Who knows what “woke” even means anymore to the increasingly paranoid MAGA movement. The word has become empty slang for anything (and anyone) that offends conservatives. The new star of their growing list of bugaboos is none other than Tom Hanks.
For his patriotic wartime tearjerkers and folksy family classics, the prolific Hollywood icon earned the nickname “America’s Dad.” The serial box-office star and two-time back-to-back Oscar winner is well known for being a nice guy, on and off the screen.
And now? He’s famous for being woke.
Hanks was set to receive the U.S. Military Academy’s Sylvanus Thayer Award — a prize named for the “Father of West Point” — on the 25th of this month for being an “outstanding citizen of the United States whose service and accomplishments in the national interest exemplify personal devotion to the ideals expressed in West Point’s motto: ‘Duty, Honor, Country.’”
But this past weekend, for unclear reasons, the West Point alumni group in charge of presenting the award abruptly canceled the ceremony for Hanks, a longtime veterans’ rights advocate whose “HANKS for Our Troops” coffee brand supports vets and their families.
The declaration read like a gun-to-the-head citation. Was the group pressured into disinviting Hanks?
The inexplicable decision was meant to refocus West Point “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,” according to a statement issued by the president of the West Point Association of Graduates.
The declaration read like a gun-to-the-head citation. Was the group pressured into disinviting Hanks? It certainly wouldn’t be the first time Trump or his far-right allies have issued demands involving West Point.
No one, so far, feels duty- or honor-bound to tell the country.
But consider the commander in chief’s reaction.
“Our great West Point (getting greater all the time!) has smartly cancelled the Award Ceremony for actor Tom Hanks,” President Donald Trump ranted on Truth Social on Sunday morning. “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!”
So there you have it — trial by Trump. Hanks is woke. No award for him.
Trump has been begging for a Nobel Prize, for various imagined accomplishments. He wasn’t about to let Tom Hanks steal his thunder at West Point.
His great crime? Likely, his politics: Hanks is a longtime Democratic donor. And in Trump’s America, the only thing that counts is loyalty to the president. If not, then you are to be excised from the public square.
Hanks joins the likes of Taylor Swift, Jimmy Kimmel and Meryl Streep in the pantheon of megastars slandered by the diseased, conspiracy-drunk corners of the Trump-worshipping MAGA media ecosystem. They delight in disrupting the images of celebrities who directly contradict the president’s self-image. Trump wants the world to view him as strong, decisive and patriotic, even as his vile social media posts reveal he’s insecure, dithering and faithless.
The president and his minions underestimate the popularity of the 69-year-old actor among those of us who live in the United States of America and do not spend every waking minute refreshing Truth Social for our cultural opinions. Hanks is one of the last of old Hollywood’s all-American everymen. His characters are modern riffs on old-fashioned masculine virtues: humility, courage and honesty. The right is attacking him because it worships a leader who is constitutionally incapable of humility, courage or honesty. Tom Hanks is best remembered for playing a modern-day Robinson Crusoe, giving voice to a pull-string cowboy doll and portraying Mr. Rogers himself. His first Oscar nomination (of six) was for the 1988 comedy “Big” — a role Trump knows well — about a boy trapped inside the body of an adult. Five years later, he won the first of his two Oscars as a gay man fighting for his rights in the groundbreaking AIDS drama “Philadelphia.” The following year, he won for “Forrest Gump,” about an intellectually disabled man whose generosity and kindness remain constant during some of America’s most tumultuous political years. Hanks, among his many other talents, specialized in depicting members of the Greatest Generation. He was astronaut Jim Lovell in 1995’s true-life space thriller “Apollo 13,” and a fictitious, drunken baseball manager who — “There’s no crying in baseball!” — finds redemption leading an all-female 1940s baseball team in “A League of Their Own.” In 2020, he starred in a little-seen war flick called “Greyhound,” playing Capt. Ernie Krause, a serious, steady man in charge of escorting Allied ships across a German U-boat-infested Atlantic. Hank’s Krause is everything Donald Trump is not: strong and silent; thoughtful and trustworthy. Directed with grim realism by Steven Spielberg, ‘Saving Private Ryan’ was more than a movie about the horrors of war. It was a blood-soaked love letter to a fundamental American value: sacrifice. He also served as a producer in 2001 for HBO’s Emmy-winning mini-series “Band of Brothers,” based on the true story of the legendary Easy Company during the invasion of Europe; and in 2010, he produced the underrated “The Pacific,” a harrowing dramatization of the Allies’ fight against imperial Japan. There is no way to watch those two productions and not be moved by what your grandparents and great-grandparents were called to do to protect democracy, and no right-wing podcaster can diminish their accomplishments. Both Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson have indulged the opinions of contrarian historians with Trump-leaning preferences who have questioned the fight against Nazism. But my favorite performance by Hanks was his extraordinary role in “Saving Private Ryan.” Directed with grim realism by Steven Spielberg, “Saving Private Ryan” was more than a movie about the horrors of war. It was a blood-soaked love letter to a fundamental American value: sacrifice. The soldiers under the command of Hanks’ Captain Miller, a humble schoolteacher turned GI Joe, give everything they’ve got for their country, but more importantly, for each other. The film follows a squad’s attempt to locate and rescue Private Ryan, whose three brothers were killed in action. It opens on the beaches of Normandy, France, during the Allied D-Day invasion, and it’s a spectacularly gut-wrenching sequence as dozens of young men are riddled with bullets before setting foot on the sand. The violence is sudden and shocking. I remember thinking, “How could anyone have survived that?” And yet, many did. The movie pays tribute to a generation that has almost completely faded from our world, and it’s up to works of art like this near masterpiece to tell the story of what they did, not just for freedom and the fight against the brutal prejudices of fascism, but also for each other. Let me be clear: Hanks is an actor. His job is to play make-believe, and he’s been wildly successful at it. And in his free time, he has used his celebrity to highlight the sacrifices made by our veterans — while Trump, on the other hand, has insulted them.
John DeVore
John DeVore is a culture writer and author of "Theatre Kids: A True Tale of Off-Off Broadway." His writing has been published in Esquire, Vanity Fair, Marvel Comics, and many other publications. 
