The Space Force Is Peak Trump
It's basically just Trump University but at the Pentagon
theatlantic.com
Later on Thursday, the Trump reelection campaign sent an email inviting supporters to vote on a new logo for the Space Force. Here are the options:
Some of these logos are pretty cool, and others are derivative. But they’re almost all misleading, especially the “Mars Awaits” one. You’d think from these designs that the Space Force is preparing for interstellar travel, rather than launching unmanned satellites into Earth orbit. The U.S. already has an agency in charge of space travel: NASA, whose classic logo many of these imitate. (My colleague James Fallows points out that the Air Force Space Command already has a perfectly good, if dated, logo.) But making a workaday defense agency into an avatar of, well, Avatar is all part of the ploy.
Once someone has voted in the poll, naturally, they are invited to donate to Trump’s reelection. That leads to a natural complaint: The Trump campaign appears to be selling the logo rights to the Space Force in exchange for campaign donations, turning the government into a tool for his own political enrichment.
The reality is much more pedestrian, and more characteristically Trumpy. What the campaign email is selling is not access and influence, but the illusionof access and influence—an even better scheme, since it demands nothing real in return. The vote will likely have no real effect on the eventual logo of the Space Force, should Congress approve it. That’s only fitting for a president who campaigned as a populist but has governed by, and to the benefit of, the wealthy and powerful. |
