Turmoil has engulfed the republic. There is unrest in the Senate. The country is crumbling. These are not newspaper headlines that were issued to announce the results of the 2024 elections, though they well could have been. They are, instead, close paraphrases of cherry-picked lines from the opening text “crawls” of three Star Wars films, a sputtering, obstreperous franchise whose original story was conceived, back in the early 1970s, as a rebuke of the presidential office of Richard Milhous Nixon and its doomed imperial adventure in Vietnam. One supposes that the regrettable yet inevitable continuation of the film cycle will all too literally transpose and assimilate Trump: Episode II into its narrative structure. (The last entry—2019’s The Rise of Skywalker—began with words that could describe the comportment of our ailing lame-duck president: The dead speak!)
Phantom IP aside, a recrudescent MAGA presidency poses grievous threats to the built and unbuilt environment, and it seems unlikely that the rebel alliance of #Resistance liberals, chimerical Never Trumpers,…