Screenshot of Trump’s ad showing a clip from Full Metal Jacket, with Vincent D’Onofrio and Matthew Modine (center)
Former President Donald Trump posted a video of a web ad attacking the Biden-Harris administration for allegedly seeking to create a “woke” military more concerned about LGBTQ representation than being “tough.”
Trump — who like other Republicans, has seized upon LGBTQ issues as one way to appeal to the party’s socially conservative base voters — has previously made the same attack at some of his campaign rallies.
The ad compares two conflicting “visions” of the military in Trump’s view. For Trump’s military vision, it includes clips from Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 war epic Full Metal Jacket. For Kamala Harris, meanwhile, it depicts a military that cherishes and respects the LGBTQ community, which the former president considers ruinous.
Ironically, Full Metal Jacket is an anti-war, anti-military movie, as the drill sergeant shown — R. Lee Ermey — abusing members of the platoon meets his fate when a recruit (Vincent D’Onofrio) he has pushed to the breaking point shoots him dead before committing suicide.
To show what the military would look like under “Comrade Kamala,” the ad utilizes a clip of Admiral Rachel Levine, the Assistant Secretary of Health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, wishing LGBTQ military members a happy Pride Month and saying, “Let’s make it a summer of Pride.”
The ad also uses clips from what appear to be three separate TikTok videos from out naval officer Joshua Kelley, who performs in drag as “Harpy Daniels.”
Kelley, who has previously performed as Harpy during events organized by the Navy’s Morale, Welfare and Recreation Department, announced in 2022 they had been chosen as a “Digital Ambassador” by the Navy to help boost recruitment.
By deploying clips of a prominent transgender woman and a drag queen, Trump’s implied message is that a military under a Democratic administration fosters an atmosphere where people are “weak and gay.”
“WE WILL NOT HAVE A WOKE MILITARY!” Trump wrote in a caption on X featuring the video clip.
“Trump has twisted and profoundly distorted Kubrick’s powerful anti-war film into a perverse, homophobic, and manipulative tool of propaganda,” the film’s star Matthew Modine told Entertainment Weekly.
Republicans have frequently claimed that the military, including leaders at the Department of Defense, are overly concerned with diversity and sensitivity training. As a result, they claim, the military has degraded its readiness to go to war and become “soft,” with rank-and-file service members more concerned with political correctness and left-wing social activism than defending America from external threats.
Congressional Republicans have proposed amendments to Department of Defense funding bills seeking to make the Pentagon’s existing ban on drag performances on military bases more permanent.
Some Republicans, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, have even called on the military to reinstate the ban on LGBTQ service members, claiming that their mere presence in the ranks is resulting in recruiting problems for all branches of the service.
DeSantis’s claim is based on stereotypes of conservative-leaning Americans so blinded by anti-LGBTQ hatred and so inflexible that they are allegedly incapable of serving alongside any service member who does not ascribe to their same worldview or come from the same background.
DeSantis is not the only person to employ the trope — much of right-wing social media frequently seeks to portray “real” military members — and by extension, Trump, should be become commander-in-chief — as hypermasculine “alpha males” who are ready to protect Americans at a moment’s notice.
That same view has also extended beyond the military, with Republicans frequently asserting that any male who votes for Democrats isn’t a “real man.”
The U.S. Senate parliamentarian blocked several provisions in President Donald Trump's proposed tax and budget bill, including a transgender health care ban that would have prohibited federal funds from covering gender-affirming care.
The provision seeks to block transgender people of all ages -- including adults -- from accessing transition-related care by banning Medicaid, ACA marketplace plans, and the Children's Health Insurance Program from covering the cost.
But Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough, who is tasked offering nonpartisan advice to federal lawmakers on Senate rules, declared that the proposed transgender health care ban violates the Byrd Rule, which requires reconciliation bills -- those cobbled together to resolve differences between House and Senate versions -- to only contain provisions that impact the budget or spending, and not any "extraneous" matters.
A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration from enforcing a directive from Secretary of State Marco Rubio that prohibits transgender and nonbinary individuals from obtaining passports reflecting their gender identities.
Rubio's directive, issued in January, had instructed State Department staff to freeze all applications for passports with "X" gender markers or applications requesting changes to gender markers on existing passports.
Rubio also directed his subordinate to enforce a section of the Immigration and Nationalist Act that allows the United States to refuse entry to any visa applicant who commits identity fraud or misrepresents who they are, with particular focus on transgender athletes from foreign countries.
Andry José Hernández Romero, deported in Trump’s immigration crackdown, was freed from El Salvador’s CECOT prison in a prisoner swap but still faces danger.
Gay asylum seeker Andry José Hernández Romero, a makeup artist and costume designer deported to El Salvador’s notorious Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT) maximum-security prison, was released on July 18 as part of a prisoner swap, NBC News reported.
The swap was brokered by Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, a close ally of U.S. President Donald Trump, who agreed to free more than 200 Venezuelans from CECOT in exchange for Venezuela releasing 10 American political prisoners.
Most released detainees had been deported from the U.S. after Trump invoked the rarely used Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to justify removing hundreds of undocumented immigrants, alleging ties to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, which constituted an "invading force" whose members were committing serious crimes.
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