquely American tradition that we honor anonymous sacrifice above worldly greatness. While we don’t know the unknown’s identity, race or creed, we know his story. It’s the story of every soldier, every warrior. It’s a simple story as old as war: A young man with hopes and dreams and loves who’s called by his country leaves behind his hometown, his parents, his siblings, his sweetheart — all that he knows — to go fight a war that he may or may not understand. He’s called to go through hell and back: to sleep in a trench, to eat out of a tin cup or on the hood of a Humvee, to pray as bullets and bombs thunder around him, to fear for the bullet or the mortar or the IED or the RPG with his name on it. He does it willingly and stoically because he loves his country, his brothers in arms, and his family. This is the story of the unknown, the story of the fallen soldier who we have gathered today to honor. It is the story of the American warrior.
He emphasized that the unknown soldier “answered the call, fought and died for this Republic, the ultimate sacrifice of a free people.”
“You see, the American soldier fights not because he hates what’s in front of him, but because he loves what’s behind him. We honor his selfless sacrifice, his courage, his duty, and his love,” he continued.
The defense secretary then cited the biblical verse John 15:13: “As Jesus taught His disciples, ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.’”
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