The Daily Fuckup

Trump’s campaign put a Vietnam War movie into service as a campaign prop. On October 14, 2024, AP reported that Trump had been featuring a video at recent rallies built around clips from Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 film Full Metal Jacket. The footage shows R. Lee Ermey as Marine Gunnery Sgt. Hartman and pairs those scenes, labeled “THEN,” with images labeled “NOW” and “THE BIDEN HARRIS MILITARY.” Those newer clips include references to LGBTQ+ rights and drag performers.

The result was a blunt political contrast: a hard-edged drill-sergeant performance on one side, and a set of culture-war images on the other. The video ends with the line “LET’S MAKE OUR MILITARY GREAT AGAIN.” AP also noted that the film is widely recognized as an anti-war work about Vietnam, a war from which Trump received medical deferments. That makes the choice of imagery easy to read, even if the campaign’s intended message is simply that it wants a tougher military.

The ad says less through argument than through juxtaposition. It treats military strength as something that can be signaled by borrowing the visual language of discipline, insult, and humiliation. But the source material matters here: Full Metal Jacket is not a generic war movie and not a neutral backdrop. It is a film about the brutality of training and the cost of turning people into instruments of violence. Using it to sell a political vision of military power is an unmistakable choice, and one that invites viewers to notice the mismatch between the film’s meaning and the campaign’s use of it.

That mismatch is the story. The video is built to provoke, and it does so by putting an anti-war film next to a message aimed at anti-LGBTQ+ grievance. It is a compact example of how campaign messaging can rely less on policy than on visual shorthand designed to trigger a reaction. Whether that makes the pitch persuasive is a different question. What is clear from the footage itself is that Trump’s campaign wanted the military to look like an arena for punishment, hierarchy, and confrontation, not just defense.