Leave it to Donald Trump to turn an important meeting into a forum to argue about a movie that he probably hasn’t even seen. The gathering? A meeting last March, in which the president and several administration officials spoke with representatives for almost a dozen major veterans’ groups, in an attempt to prove that the administration really cares about veterans. The movie? Apocalypse Now. It went about as well as you’d expect.
As one attendee told the Daily Beast, “It was really fucking weird.”
The meeting reportedly started off smoothly enough: Trump, whose platform as a presidential candidate leaned heavily on taking care of military veterans, polled the room for ways the administration could help their efforts. Vietnam Veterans of America co-founder Rick Weidman asked the president to expand benefits coverage for more veterans who report having been poisoned with the herbicide Agent Orange during their tours of duty in the Vietnam War. Trump reportedly assured Weidman, “That’s taken care of.”
When the attendees—including several who served in Vietnam, including Weidman—informed the president that that was not the case, Trump responded with an extremely relevant question: was Agent Orange “that stuff from that movie”? It soon became clear that by “that movie,” he meant Apocalypse Now.
As anyone who remembers the very famous line “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” could tell the president, the American military did not use Agent Orange in the 1979 film, which laid bare the atrocities of the war by taking its template from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Multiple sources told the Daily Beast that several attendees did tell Trump that the use of napalm, and not Agent Orange, was depicted in the film. His response? “No, I think it’s that stuff from that movie.”
Per the Daily Beast, the president spent at least two minutes asking various attendees which substance was used in the film before finally asking Weidman, who joined the chorus of people who had already said it was napalm—before adding that he didn’t like the film because he thought it did a disservice to veterans. “Well, I think you just didn’t like the movie,” Trump told Weidman. Then, and only then, did he allow the conversation to return to the actual pressing topic at hand.
When reached for comment, Kellyanne Conway—who was one of the officials in attendance at the meeting—told the Daily Beast, “This president has been a reliable friend to veterans and has taken bold action to measurably improve their lives, including the V.A. Choice Act, V.A. Mission Act, V.A. Accountability and Whistleblower Protection Act, and the 24/7 veterans hotline. President Trump donated his quarterly salary to the Veterans Administration, and took action to allow vets to use their G.I. Bill education benefits at any time during their lifetime, and process their disability claims more quickly than ever before.”
Still, that does little to dissipate the irony of Donald Trump, who dodged the draft for the Vietnam War by claiming bone spurs in his feet made him unfit to serve, derailing an important meeting with Vietnam War veterans to argue about a movie about the Vietnam War.
On a somewhat related note, Agent Orange happens to be one of director Spike Lee’s favorite nicknames for Donald Trump himself. Given that the president hasn’t tweeted any BlacKkKlansman critiques or digs at Lee personally, it seems safe to say he hasn’t caught wind of that—yet.