A gold statue of President Donald Trump clutching his foot appeared on the National Mall on Monday, two days before Veterans Day — an anonymous artists' stunt built to mock the bone spurs diagnosis that kept him out of the Vietnam draft more than half a century ago.
The statue, called “The Foot Soldier,” stands about eight feet tall. It shows the President in a suit, seated on a pedestal and grimacing as he holds his right foot, and it was placed overnight on Madison Drive NW between 7th and 9th Streets, just outside the National Gallery of Art's Sculpture Garden. Beside it stood a costumed mascot named Toey — a giant big toe with a protruding bone spur — posing for photographs with tourists, runners and passersby through the morning.
A plaque on the pedestal 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.” Beneath it sits a line from the President himself: “I can be very military.”
The group behind the statue is The Secret Handshake, an anonymous collective that has installed a series of sculptures mocking the President since last fall — among them a golden toilet and statues of the President with Jeffrey Epstein. The artists keep their identities private and work through an intermediary to secure National Park Service permits. The group says the statue will stay up through Veterans Day on Wednesday, November 11.
Nothing in the stunt is new history. Trump received four education deferments while at Fordham University and the University of Pennsylvania, and after graduating in 1968 he received a medical disqualification which he has attributed to bone spurs in his heels. An account published in 2018, in which the daughters of a Queens podiatrist said their father provided the diagnosis as a favour to Trump's father, has never been independently substantiated, and the surviving military records do not detail the medical basis for the disqualification.
There was no word from the White House about the statue. The President's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and no veterans' organisation had issued a statement on it by Monday evening.
For the veterans the holiday honours, Monday's stunt changes nothing either way — the care, benefits and respect owed to the men and women who did serve are decided by policy, not by a statue on the Mall, and Veterans Day on Wednesday remains what it has always been: a day for the people who stood up when they were called.
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