Luke Skywalker has a deadly new foe: a 3-year-old Kushner kid.
A bizarre online spat has erupted after Mark Hamill, the actor who plays Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars franchise, launched an attack on Ivanka Trump and her family after she posted a picture of herself and husband Jared posing with their son Theodore, who was dressed up as a Stormtrooper.
The row began after Ivanka posted what, for any other family, would be a cute picture of her and her husband, in an endearingly messy apartment, posing with their young kid dressed as one of Darth Vader’s thugs.
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One might argue that dressing up the president’s grandson as one of the foot soldiers of the evil empire and then sharing the image with the world was asking for trouble—but few could have expected that a mighty Jedi would get involved.
It’s hard to escape the conclusion that an entire life spent floating in the Hollywood bubble (or out on that isolated Irish island) have melted Hamill’s judgment even more than a few years in the Washington bubble has Ivanka’s.
If you thought Ivanka was dumb for posting a picture of her son dressed as a mindless and murderous employee of a corrupt system of darkness, her capacity for scoring an own-goal was surely rivaled only by Hamill, who opened himself up to accusations that the favored son of the rebel alliance had taken to trolling a toddler.
It’s hard to make yourself look mean-spirited and intolerant next to the Trumps but, somehow, Hamill managed it.
His supporters, of course, argued on social media that his comments were intended as a criticism of Ivanka and the elder Trumps in general.
They might have added that any self-respecting 3-year-old is unlikely to have demanded to be allowed to dress up as one of the characters from a 1978 sci-fi movie, and that the decision was clearly Ivanka and Jared’s.
Of course, within the gigantic world of Star Wars nerdology, further questions were being asked about Javanka’s familiarity with the Star Wars story. Did they, for example, understand that Stormtroopers are the bad guys? You know, the whole dark side thing?
Was this really the action of a family who love the Star Wars nonology, or merely a ploy, more cynical than Disney’s acquisition of Lucasfilm, to hitch a ride on the coat tails of the Millennium Falcon?
Maybe Javanka were indeed cynically using their kid to project a softer, gentler, more cuddly image. However, it didn’t really look like it.
Note to super-powerful Hollywood movie stars with millions of online followers: As a general rule, it’s wise to resist situations where it might, however unintentionally, look like you are trying to pick a fight with a 3 year old.
This isn’t what you learned in training with Obi-Wan, but, maybe, on this occasion, Luke, don’t use the Force.
