Alumni at West Point’s US Military Academy abruptly canceled an upcoming award ceremony for actor veterans advocate Tom Hanks – one of President Biden’s most impassioned celebrity supporters who once said that if President Trump won a second term it proved that America’s “journey to a more perfect union has missteps in it.”
“This decision allows the Academy 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,” read an email dispatched Friday by Retired Army Col. Mark Bieger to alumni, per The Washington Post.
Hanks was scheduled to be honored on Sept. 25 with the Sylvanus Thayer Award, dedicated to recognizing an “outstanding citizen” that did not attend West Point but still exemplifies the academy’s ideals of “Duty, Honor, Country.”
The email did not state whether Hanks would still be receiving the award at a different time, or whether it had been revoked, the outlet reported.
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Asked on CNN last year if he worried about country’s “commitment to democracy and freedom” if Trump was reelected, Hanks said. “I think there’s always reason to be worried about the short term.”
“But I look at the longer term of what happened I think there’s an ongoing — look, our Constitution says, ‘We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union,’ — that journey to a more perfect union has missteps in it,” he continued.
In 2021 Hanks hosted Biden’s prime-time TV special.
And in 2022, the “Saving Private Ryan” actor narrated a video in 2022 of the Biden administration’s accomplishments in its first year, insisting the country is “stronger than we were a year ago today.”
Bieger’s email was sent the same day Trump renamed the Department of Defense the Department of War telling reporters that he thinks it “sends a message of victory.”
“It’s a very important change because it’s an attitude,” he said of the move away from the word “defense.”
The Department of War was originally renamed in 1947 after WWII to be the Department of Defense.
