President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign tweeted a video that showed Trump — as Yoda — decapitating two stormtroopers meant to represent MSNBC and CNN.
In the clip — posted with the timely caption, “May The 4th Be With You” — former vice president and presumed Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s face is imposed on top of Emperor Palpatine’s. Biden commends the CNN and MSNBC troopers to do his bidding, but Trump violently chops their heads off.
A representative for Disney, which owns Star Wars, did not immediately return a request for comment on the president’s re-election campaign using Star Wars imagery.
After being up for about an hour, the clip had racked up almost 1,000 retweets and over 2,000 favorites on the microblogging platform. This isn’t the first video that shows the president committing acts of violence against news organizations to gain traction among the base, either.
The White House Correspondents Association said it was “horrified” by a violent video depicting Trump stabbing, shooting and impaling the media and top political opponents like Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney, shown at a conference for his supporters at Trump’s Miami resort last October. After an outcry and demands from various organizations from CNN to the WHCA that Americans and Trump disavow the violent clip, former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham tweeted that though he hadn’t seen it, the president strongly condemned the the video.
https://twitter.com/TeamTrump/status/1257334686084411396