Donald Trump, Elon Musk, government officials evoke the Sith on Star Wars Day

Today is May 4, Star Wars Day. Why? Because may the fourth be with you. It works too well.

There are plenty of people celebrating Star Wars around the internet, but the post that gotten the most attention came straight from the official X account for the White House, which posted an AI-generated picture of President Donald Trump with absurdly big muscles holding a red light saber. "Happy May the 4th to all, including the Radical Left Lunatics who are fighting so hard to to bring Sith Lords, Murderers, Drug Lords, Dangerous Prisoners, & well known MS-13 Gang Members, back into our Galaxy," tweeted an official account operated by the most powerful country in the world. "You’re not the Rebellion—you’re the Empire. May the 4th be with you."

Donald Trump loves to charicature and insult his political opponents, so the text isn't surprising. At this point, not even Muscle Man Trump is surprising; that kind of imagery has become fairly common, wacky as it is. But even in a world where the official White House account would tweet something like this, it's still strange to hear people who oppose Donald Trump called "the Empire," when Trump is president, has a Republican majority in Congress, and the Supreme Court is full of his nominees. It's hard to cast yourself as the little guy when you control all the levers of power, but it's all par for the course.

But you wonder if there weren't any Star Wars nerds on staff to tell whoever put this together that red lightsabers are used by, as George Lucas put it, "bad guys." In Star Wars, Sith lords like Darth Vader wield red lightsabers. "Good guys are green and blue," as Lucas says.

So did the White House social media team give Trump an evil lightsaber by mistake? Surely they wouldn't want to purposefully associate him with the tyrannical Empire, right? You'd think so, but then Elon Musk, who's been dismantling the government these last few months through the Department of Government Efficiency, posted an image of himself wielding a red lightsaber...

...and then Gregory K. Bovino, the U.S. Border Patrol Sector Chief of the Premier Sector in Southern California, posted a video of the clip from Rogue One: A Star Wars Story where Darth Vader tears through a hall of Rebel fighters...it labels Vader as "Premier Sector" and the rebels as stuff like "Sancturary Cities," "Fentanyl" and "Fake News."

Once is a mistake but thrice is a pattern. I guess the Trump administration identifies more with the Empire and Sith than with the Rebels and the Jedi. I'm sure it'll be fine.

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