Once in a while, Stephen Colbert will kick off his Late Show with an animated sketch—often featuring his cartoon President Trump, whose Showtime series will debut Feb. 13.
On Tuesday night, he aired a mock TV commercial. The ad was inspired by the recent comments of Tammy Duckworth, a Democratic senator from Illinois—and decorated Army veteran who lost both of her legs while serving in Iraq. After President Trump called the Democrats who didn’t applaud during his State of the Union “treasonous,” Sen. Duckworth fired back:
“We don’t live in a dictatorship or a monarchy. I swore an oath—in the military and in the Senate—to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, not to mindlessly cater to the whims of Cadet Bone Spurs and clap when he demands I clap,” she tweeted Monday night.
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Duckworth was referring to the five draft deferments that President Trump sought to avoid serving in the Vietnam War—the last of which was due to apparent heel spurs, a condition that has, according to the information released to the public, failed to resurface in any of the president’s medical exams since. To add insult to injury, Trump once claimed in a 1997 interview with Howard Stern that sleeping around in the ’80s and ’90s during the height of the AIDS crisis was “my personal Vietnam.”
“I’ve been so lucky in terms of that whole world. It is a dangerous world out there. It’s scary, like Vietnam. Sort of like the Vietnam era,” Trump told Stern. “It is my personal Vietnam. I feel like a great and very brave soldier.”
Oh, and there was also the time President Trump said that Sen. John McCain, a Navy pilot who spent five-and-a-half years imprisoned and tortured in the “Hanoi Hilton” during the Vietnam War, was “not a war hero” because he was “captured.”
So The Late Show opened Tuesday’s show with a retro parody TV ad for a new G.I. Joe action figure modeled on Donald Trump, aka “Cadet Bonespurs.”
“Get ready for Hasbro’s newest G.I. Joe character: Cadet Bonespurs!” the narrator said. “He’d love to charge bravely into battle, it’s just that he has this thing with his heel which causes occasional minor foot pain… Cadet Bonespurs! It will be the greatest fun you’ve ever had playing soldier—or in his case, avoiding playing soldier to date models.”
Sen. Duckworth hasn’t only brought up Trump’s draft-dodging past on Twitter; last month, she railed against him on the Senate floor:
“I spent my entire adult life looking out for the well-being, the training, the equipping of the troops for whom I was responsible. I will not be lectured about what our military needs by a five-deferment draft dodger,” she said.
