Trump uses ‘Full Metal Jacket’ clips to show the ideal army

WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump embraces perhaps Hollywood’s most memorable drill sergeant to portray his vision of a battle-hardened military and mock the Biden administration’s embrace of the LGBTQ+ community serving openly.

At Trump’s recent rallies, a video showed clips of R. Lee Ermey as Marine Gunnery Sgt. Hartman in Stanley Kubrick Classic Vietnam War film from 1987, ‘Full Metal Jacket’. Ermey’s character was known for his vulgar and sometimes racist outbursts as he taunts and bullies recruits.

These clips, captioned “THEN,” are interspersed with clips of people expressing support for LGBTQ+ rights and drag performers, captioned “NOW” and “THE BIDEN HARRIS MILITARY.”

The video ends with a shot from the film, a scene before the recruits were sent to Vietnam, with the caption “LET’S MAKE OUR MILITARY GREAT AGAIN.” The video was shown before him at several Trump rallies posted it on social media on Saturday.

Trump often against rails the growing acceptance of transgender people, including the use of pronouns and transgender women in women’s sports, which saw him draw some of the biggest applause lines at his rallies by promising to limit them.

Trump earlier this month praised the performance of Ermey, who served in the Marines as a drill sergeant before turning to acting.

“He should get the Academy Award,” Trump told his audience in Wisconsin, saying he was denied the honor because “he wasn’t part of the establishment.”

By using the film to illustrate Trump’s ideal army, the campaign borrowed from what is recognized as an anti-war film. It doesn’t matter that the movie is about Vietnam, for which Trump received a medical deferraldespite having attended high school at the New York Military Academy.

Vivian Kubrick, the late filmmaker’s daughter, said she believes her father would have embraced Trump and forgiven him for using an anti-war film to make his point about building a powerful military.

“That is primarily what FMJ is about, the shocking and complicated paradoxes of human nature,” Vivian Kubrick wrote Sunday on the social media platform X.

“And so on this tooth-and-claw planet you need a very strong military – so I stand by the idea that FMJ footage was used primarily for its powerful, realistic depiction of boot camp, juxtaposed with the completely demoralizing and inappropriate injection of the WOKE ideology in the US military,” she added. “Which I agree with myself and I’m sure my father would have agreed with.”

Ermey’s “Full Metal Jacket” co-star Matthew Modine, who played Private Joker in the film and appears in some clips in Trump’s video, saw things differently.

“Ironically, Trump has twisted and profoundly distorted Kubrick’s powerful anti-war film into a perverse, homophobic and manipulative propaganda tool,” Modine said. told Entertainment Weekly.