A tweet by the campaign manager for President Trump’s 2020 reelection bid is drawing attention not only in political circles but also among Star Wars fans.
Brad Parscale on Thursday compared Trump’s fall fight against presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden with the Death Star and said it was “firing on all cylinders” above a clip from Return of the Jedi, in which a nearly completed Death Star unleashes a series of giant, deadly laser blasts against Rebel fighter pilots.
“For nearly three years we have been building a juggernaut campaign (Death Star). It is firing on all cylinders. Data, Digital, TV, Political, Surrogates, Coalitions, etc. In a few days we start pressing FIRE for the first time.”
For nearly three years we have been building a juggernaut campaign (Death Star). It is firing on all cylinders. Data, Digital, TV, Political, Surrogates, Coalitions, etc.
In a few days we start pressing FIRE for the first time. pic.twitter.com/aJgCNfx1m0
— Brad Parscale (@parscale) May 7, 2020
The wisdom of Parscale’s Star Wars analogy is open to question. In both Jedi (Episode VI to series aficionados) and in the original film, A New Hope (Episode IV), Rebel forces ultimately destroy versions of “the ultimate power in the universe,” as a high-ranking Imperial commander brags to a skeptical Darth Vader.
Parscale’s tweet is hardly the first time Star Wars and electoral politics have intertwined. In fact, there’s a long history of it.
Series creator George Lucas dropped several political hints in the original three Star Wars films, released between 1977 and 1983, and the prequels, which came out in three installments from 1999 to 2005. In 2012, Lucas sold the franchise to Disney for $4.1 billion in stock and cash.
In the first prequel, The Phantom Menace, two bumbling and cowardly Neimoidian criminal-syndicate types, Nute Gunray and Lott Dod, have names that sound suspiciously like Republican congressional leaders in the late 1990s. That would be then-Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott and Newt Gingrich, House speaker from 1995-99.
By the third Star Wars prequel, viewers of a liberal bent drew comparisons between series villain Darth Vader and then-President George W. Bush. Late in Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, Vader — the former Anakin Skywalker — confronts his former teacher, Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi.
“If you’re not with me, then you’re my enemy,” Vader says. The line echoes Bush’s international ultimatum after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”
And in Return of the Jedi, the short, fuzzy, and furry creatures of the Endor moon, known as Ewoks, actually represent Viet Cong fighters in the Vietnam War. The North Vietnamese communists, like the Ewoks on film, faced a far more technologically advanced enemy, the U.S. military. The Empire of Star Wars lore “fatally underestimates their ability to use the environment to their advantage,” as the Telegraph noted in 2015.
Darth Vader has occasionally been embraced by former Vice President Dick Cheney, Bush’s understudy from 2001-2009, who critics have compared the character with.
In September 2011, Cheney told conservative radio host Laura Ingraham that he “was honored” to be compared with Darth Vader while in office.
On Monday, his daughter, Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the third-highest House Republican, tweeted, “Happy #StarWarsDay from our family to yours!#MayThe4thBeWithYou”
Happy #StarWarsDay from our family to yours!#MayThe4thBeWithYou pic.twitter.com/EC1NOUWlzd
— Liz Cheney (@Liz_Cheney) May 4, 2020
The Darth Vader-masked man isn’t known but is presumably the former vice president.
