How will the Orange Vader storyline end?

The real moral of Star Wars comes from Martin Luther King Jr.

As I drove to a Hands Off! rally in Hartford, CT on April 5 to talk with the protestors there, I played some CDs a friend had given me. We were both Star Wars fans of the pre-Disney era, and the last time we met for breakfast, he handed me a clump of homespun disks with the radio dramatizations for the original trilogy. Listening to the Star Wars story unfold, I thought about how Darth Vader was presented as such a loathsome character; the personification of evil, the ultimate bad guy everyone was supposed to hate. The crowds gathered at the state capitol manifested that same energy toward Donald Trump, sometimes called the orange man by those who will not speak his name.

Protestors on the street in front of the Connecticut state house, April 5, 2025.

I never made it around to the main event; the opposite side of the building had crowds of protesters lining the damp streets. The first man I talked to was watching the spectacle from 200 feet away; I was curious what he made of the whole thing. Turned out he was homeless after spending twenty years as a public school teacher. He was grateful for what resources the state of Connecticut provided him and supportive of the idea of Trump being successful. When asked what that might look like, he envisioned a society where we thought more about human dignity.

When I waded into the sign wavers, I found a fair amount of hate for Orange Vader. My usual routine is to ask people what they hope to see accomplished. On this day, their ideas were often “Get Trump out of office,” “Get money out of elections,” “Change the way we vote,” and similar. While these ideas reflect the widely recognized fact that our election system isn’t producing functional governance, it’s critical to remember that all of those things are just means to an end. Politics is about setting policy. What do we want government to do?

There were isolated counter protesters. A White woman proudly displayed a pink “Moms for Trump” flag; an elderly Black man with a walker screamed “racist” as he went by her. (His top concern was that he might lose his Social Security.) Offended, she hurled insults back. I learned her name was Jennifer, and she and her husband enjoyed living in a Puerto Rican neighborhood. “You don’t move there if you’re racist,” she explained. A decade earlier, Jennifer said she would have been standing with the protestors. Finding out her then-boyfriend (now husband) had voted for Trump in 2016 had been a shock, but the idiocy of the blue team eventually drove her over to the red team with him.

Another man carried a sign declaring Trump was ineligible to be president under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, Supreme Court adjudication notwithstanding. We talked about the actual text, which lists various elected offices but not that of president, and he was aghast at the idea that any perspective other than his might have merit. “No reasonable person could think that,” he huffed. After he found out I’d been talking with people in the crowd on January 6, 2021, he ended the conversation and walked away.

One of the many striking things about that January day four years ago was the homogeneity of responses I received to the question, “What do you want Congress to actually do?” Passing term limits was the overwhelming favorite. Tens of thousands of people had answered the president’s call to gather in the nation’s capital January 6 because Washington was broken. Throwing all the bums out is an very understandable position to take, but it doesn’t answer the fundamental question: What do we want government to do?

I’ll be posting more soon about a new paradigm of collaborative governance, which starts by proposing an answer to this question, but let me bring it back to Star Wars. Darth Vader is the ultimate bad guy in the first movie, and the audience knows intuitively that a showdown with Luke Skywalker must take place. Sure enough, the second movie brings them into a lightsaber duel, and Vader reveals that Luke is his son. How will the young Jedi Knight confront his own father?

In the third film, that conflict is resolved. Luke Skywalker is now a Jedi Master, and he refuses to hate Vader or even fight him. Instead, he engages the Dark Lord of the Sith with an even more powerful force: unconditional love. At the trilogy’s climax, Luke’s unwavering belief in Vader’s innate goodness succeeds, and the Sith Lord, reborn through Luke’s faith as Anakin Skywalker, saves the galaxy.

This, then, is the true meaning of Star Wars, and it can be summed up by something Martin Luther King Jr. said: “Hate can not drive out hate; only love can do that.”

Hate can not defeat Donald Trump. Not six months ago, we literally put this up for a vote, Trump vs. anti-Trump, and the anti-Trump forces lost. Had they won, the path of possibilities would look different, but the reality of the political landscape today is that Donald Trump is the guy pulling the strings in Washington. Instead of a new round of protests to stimulate hate, what if we used Jedi tactics and engaged him with unconditional love?

To redeem Vader, Luke Skywalker manipulated his conscience by setting up a scenario where the Dark Lord couldn’t refuse to act. As I teased in my April Fools’ Day post, part of this strategy involves providing Trump with a blueprint for a big win. Since he’s a man who’s structured his life around persuading others that he is successful, this may be an offer he can’t refuse. The 2025 campaign will culminate around Trump’s birthday, June 14, and the opportunity to kick off a year of jubilee for the United States.

The biggest resistance to the Jedi strategy comes from those on the left who suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome. A long time friend—a former college professor—told me recently that seeing the United States burn for four years was preferable to seeing the President of the United States be successful, just so “all those idiots who voted for him get taught a lesson.” Like the man who refused to accept that the vague language of the 14th amendment could be seen from any view besides his, there are tens of millions of people whose tribal identity is based on opposition to Orange Vader. If this were 1980, you could understand the Star Wars fans collectively rooting for Luke Skywalker to strike down the Dark Lord and illustrate the moral that evil will always be punished. But George Lucas served up a better ending.

How will the US resolve the Orange Vader storyline? I firmly believe MLK had the right idea.