|
?:reviewBody
|
-
On June 13, 2020, U.S. President Donald Trump spoke to 1,107 graduates gathered at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point for the academy's annual commencement ceremonies. Shortly afterwards, social media users began circulating an image that purported to be a photograph of a graduating cadet who pulled open his tunic to reveal a crude, pejorative message aimed at the president: This image was an altered version of a photograph related to a similar incident which had occurred several years earlier and was unrelated to Trump. In 2018, various news accounts reported that Lt. Spenser Rapone had resigned his U.S. Army commission after being reprimanded for conduct unbecoming of an officer, a charge which encompassed his posting online to advocate for a socialist revolution and disparage high-ranking officers: Those posts included pictures taken at Rapone's May 2016 West Point graduation ceremony, which he later tweeted in solidarity with NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick. Below you can see the original photograph with the likeness of Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara on Rapone's shirt, not the anti-Trump message that someone added later in the digitally altered image displayed above.
(en)
|
![[This page as RDF]](http://data.gesis.org/claimskg/static/rdf-icon.gif){kind=icon}