Donald Trump is now showing clips from Stanley Kubrick’s Vietnam-era war film Full Metal Jacket to try to make the case that the U.S. military—in its current state under the Biden administration—is far removed from its glory days.
But Trump, who appears to have an at-best tenuous understanding of depictions of that war on the big screen, was quite selective in the brief excerpts of the 1987 movie that he showed a Pennsylvania crowd Wednesday. R. Lee Ermey’s character, Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, was featured prominently, in particular his loud, in-your-face commands at the marines-in-training.
Not included in the video package, though, was Hartman’s fate: being shot to death by a recruit he often mocked, who in turn kills himself.
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Putting the underlying theme of Full Metal Jacket—certainly not a John Wayne-type ode to U.S. exceptionalism—to the side, Trump tried to portray it as an antithesis to the military’s “radical woke left ideology.” Interspersed with movie clips were ones that the former president apparently found representative of the current state of affairs: Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine, who is transgender, marking Pride month, and random TikTok videos of men in drag.
The video concluded with bold text reading “Let’s make our military great again” as the recruits chant about “working for Uncle Sam” while jogging.
“So,” Trump commented after the video ended, “It’s a little exaggeration—probably, really not that much.”
Last week, after Trump praised the performance of Ermey, a Marine drill instructor who died in 2018, co-star Matthew Modine weighed in.
“For the record, I agree, #FullMetalJacket is a great film and R. Lee Ermey was amazing, but he might have punched the orange man in the nose for disrespecting Americans who gave their lives so that the nation might live,” he wrote on X, alluding to how Trump—as The Atlantic reported in 2020—called Americans who died in war “losers” and “suckers.”
Trump himself managed to avoid the Vietnam draft after a sudden and suspicious diagnosis of bone spurs in his heels, despite him being a healthy and athletic 22-year-old, saw him ruled out on medical grounds in 1968.
