The presidential race has been fraught with so many jaw-dropping moments that I’m almost certain it will one day be dramatized as an HBO series, with a bronzer-dipped Nicolas Cage starring as Donald Trump.
To recap, we’ve had an assassination attempt, a historic withdrawal from the race, the rapid ascent of a new candidate, and perhaps most bizarrely, the involvement of coconuts. All of it might have been enough for a theoretical first season of that HBO show were it not for Trump’s insistence on perpetually making blunders that would keep the writer’s room active in overworked perpetuity.
The most recent gaffe (an episode five story arc, perhaps), arrived when Trump was photographed smiling and flashing a thumbs-up gesture while visiting the graves of fallen marines. We already know that most social cues fly over Trump’s toupee, but the now-viral image of him looking elated at Arlington National Cemetery, while surrounded by the loved ones of fallen sergeant Nicole Gee, displays a level of ignorance that perhaps even Cage couldn’t recreate.
Trump made the visit to the cemetery to commemorate the third anniversary of the soldiers who were killed at the Abbey Gate of Kabul Airport during the military withdrawal from Afghanistan. It’s worth noting that some of those pictured alongside Trump are also smiling, but the former president’s checkered history around veterans and soldiers has done little to make his thumbs-up feel like a gesture of good faith.
Last year, Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly confirmed on the record that Trump had referred to dead soldiers as “suckers,” and last week, the GOP candidate further insulted veterans when he claimed that the civilian Presidential Medal of Freedom is “much better” than the Medal of Honor, the top military award for those killed or wounded in action. This history of aversion to veterans has informed people’s reactions to the ex-President’s latest graveyard grin, including from noted Trump critic Mark Hamill.
The Star Wars actor, who has long used his X page as more of an anti-Trump diary, wrote that the photo is evidence of Trump as a “tone-deaf draft dodger,” presumably in reference to him receiving five military draft deferments in his youth. By the age of 22, Trump had avoided being drafted for the Vietnam War five times, once for bone spurs in his feet and four times while he was in college. It has been reported that Trump’s draft deferments, which have been criticized by some high-profile veterans, were afforded as a favor to his father, Fred Trump. Hamill went on to describe the scene of the photo, saying Trump was “gleefully giving a thumbs-up at the graves of those who made the ultimate sacrifice in service to our country.”
It adds to a laundry list of Hamill’s what we’ll call Trump Grievances (perhaps the title of that HBO show), following the actor’s description of the former President as an “orange nightmare” and his eloquent message to MAGA supporters to “go Force Yourself.” It’s all the fodder needed for an inevitable TV dramatization, perhaps with a Mark Hamill cameo by, well, Mark Hamill.