May the 4th is widely celebrated as Star Wars Day, and Donald Trump wasn’t about to let the occasion slip by unnoticed.
In a bold move, the Department of Defense dropped a 5-minute Star Wars-themed video, showcasing their recent triumphs and stirring up a galaxy of reactions.
A flood of reactions
While the Star Wars-themed brag reel from the Department of Defense made waves, it was a different, eye-popping image that truly set the internet ablaze.
To mark Star Wars Day on May 4th — the day celebrated in honor of the iconic phrase “May the Force be with you” — the White House posted a computer-generated image of Donald Trump. In this over-the-top depiction, Trump stands muscular and almost cartoonishly buff, wielding a lightsaber in front of U.S. flags and two bald eagles.
The accompanying caption 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.”
The image quickly sparked a flood of reactions, with many expressing shock and disbelief that it came from the official White House account.
Others compared it to the kind of over-the-top content typically seen on social media, with some joking that it looked like something created by an amateur using AI.
But the most talked-about detail, by far, in the White House’s May the 4th Trump image was the red lightsaber.
For anyone even remotely familiar with Star Wars, the red lightsaber is universally associated with the Sith Lords, the evil counterparts to the Jedi. As Star Wars creator George Lucas once said: ”Good guys are green and blue, bad guys are red.”
It’s hardly a deep revelation, yet it makes the image all the more ironic. The picture, meant to portray Trump as the hero of the story, instead serves as an epic self-own, suggesting he’s more aligned with the dark side than the side of good he claims to fight against.
Defending the red lightsaber
One X user pointed out the glaring hypocrisy: ”The lack of self-awareness and hypocrisy by calling the left ‘the empire’ while showing Trump with a Sith lightsaber.”
Some have tried to defend the red lightsaber by pointing out that red is the color of the Republican Party. However, the Star Wars universe features a variety of other lightsaber colors — green, yellow, even purple — that don’t have any negative connotations. And none of them are linked to the Democrats’ blue. So, the whole red-saber choice just seems like a miss, further emphasizing the irony.
This, of course, isn’t the first AI-generated image the White House has posted of Donald Trump. Another image that stirred up strong reactions was one depicting Trump as the Pope — an image that many found insensitive, especially in light of the Pope’s recent passing. On Monday, the president responded to Catholic critics of the AI-generated image by suggesting that they weren’t truly offended.
“I just saw it last evening,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. He added that his wife, Melania Trump, thought it was cute.
Trump denied any involvement in creating the image of him dressed as the Pope, and said that anyone who was upset simply “can’t take a joke.”
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