The White House Instagram Account Thinks Donald Trump Is Actually a Sith Lord

The world of Star Wars is more straightforward than many sci-fi or fantasy stories. Although some pockets of the universe are complicated, the core stories are about good guys vs. bad guys, and it's honestly pretty easy to tell which is which.

Following a celebration of May 4 (which is recognized every year as Star Wars Day) in which the White House posted an AI-generated image of Donald Trump holding a red lightsaber, many wanted to know more about what that meant. Here's what we know about the image, and why he seems to have chosen red.

In Star Wars, a red lightsaber is almost always used to signify that its wielder is a Sith Lord. Without getting too nerdy, the Sith Lords are the bad guys. They kill people, and perhaps most famously, one of them conspired to overthrow a democratic government and replace it with an evil empire. You do not usually want to associate yourself with the Sith, who are, again, the bad guys. And yet, Trump is, for some reason, holding a red lightsaber in the image.

The image of Trump wielding the lightsaber even came to the attention of Mark Hamill, who played Luke Skywalker in the original Star Wars trilogy. "Proof this guy is full of SITH," he wrote in a post on Bluesky over the image.

It's unclear if the White House knows that red lightsabers are usually reserved for bad guys in the world of Star Wars or not, so we don't know whether they're leaning into this or just didn't think it through.

Although Trump has sometimes aligned himself with antiheroes, suggesting that the Sith Lords of Star Wars were misunderstood is a new level of strangeness. The guys with the red lightsabers are the bad guys. You can spot them because they wear black cloaks and have red lightsabers. This is how Star Wars has worked since the beginning, and not understanding that would be strange.

Although this AI-generated image was among the most perplexing that the administration has put out, it was far from the first. They have started to generate these kinds of images regularly, using them for everything from sacrilege (in a post suggesting that Donald Trump should be the next pope) to going after immigrants who they claim should be deported.

These images are done in a variety of different art styles, and because they're generated by AI, they can be made fairly quickly, Now that the technology is good enough not to add phantom fingers or make other mistakes, the images themselves often look fine.

Of course, asking AI to generate images can sometimes lead to other problems. It's possible that the AI was the one that first associated Trump with a Sith Lord, and the White House just ran with it. They haven't explained the image in detail, but it does feature an odd suggestion that they're the bad guys.