Arlington Cemetery Wreath Laying Live Stream: How To Watch Donald Trump And Mike Pence Honor US Veterans

President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect Mike Pence will kick off three days of inauguration festivities Thursday with a wreath laying ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. The burial ground sits across the river from the Lincoln Memorial, where a slew of performers will take the stage for Trump’s Welcome Celebration immediately after the wreath laying event.

To watch the soon-to-be-president honor U.S. veterans in real time Thursday afternoon, viewers can tune into C-SPAN 1. The events start at 3:30 p.m.

Thursday likely won’t be Trump’s only trip to Arlington in the next four years. Presidents often head to the cemetery, which houses more than 400,000 fallen U.S. armed service members, for ceremonies on Memorial Day and Veterans Day. In fact, President Barack Obama sparked a flurry of criticism from right-wing pundits when he opted to honor American troops at the Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery in Elwood, Illinois, on Memorial Day in 2010, rather than at the Virginia burial ground’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

Obama laid a large, floral wreath at that very tomb—beneath which unidentified fallen soldiers from World Wars I and II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War are laid to rest—for his last Memorial Day as president on May 30, and did so again for the final Veterans Day of his time in office, on Nov. 11.

Presidents tend to use such ceremonies as a springboard for discussing veterans’ issues and their own policies. After enumerating his administration’s accomplishments—lowering vets’ unemployment, increasing their funding and lowering the homelessness rate among retired service men and women—Obama noted that 20 former soldiers take their lives daily.

“We have to keep solving problems like long wait times at the VA,” he said, according to a White House transcript. “We have to keep cutting the disability claims backlog. We have to resist any effort to outsource and privatize the health care we owe America’s veterans.”

Trump has so far got off on a rocky footing with veterans, insulting a pair of Gold Star parents in July and criticizing Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona) for his time as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. (The Khans' son, Humayun, is buried at Arlington.) Ahead of the wreath laying ceremony, he already appeared to be working on a fresh start.