Andor on Repeat

Imagine a world where, when you die, your ashes are mixed into an engraved brick that is used to build your city. Crowds pour into the streets, marching from all directions with instruments and playing a dirge that swells into an animated anthem. People unite in the city square to honor your memory. I don’t cry easily, but the fourth time I saw this scene from Andor, I still had tears running down my face. This custom from the planet Ferrix was one of the strokes of world-building genius that made me fall in love with the show. 

I began watching Andor a few years late but right on time, and I’ve had it on repeat ever since. Trump had just taken his second oath of office and was ramping up his mass deportation efforts. Our country’s most racist high school dropouts joined ICE with $50,000 signing bonuses. They donned tactical vests and covered their faces to avoid accountability for their crimes. Later, the Trump administration started killing people in boats off the coast of Venezuela, finally kidnapping the country’s president and telling the world that we will take their oil. 

Oppressing large groups of people and seizing resources from smaller, less powerful countries are actions that mirror Emperor Palpatine’s designs on absolute power over the galaxy.  To see Andor for the first time in 2025 felt prophetic. Although it was released in 2022, creator Tony Gilroy had witnessed and exposed the abuses of malignant tyrants like Trump throughout history. 

The Empire’s brutality, lies, and need for control hold an eerie parallel to the rise of MAGA fascism in the United States. There is a cultish devotion to a single leader, abetted by a hypocritical and corrupt bureaucracy of anonymous, masked agents. Similar to stormtroopers, ICE agents are deindividuated, morally disengaged, and unbridled by laws or decency. They routinely rough up civilians with impunity, as demonstrated by the countless videos of ICE assaulting people, breaking car windows, and most recently, murdering an unarmed Minneapolis woman in broad daylight. 

And just like in Andor, there are seeds of resistance everywhere—throughout our cities and in our deepest red rural counties. These are folks who reject the manufactured narrative, folks who witnessed George Floyd and Renee Good being killed in cold blood and seethe against the gaslighting and propaganda. We all saw the videos.

In Andor, the Imperial Security Bureau supervisor Dedra Meero works tirelessly to astroturf violent resistance in occupied areas—in the case of the planet Ghorman, this is a pretext to seize control of a resource the Empire needs to construct the Death Star. The anti-Ghor propaganda being pumped throughout the galaxy isn’t enough: Supervisor Meero tells her boss, “You need Ghorman rebels you can rely on to do the wrong thing.” 

During a tense demonstration in the city square of Palmo (Ghorman’s capital), an imperial sniper intentionally shoots a young imperial security trooper, igniting a violent massacre. Stormtroopers and security droids gun down hundreds of people. Imperial propaganda claims it used justified force for security reasons. Sound familiar?

Kristi Noem could only dream of Supervisor Meero’s success with the false flag attack: Noem failed to goad Portland into a violent pushback after deploying the National Guard. (Instead, we came dressed in inflatable animal costumes and made the occupying force look ridiculous.) 

Both the Empire and the Trump administration command us to reject the truth we see with our own eyes. In an episode that won Andor an Emmy for writing, Senator Mon Mothma makes her final address to the Galactic Senate following the Ghorman Massacre. She says, “The distance between what is said and what is known to be true has become an abyss. Of all the things at risk, the loss of an objective reality is perhaps the most dangerous.”

Our government’s propaganda is failing: they call victim Renee Good a “domestic terrorist” and promise absolute immunity for murderous ICE agents. We know better. This administration is intentionally poking progressive cities with the tip of its spear, trying to justify imprisoning or deporting people for their political beliefs or skin color.

Mon Mothma’s speech continues, “When the truth leaves us, when we let it slip away, when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever monster screams the loudest.” 

In the United States, it’s clear as kyber crystal who that loud monster is and where his appetites have led us: Donald Trump is like Emperor Palpatine except he’s more attention-hungry, weaker, pettier, and dumber. Also, Palpatine wasn’t a convicted rapist.

In the midst of so much blatant injustice, I keep returning to a quote from my favorite monologue in the show: Nemik’s Manifesto. It states, “The imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort—it breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear.”

This administration knows it is racist and wrong and is scared of being overrun. They are treating us as if we are blind and stupid. They believe their violence is a show of strength, but it’s temporary and there will be a reckoning. When we have our own Nuremberg trials, Kristi Noem, JD Vance, and Stephen Miller will face the consequences of their lies and manipulation. They will need to own every broken car window, every injured protestor, and every murder in detention facilities and at the hands of ICE agents. 

And soon, when Trump chokes on that holy cheeseburger, the world will dance in the streets.