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With three weeks to go before the U.S. presidential election, the Trump campaign is tripling down on its plan to ride anti-LGBTQ+ hate to the White House, with a new ad that bizarrely recuts Full Metal Jacket as pro-war propaganda.
Trump posted the ad to his own account on X, formerly Twitter, on Sunday, along with the message “WE WILL NOT HAVE A WOKE MILITARY!” In it, scenes from director Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket — which, we’ll remind you, is a film about the brutality of war and the Marine Corps’ horrific dehumanization of soldiers — are interspersed with videos of drag queens and footage of Dr. Rachel Levine, whose image was also used for Trump’s “Kamala is for They/Them” ad campaign. The video purports to illustrate the difference between “Trump’s military” (represented by a greatest-hits compilation of verbal abuse from R. Lee Ermey as Gunnery Sergeant Hartman) and that of “Comrade Kamala Harris.”
The ad notably contains no credits — there is no text or audio declaring who financed its creation, as broadcast campaign ads are required by federal law to include. As a result, the video would not be legally playable on TV as a campaign ad in its current form, but that may not be the game Trump is playing. After all, the video’s editing and meme-adjacent vibe is perfect for sharing on social media.
Those images are contrasted with two videos of drag queens, plus a clip of Dr. Levine — who is currently Assistant Secretary for Health and an admiral in the Public Health Service Commissioned Corps (which is not part of the Department of Defense and is only comprised of noncombatants). The video also uses social media footage of Harpy Daniels, a queen currently enlisted in the Navy who participated in a short-lived recruitment campaign in 2023. Another drag performer in the video was not identified as of Wednesday, but several watermarks remained in the Trump video. One watermark sourced the video to TikTok user NotInRegss, a since-deleted backup account for a popular military humor page. The other, imposed over the center of the footage, reads “LibsOfTikTok,” the anti-LGBTQ+ propaganda campaign begun several years ago by Chaya Raichik. The juxtaposition falls back on antiquated stereotypes to deliver a typically authoritarian message of “strength over weakness,” much like when failed GOP candidate Valentina Gomez told her own would-be constituents not to be “weak and gay” earlier this year.
You may be wondering “hold on, wasn’t Full Metal Jacket an anti-military movie?” If so, congratulations on knowing literally anything about Full Metal Jacket. The scenes pulled for Trump’s video infamously occur shortly before Private Pyle (Vincent D'Onofrio) has a full mental breakdown and kills both Hartman and himself. It’s the film’s first and most enduring illustration of how the U.S. military traumatizes, consumes, and discards its soldiers in an ultimately pointless waste of life. (A representative for D’Onofrio told Entertainment Weekly that the actor “did not provide any consent for this usage by the Trump Campaign.”) In Trump’s macabre calculus, however — and that of other Republicans like Senate candidate Hung Cao — Hartman’s tirade of abuse becomes an example of how a strong military should be run: maximum cruelty, minimal queer people.
Perhaps even stranger than the video itself was the response it provoked from Kubrick’s daughter, Vivian Kubrick. In her own post to X, Kubrick said Trump’s use of Full Metal Jacket indeed ran counter to the film’s message, but said she approved of it anyway, because “you need a very strong military” and her father had supported Ronald Reagan. “I’m going to stick with the idea that FMJ footage was used primarily because of its powerful, realistic portrayal of boot camp, juxtaposed with the entirely demoralizing and inappropriate injection of WOKE ideology into the USA military,” Kubrick wrote, adding she believed her father would have supported Trump and approved his usage “if it helps the cause of freedom!”
But Matthew Modine, the actor who starred as Private Joker in the film, had a very different take. Modine pointed out to Entertainment Weekly via an emailed statement that Trump is utilizing Nazi tactics to seize and hold onto power, a strategy he consistently resorted to in his previous two election cycles. (Earlier this year, the Trump campaign even posted, then deleted, a video that mentioned a “unified Reich.”)
“[I]ronically, Trump has twisted and profoundly distorted Kubrick's powerful anti-war film into a perverse, homophobic, and manipulative tool of propaganda,” Modine told EW, referencing the filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, who expressed regret for creating Nazi propaganda films shortly before her death. “It is no exaggeration to see Trump's reflection in the terrible figure Hitler was [...] Trump has shown us who he is and made no secret of what he intends to do.”
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