A gold-painted statue of President Donald Trump, seated and clutching his bare right foot, appeared on the National Mall in Washington on Monday 9 November, two days before Veterans Day. Titled The Foot Soldier, the work was installed by the anonymous artist collective The Secret Handshake near the National Gallery of Art's Sculpture Garden, and is due to remain in place through Veterans Day on 11 November.

The statue mocks the medical deferment that kept Trump out of military service during the Vietnam War. Trump received five draft deferments: four while he was at college and a fifth, in 1968, after a diagnosis of bone spurs in his heels. A plaque beside the sculpture praises him, with heavy irony, as a soldier in spirit who marched to the front lines of dodging the draft, armed with a perfect diagnosis of bone spurs. It also quotes Trump's own 2013 boast that he can be very military.

Beside the statue stands a six-foot-tall mascot in a giant toe costume, nicknamed Toey, who has been greeting passers-by with jokes delivered in Trump's voice, including the claim of being the hugest toe anyone has ever seen. The collective said the piece also responds to Trump's military campaign against Iran, recalling a time when he would do whatever it took to stay out of combat. The White House dismissed the installation, with spokesman Davis Ingle describing it as the work of activists suffering from Trump derangement syndrome.

The Foot Soldier is the latest in a series of satirical installations the collective has placed around Washington since 2024, numbering more than a dozen. Earlier works have included a statue pairing Trump with Jeffrey Epstein, a golden toilet and an arcade game themed on war with Iran. The group told reporters it erected the statue to highlight Trump's efforts to avoid military service in Vietnam, a history that has been questioned since 2018, when the daughters of the podiatrist who treated Trump said they believed their father gave the diagnosis as a favour to Trump's father, Fred Trump.