The Trump administration has blasted Star Wars actor Mark Hamill for posting an image on social media of the president dead in a grave, claiming that such rhetoric has inspired security threats, including the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ dinner.
“Mark Hamill is one sick individual,” the White House wrote in a post on X. “These Radical Left lunatics just can’t help themselves. This kind of rhetoric is exactly what has inspired three assassination attempts in two years against our President.”
The day before, the Luke Skywalker actor posted what appeared to be an AI image of Trump on Bluesky, featuring the president in an open grave. The image included the caption “if only” and a headstone showing his date of death as 2024, the year a gunman nearly killed the Republican on the campaign trail.
“If Only- He should live long enough to witness his inevitable devastating loss in the midterms, be held accountable for his unprecedented corruption, impeached, convicted & humiliated for his countless crimes,” Hamill wrote in an accompanying post. “Long enough to realize he’ll be disgraced in the history books, forevermore. #don_TheCON.”
Later Thursday, Hamill issued a clarification.
“Accurate Edit for Clarity: ‘He should live long enough to… be held accountable for his… crimes,’” Hamill wrote on Bluesky. “Actually, I was wishing him the opposite of dead, but apologize if you found the image inappropriate.”
The White House has consistently argued that aggressive left-wing commentary is driving political violence in the U.S, including the April shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
Suspect Cole Tomas Allen sent family members an anti-Trump message shortly before the shooting, describing his intention to target members of the administration, according to federal officials.
2025 was the first time in more than 30 years that left-wing terror attacks outnumbered those from the right, according to a September analysis from the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
The president himself has repeatedly used AI and harsh rhetoric to make threatening comments about his enemies online, and he has pardoned those convicted of political violence offline.
During the course of the Iran war, the president has depicted himself holding a machine gun and threatened that a “whole civilization will die” unless Tehran agrees to his demands.
Last year, he shared an AI video of himself bombing No Kings protesters and an AI image playing on the Vietnam war film Apocalypse Now, threatening a “war” and “Chipocalypse Now” ahead of a mass immigration crackdown in Chicago.
On the campaign trail, Trump regularly featured audio clips from jailed January 6 rioters who had violently stormed the Capitol to disrupt the 2020 election certification, thousands of whom he pardoned upon taking office.
