“In brightest day, in blackest night,
No evil shall escape my sight.
Let those who worship evil’s might,
Beware my power… Green Lantern’s light!

The oath of the Green Lantern Corps is pretty iconic. It has been a consistent part of the Corps for decades, representing the ideals that its members are supposed to uphold: courage, duty and the willpower to overcome fear.

Which is why I find it a little irritating — and more than a little funny — to see the current White House administration using the imagery of the Green Lantern Corps to promote its political agenda.

In its newest piece of AI slop, Donald Trump is depicted wielding a Green Lantern ring, using its power to stop immigrants at the border and conjure up American industry.

There are a few problems here.

Firstly, this is some decidedly non-Green-Lantern behaviour.

The Green Lantern Corps are not an army dedicated to keeping people inside arbitrary borders. They are an intergalactic peacekeeping force whose members are selected for their ability to overcome great fear and then sent across the universe to protect life.

Earth itself isn’t even treated as one country by the Corps. It’s part of Sector 2814, a tiny piece of a universe containing countless species, cultures and civilisations.

The Corps is, almost by definition, internationalist — actually, intergalactic.

Then there is the wonderfully accidental self-own contained within the video itself.

Trump uses the ring to create a border wall.

A Green Lantern construct.

In other words, the wall still isn’t real.

Then he apparently creates American industry using the same power.

Which means that’s an illusion too.

Green Lantern constructs disappear when the Lantern stops maintaining them. So whoever made this video has accidentally created a metaphor in which Trump produces the appearance of a wall and thriving industry through sheer force of will, while neither actually exists independently of him.

That’s considerably funnier than whatever political message they were aiming for.

Obviously, this is a dumb meme. I’m not pretending someone in the White House communications team sat down with several decades of Green Lantern comics and carefully considered the political philosophy of the Guardians of the Universe.

But it does demonstrate something that increasingly fascinates me about the way politicians use popular culture.

They want the iconography without the meaning.

Superman becomes useful because he looks strong. Captain America becomes useful because he wears a flag. Green Lantern becomes useful because he is a powerful man with a glowing weapon.

Strip away everything the characters actually represent and you’re left with costumes that can be pasted over whatever message you want to sell that afternoon.

Anyone with even a modicum of media literacy should understand that a billionaire real-estate mogul obsessed with borders, wealth and putting his own name on enormous buildings probably isn’t obvious Green Lantern Corps material.

Although, now that I think about it…

There is another Lantern Corps.

The Orange Lanterns draw their power from greed. Their defining emotion is avarice: the desire to possess, accumulate and claim everything for themselves.

Their oath even begins:

“What’s mine is mine and mine and mine.”

You know what?

Maybe they got the right franchise after all.

They just picked the wrong colour.

(Editor Note: maybe the Man Hunters might be more appropriate too)