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Trump attacks Tom Hanks after West Point cancels event honoring actor

President calls Hanks ‘woke’ in vitriolic post after US Military Academy calls off ceremony with little explanation

Mon 8 Sep 2025 12.24 EDT

Donald Trump launched a vitriolic attack against Tom Hanks for supposedly being “destructive” and “woke” after one of America’s most beloved actors was snubbed without much explanation by West Point last week.

On his social media site on Monday, the US president applauded the alumni association of the US Military Academy (or West Point) for abruptly calling off a ceremony honoring Hanks, twice an Academy award winner who has played numerous military characters and also has a long history of advocating for veterans.

Trump wrote: “Our great West Point (getting greater all the time!) has smartly cancelled the Award Ceremony for actor Tom Hanks. Important move! We don’t need destructive, WOKE recipients getting our cherished American Awards!!! Hopefully the Academy Awards, and other Fake Award Shows, will review their Standards and Practices in the name of Fairness and Justice. Watch their DEAD RATINGS SURGE!”

Hanks had been scheduled to receive the 2025 Sylvanus Thayer Award later this month for his “service and accomplishments in the national interest”.

In a message to faculty, retired Col Mark Bieger declared the cancellation would allow the institution to “continue its focus on its core mission of preparing cadets to lead, fight and win as officers in the world’s most lethal force, the United States Army”, without elaborating how the two are connected.

Hanks has previously endorsed Democratic candidates including Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

He has been deeply involved in veterans’ causes. He was the national spokesperson for the World War II Memorial in Washington DC. He also supported Bob Dole’s fundraising campaign for the Dwight D Eisenhower Memorial, according to the alumni association’s own original statement.

He has already been inducted as an honorary member into the US Army’s Ranger Hall of Fame. In 2016, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Among his military portrayals are Capt John Miller in Saving Private Ryan, the Vietnam war soldier Forrest Gump (for which he won the Oscar for best actor), and Cmdr Ernie Krause in Greyhound, for which he also wrote the screenplay. He also portrayed the title role in 2013’s Captain Phillips and appeared in the cold war film Bridge of Spies.

His work has made him one of the US’s most decorated actors, with seven Emmy awards to go alongside the five Academy award nominations for best actor, which he won twice in a row.

Trump, who has dabbled in acting including a cameo in Home Alone 2, has regularly complained about never winning an Emmy for his reality television show The Apprentice, lamenting that he “should have gotten it”, that he “got screwed out of an Emmy” and that “the Emmys are all politics”.

CBS' new corporate owner has taken a series of concrete steps to address the concerns of the news division's sharpest critics — particularly President Trump and his allies.

In recent days, the network selected a new ombudsman for CBS News with strong conservative credentials. It promised to run full, unedited interviews on a key public affairs show after receiving blowback from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. And it's in talks to bring on a top news executive who believes the mainstream press is reflexively biased.

All of these decisions have come from top officials at Paramount under the new ownership of Skydance Media. And they represent a grand accommodation to Trump by CBS, known for its rich legacy of journalistic touchstones spanning back to the dawn of television news, including Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite and 60 Minutes.

Its coverage of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Vietnam War, U.S. astronauts walking on the moon, Watergate and the Tiananmen Square massacre helped to define those events for Americans. In recent years, some of its most prominent correspondents have covered Trump aggressively. And Trump has attacked the network in his public statements.

These latest moves under Skydance follow a $16 million payment by CBS' previous owner to settle a lawsuit Trump brought against the network and regulatory pressure by Trump's chief broadcast regulator against the sale. Even since CBS changed hands, it has not escaped the wrath of the Trump administration. Recently, the White House and Noem lambasted the network over the handling of a recent interview.

Now, The Wall Street Journal reports that the company wants to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery — the owner of Warner Bros. studios, HBO Max and cable news giant CNN. Such grand ambitions would have to pass muster with Trump administration regulators once more. And they would also raise questions about CNN's direction under Skydance, were they to come to pass.

Paramount Global, CBS and CBS News have declined to comment.

Skydance is run by its founder, David Ellison. He's the producer (along with Paramount Pictures) of Tom Cruise's Mission: Impossible movie franchise, among other properties. He is also the son of Oracle founder Larry Ellison, one of the richest people in the world and a vocal backer of President Trump.

Douglas Wilson Wants the U.S. to Be a Christian Republic. MAGA Is Listening.
The incendiary pastor calls for taking away women’s right to vote and barring non-Christians from holding office. Pete Hegseth and Tucker Carlson are among his fans.

Wilson’s most powerful admirer in the Trump administration is Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. He has spoken highly of Wilson and belongs to one of the roughly 150 churches in the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), the Calvinist denomination that Wilson cofounded in 1998. A Pentagon spokesman confirmed that Hegseth is a member of a CREC church and said, “The secretary very much appreciates many of Mr. Wilson’s writings and teachings.”

Earlier this year, Hegseth invited Brooks Potteiger, his pastor at a Wilson-affiliated church that Hegseth joined in Tennessee, to give a sermon at the Pentagon. It was delivered during working hours and was broadcast to off-site Defense Department locations. Hegseth himself gave an invocation before Potteiger spoke, telling the assembled staff that he came “on bended knee, recognizing the providence of our lord and savior, Jesus Christ.”

Wilson doesn’t lobby lawmakers or the Trump administration, and he said he has met Hegseth only twice, including at church this month. But his rise comes as Trump is eroding the separation between church and state, taking steps that will help Wilson and others advance their goal of inserting religion more prominently into civic life.

A July directive from the Trump administration said that federal employees, including supervisors, may discuss religion in the workplace, “including attempting to persuade others of the correctness of their own religious views.” Also in July, the Internal Revenue Service said that churches and houses of worship can endorse candidates without jeopardizing their tax-exempt status, reversing an established principle. Trump also created a high-level task force to combat perceived anti-Christian bias.

The Trump administration is blaming Democrats for the government shutdown in internal federal agency communications as well as public agency websites, in what experts say could be a violation of federal ethics laws.

A bright red banner and pop-up message first appeared Tuesday on the Department of Housing and Urban Development's website. It was updated early Wednesday morning and warns: "The Radical Left in Congress shut down the government. HUD will use available resources to help Americans in need."

Wednesday morning, a banner added to the top of Department of Justice websites reads "Democrats have shut down the government" with a link to its shutdown plans.

Also on Wednesday morning, employees at the Small Business Administration were provided "suggested" language to include in their out of office automatic replies mirroring the partisan accusations made by OMB before the shutdown. In an email blast to the entire agency, the SBA suggested employees write that "I am out of office for the foreseeable future because Senate Democrats voted to block a clean federal funding bill (H.R.5371) leading to a government shutdown," and that "as soon as the shutdown is over, we are prepared to immediately return to the record-breaking services we are providing under the leadership of the Trump administration," according to a screenshot shared with NPR.

Staffers at multiple agencies and Cabinet departments received emails on Tuesday from the White House Office of Management and Budget. Many shared screenshots of those emails with NPR, or confirmed the text of the message they received. The messages said any lapse in government funding would be "forced by Congressional Democrats."

"We just all accept that the Hatch Act is null and void," one federal worker, who requested anonymity because they fear retaliation from the Trump administration for speaking out, told NPR. "Nothing matters."

Trump’s plans to deploy the National Guard have occasionally hit legal hurdles. A federal judge in Oregon on Sunday blocked him from sending guard members from any state to Portland. The next day, Trump said publicly that he would invoke the Insurrection Act “if it was necessary.”

“If people were being killed and courts were holding us up or governors or mayors were holding us up, sure, I’d do that,” Trump said. As of now, he said, it has not been needed.

Talk inside the White House about invoking the act has ebbed and flowed since Trump took office again in January, said the five people, who include the senior administration official, two people familiar with the discussions and two people close to the White House.

But the debate inside the administration has shifted recently, from whether it makes sense to invoke the act to more deeply exploring how and when it might be invoked, both people close to the White House said.

Administration officials have drafted legal defenses and various options for invoking the act, two of the people said.

But the current, broad consensus among Trump’s aides has been to exhaust all other options before taking that step, the senior administration official and one of the people close to the White House said.

The person close to the White House described the process as working its way up “an escalatory ladder.”