Trump Campaign Under Fire For Calling Its Operation The ‘Death Star’ As 75K Americans Dead From Coronavirus
Donald Trump’s campaign is coming under fire for referring to its operation as the “Death Star,” a Star Wars nickname that critics have slammed as insensitive given the rising death toll from the coronavirus.
The nickname was shared in a tweet on Thursday from campaign chair Brad Parscale, who referred to the internal campaign operation as a “juggernaut” that includes a number of different aspects. Parscale said that the campaign would soon “start pressing FIRE” for the first time, putting things into play.
Parscale’s nickname of the “Death Star” is taken from the Star Wars movie franchise, a planet-sized military base used by the Galactic Empire. These antagonists used the Death Star as a weapon to destroy enemy planets.
The reference to Trump’s campaign as the “bad guys” of the Star Wars franchise was not lost on many of the president’s critics, who found the depiction of the enemy super-weapon used to cause death and destruction to be poorly thought out, given the tens of thousands of fatalities caused by the coronavirus pandemic. The official death toll for COVID-19 in the United States topped 76,000 on Thursday, with projections that the death toll will nearly double by June.
Some pointed out that the reference came just hours after a report claimed that the Trump administration chose to reject medical advice from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention regarding when it would be safe to reopen states. The president has pushed for states to begin lifting coronavirus restrictions and allow businesses to reopen, despite warnings from public health experts that doing so could lead to a surge in coronavirus cases and deaths.
Too "prescriptive."
Trump rejected the CDC's medical advice about #coronavirus reopening for being… medical advice.
No wonder the White House is branding itself the "Death Star."
They're going to kill a LOT of Americans this way.#ThursdayThoughts pic.twitter.com/0Iwr9XNEa6
— Grant Stern (@grantstern) May 7, 2020
Others pointed out to Parscale that the Death Star in the Star Wars series was ultimately proven to be of poor quality, as this allowed the protagonists of the movie to destroy it using a small and targeted operation.
“The Death Star was expensive and flawed. It blew up twice and was the tool of a political hack who usurped democracy and caused many deaths,” one person tweeted.
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
It was not clear what Parscale was referring to when saying the campaign would be “pressing FIRE” soon. Trump started campaigning for re-election shortly after he took office in 2017, holding a series of rallies in the years that have followed. His campaign, like that of presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden, has since gone off the road and stopped holding events in the weeks since the pandemic first started.
