The US Army’s top educational institution on Friday abruptly nixed a September 25th ceremony honoring actor Tom Hanks as the 2025 laureate of the Sylvanus Thayer Award for his decades of advocacy for veterans through his work on screen and his efforts to build the US World War II Memorial in DC, the National World War II museum in New Orleans, and the Dwight D Eisenhower Memorial, the Washington Post reports. The cancellation was announced in an email to faculty from retired Army Col Mark Bieger, president and CEO of the West Point alum association, who wrote that not holding the ceremony “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.”

It’s not clear whether the Thayer award to Hanks – who starred as a service member in Saving Private Ryan, Forrest Gump, and Greyhound, and executive produced the critically-acclaimed World War II miniseries epics Band of Brothers, The Pacific, and Masters of the Air – had actually been revoked or if this is just the ceremony being canceled. The Post couldn’t get a straight answer.

Nor could they on why, but the Post’s list of non-mutually-exclusive possibilities is long…

SNL decided it was a good idea to depict Tom Hanks as a “Racist Trump Supporter” in a MAGA Hat afraid to shake a black man’s hand.

Donald Trump just won a landslide election and has never been more popular with Americans.

They have learned nothing.pic.twitter.com/HST1DXcM4L

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) February 17, 2025

Before MAGAmerica lost their shit over that Saturday Night Live skit earlier this year, Hanks publicly endorsed Joe Biden in 2020, hosted a televised Biden inaugural event in 2021, and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama at the White House in 2016.

Not on the Post’s list is Hanks’s high profile as an ankle-monitor-wearing secretly-convicted sex trafficker in the QAnon mythos, rivaled only by Oprah Winfrey as a second-tier villain after Hillary Clinton, Bill Gates, Klaus Schwab, George Soros, and John Podesta in the LARP.

Then there’s what former VA Secretary and West Point alum Robert McDonald wrote in the June announcement of the award, lauding Hanks as having “done more for the positive portrayal of the American service member, more for the caring of the American veteran, their caregivers and their family, and more for the American space program and all branches of government than many other Americans.” Now THAT sure as hell sticks out and not just for making the cancelation look like a 180.

If it wasn’t the superlative language of “done more… than many other Americans” alone that prompted convicted felon President Trump to command the West Point alums to cancel the ceremony then it had to be the cherry on top of this MAGA sundae. Nobody hates being deprived of such a declaration than the fat bastard, who in reality has fucked over more veterans than any president since Herbert Hoover, all while claiming he’s the best they’ve ever had.

And a lot of them still believe it anyway.

At the bottom of the article the Post points out that West Point also recently rehung a 20-foot portrait of famous graduate General Robert E Lee in its library after the school had mothballed it in 2022, quoting another alum and former instructor questioning how that reversal “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,” while canceling the Hanks ceremony – for which the former instructor had not heard any outcry over – was an affirmation of that core mission of lethality.