President Donald Trump, along with Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, attended the wreath-laying ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery on Memorial Day.

The tradition began after World War I in 1921 on Armistice Day, now known as Veterans Day. The previous year, on Armistice Day, Britain and France designated a tomb for an unknown soldier to represent all the nameless soldiers who fell in battle to become a national shrine where their citizens could gather to mourn.

Inspired by this, the United States buried an unknown soldier in what became known as the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, at the heart of the cemetery, where people can come to pay their respects to those who gave their lives for our country. The act of laying the wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier has become imbued with great symbolic significance and has become a popular tradition, beginning with the first to lay the wreath, President Warren G. Harding.