Just in time for Veterans Day, a new installation on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., pokes fun at one of President Donald Trump’s Vietnam War draft deferments.
The Foot Soldier depicts a seated and gilded Trump with one shoe off as he looks at his bare foot. According to The Secret Handshake, the anonymous art collective behind the statue, the piece was inspired by the idea of what a Lincoln Memorial-style sculpture of Trump might look like. “We wanted it to have a regal, military feel,” the group says in an email. But unlike Lincoln, who is depicted gazing pensively into the distance, Trump is focused entirely on himself (of course).
Made of foam, plastic, wood, and rebar, the temporary statue is located at Madison Drive NW between 7th and 9th streets, opposite the National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden. It will remain on display through Veterans Day, Wednesday, November 11.
The Secret Handshake is also behind previous installations on the National Mall that criticized Trump’s friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, his handling of the Iran war, and his taste in interior design. Each satirizes the president’s ethical shortcomings. This time, the collective took aim at the president’s dereliction of duty.
Trump received multiple draft deferments during the Vietnam War, including one in 1968 at age 22 for bone spurs in his heels. He said in 2016 that he received “a very strong letter on the heels.” The daughter of a podiatrist who rented office space in a building owned by Trump’s father claimed in 2018 that her dad gave the future president the diagnosis as a favor for the elder Trump.
The installation mocks the so-called diagnosis. A plaque on the statue’s base reads: “We honor the service and sacrifice of our Commander in Chief, Donald J. Trump. He’s a soldier in spirit, who marched to the front lines of dodging the draft, armed with a perfect diagnosis of bone spurs. We salute a leader who knows you can’t spell sacrifice without ‘I,’ and a warrior who reminds us that sometimes when you’re called to stand up, it’s best to just sit down and rest your feet.”
The statue also includes a quote from Trump—“I can be very military”—which is pulled from a 2013 Facebook post he shared of his parents and him during his time at the New York Military Academy in Cornwall. In the photo, Trump is wearing his dress uniform.
For this sculpture, the collective added an interactive element, a 6-foot-tall bone spur mascot named “Toey.” In an email, the group said they added a mascot to “feel silly and celebratory. He’s there to amp up the absurdity and interact with people.”
Trump has long received criticism over his deferment. Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), an Iraq War veteran, has called him “Cadet Bone Spurs” on multiple occasions. And former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, a retired four-star U.S. Marine general who served during Trump’s first term, said this in 2019: “I earned my spurs on the battlefield . . . Donald Trump earned his spurs in a letter from a doctor.” Now the new statue and mascot give jokes about Trump’s bone spurs a visual punch line.