Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign manager raised eyebrows on Thursday by comparing Trump’s re-election efforts to a massive space weapon designed to obliterate peaceful planets.
Brad Parscale, a digital marketing expert turned Trump champion, used Twitter to declare that the Trump re-election campaign had constructed a “Death Star”, a reference to the fictional Star Wars space station capable of destroying planets with a big laser.
“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,” Parscale said.
He added, ominously: “In a few days we start pressing FIRE for the first time.”
The tweet contained a gif of the Star Wars Death Star – a sprawling spherical construction capable of housing more than a million military personnel, and another 400,000 droids – apparently preparing to fire its laser at an unknown target.
In a follow-up tweet, Parscale said the Trump campaign had assembled an “enormous lead in cash”. He said that Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee “won’t know what hit him”.
It is not the first time the Trump campaign has drawn parallels between the president and a movie. In December 2019 the “Trump War Room” – Trump’s re-election effort – cut together a picture of Trump as Thanos, a fictional comic-book super villain who erased 50% of the world’s population.
For a while last year, some of his online policy presentations mimicked the TV series Game of Thrones.
Parscale’s comparison between the effort to elect Trump to four more years in office and a terrifyingly powerful space weapon designed to cow any potential resisters into obedience drew intrigue.
“Nicknaming your presidential reelection campaign ‘Death Star’ in the middle of a pandemic that has already killed 70k+ people is an interesting choice,” wrote journalist Jedd Legum.
The fictional Death Star, which was built using forced labor, was capable of moving at light speed and actually had thousands of weapons besides the large, planet-destroying laser.
For all its perceived might, however, the Death Star was actually destroyed, as many pointed out on Twitter, while Gary Whitta, a screenwriter who co-wrote the movie Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, offered further information.
“You do understand that the people who built the Death Star were the bad guys, right?” Whitta wrote.
“Also they lost.”
