The White House's ‘Star Wars' misstep adds to Trump's pop culture woes
For 'Star Wars' fans, May 4 is an unofficial holiday of sorts, and as Variety noted, the White House apparently wanted to get in on the fun — in the most Trumpian way possible.
The official White House X and Instagram accounts on Sunday posted an AI-generated image of Donald Trump as a beefed-up Jedi in celebration of 'Star Wars' day. The post read, 'Happy May the 4th to all, including the Radical Left Lunatics who are fighting so hard to bring Sith Lords, Murderers, Drug Lords, Dangerous Prisoners, & well known MS-13 Gang Members, back into our Galaxy. You're not the Rebellion — you're the Empire. May the 4th be with you.'
(In case this isn't obvious, characters in the film franchise say, 'May The Force be with you.' With this in mind, 'May the Fourth be with you' is a pun.)
The fact that Team Trump used the opportunity to lash out at 'Radical Left Lunatics' was not surprising: Two weeks earlier, the president also wrote online, 'Happy Easter to all, including the Radical Left Lunatics.'
But in this case, what stood out was not the predictable palaver, but rather, the seemingly AI-generated image of the Republican wielding a red lightsaber — and as fans of the 'Star Wars' franchise know, it's the Sith villains who use red lightsabers, not the Jedi heroes. (New York magazine's Chas Danner took an even deeper dive into all of the nerdy missteps in the White House-backed image.)
With this in mind, actor Mark Hamill, best known for playing Luke Skywalker, turned to Bluesky to have a little fun at Trump's expense.
Stepping back, I can appreciate why Trump and his team want to try to exploit pop culture to advance their message, but it's hard not to notice just how frequently they flub these efforts.
In 2019, for example, the Republican White House tried to use 'Game of Thrones' as part of a clumsy argument about the president's border-wall project, and the whole thing fell apart rather quickly. A year later, Trump talked about the Captain William Bligh character from 'Mutiny on the Bounty,' though it wasn't altogether clear whether the president realized that Bligh was the villain of the story.
After his defeat in 2020, Trump talked obsessively about Hannibal Lecter, a fictional character, including a weird instance in which he referred to the infamous cannibal from 'The Silence of the Lambs,' as 'the late, great Hannibal Lecter' and 'a wonderful man.'
Soon after, Trump's 2024 running mate, future Vice President JD Vance, pointed to Martin Scorsese's 'Gangs of New York' as an example of immigration leading to higher crime rates — which was wrong on the policy details as well as the artistic narrative. It fell to The Washington Post's Philip Bump to note, '[T]he most brutal, vicious killer in that movie is the nativist who loathes immigrants.'
Maybe these guys should just steer clear of making pop culture references? They're clearly not good at it.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
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