Andor: Mon Mothma's Fiery Speech on Defending Truth May As Well Have Been About Trump

Warning: This article contains spoilers for Andor Season 2. Read at your own risk!

This week's batch of Andor episodes, Episodes 7, 8, and 9 of Season 2, were the climax of the acclaimed Star Wars series. Yes, there's one more bloc of episodes dropping next week, but those episodes are more the bridge that will lead us to the events of the 2016 film Rogue One, which Andor is a prequel of. It's this week where it all comes to a head — both with the Imperial false flag operation on Ghorman and with the various disparate resistance groups cementing a proper Rebel Alliance as a result. 

In Episode 8, the Empire finally enacted its final move against the Ghorman resistance, drawing a protest march into the Ghorman Plaza, surrounding them with Imperial troops, and then intentionally murdering one of their own soldiers to justify shooting the protesters. It's a painful but incredibly effective sequence, with so many key characters dying during the fighting, including Syril Karn (Kyle Soller). 

ALSO READ: Andor's undocumented immigrant plot hits terrifyingly close to home

But what came after might have been even more spectacular. Episode 9 brings with it Mon Mothma's (Genevieve O'Reilly) big moment — she addresses the Imperial Senate and calls out the Empire not just for what it did to Ghorman, but for how difficult they've made it for people to really see what happened after the Ministry of Enlightenment spent two years slandering the people of Ghorman as being terrorists and agitators. 

The speech itself is great television, as is her frantic escape from Coruscant with Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) after, but it's worth dwelling on the contents of the speech because it includes some pretty uncomfortable parallels with reality. Here's how Mon laid it all out:

I believe we are in crisis. 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. The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil. When 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. 

This chamber's hold on the truth was finally lost on the Ghorman Plaza. What took place yesterday — what happened yesterday on Ghorman was unprovoked genocide. Yes, genocide! And that truth has been exiled from this chamber. 

And the monster screaming the loudest, the monster we've helped create, the monster who will come for us all soon enough, is Emperor Palpatine!

It's pretty tough to listen to that speech and not see some uncanny parallels to our own real-life "monster screaming the loudest": Donald Trump, who has shown little to no regard for actual reality in his second term as president of the United States. The Trump regime has done a lot of terrible and nonsensical things already, but none of them capture the cruelty of its false reality more clearly than its immigration crackdowns, which has involved the extrajudicial deportation of hundreds of immigrants to El Salvador without any pretense of due process, including a man who had been under the protection of a do-not-deport court order for years that the regime has spent the past month saying bad things about as often as possible, and a random teen in the Bronx who was unlucky enough to have the same name as one of ICE's deportation targets. And the administration has already made a deal with El Salvador's government to illegally do the same with American citizens if they feel like it. And it is attempting to justify all this by falsely pretending the president of Venezuela is directing the actions of gang members in the US — essentially claiming that we're currently at war with Venezuela, which is just not true by any legitimate definition.

As it is with the Empire on Andor, everything these people do hinges upon our acceptance of their version of reality, in which every single one of these deportees is a hardened, murderous member of a specific pair of gangs. But in Trump's America, these folks get shipped out without any process at all, or any attempt to prove the claims being made against them — they've usually just been abducted and shipped out without the chance to talk to family or a lawyer. And that's just one very narrow slice of the absolute mess we find ourselves in, all at the behest of this one screaming monster called Donald Trump, who simply doesn't care about anybody's well-being or happiness aside from his own. And many people are feeling trapped in that monster's embarrassingly skewed portrait of reality, unable to ever fully escape while he's around.

But this monster isn't just coming for Latino immigrants with tattoos, just as the Empire doesn't limit itself to killing rebels. As Mon says, Palpatine's madness will eventually affect everyone — no one gets to escape the consequences of these atrocities, not even the people enabling and enacting them. Look again at the massacre in the Ghorman Plaza, and consider that every single person who was on the ground in the plaza fighting, including the Imperial troops themselves, were the victims of the Empire's plan. The man in charge on the ground purposely brought in inexperienced and undisciplined young troops that he knew would panic under pressure, and then had an Imperial sniper murder one of them from afar to get the party started — all of those kids and their commanding officer ended up dead in the fighting.

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Adding to the tragedy is the fates of those villainous characters who seemed to be having a change of heart as everything came to a head. First it's Syril Karn, the idealist who finally grasps over the course of Episodes 7 and 8 that he has been deeply deceived by a lifetime of Imperial lies. Syril, witnessing the carnage on Ghorman firsthand, is seconds away from an epiphany when he spots and then immediately attacks Cassian. Syril has our hero dead to rights, a pistol pointed at his face, when Cassian utters one simple question — "Who are you?" — that fully shatters any residual hold that Imperial propaganda had on him, as he realizes his vendetta against Andor was personal rather than righteous. But then Syril is shot in the head an instant later, and is never able to act on this change of heart. Another victim of the monster.

We get another example in the next episode, as Mon and Cassian flee the Senate building. Mon's driver Kloris (Lee Ross), an Imperial spy, was deeply affected by her speech, which he listened to in the car. Inspired to finally support Mon Mothma's efforts, he heads to the Senate to try to find and help her escape — but Cassian, having been warned that Kloris is an Imperial, shoots him before he can do anything or offer assistance. Don't blame Cassian, though. The credit for this wasting of a life belongs to the monster responsible for creating this whole scenario, not the person who's responding to it.

It's particularly interesting that the monster himself, Palpatine, is never seen on Andor, adding emphasis to the fact that this series is not about him, but rather the destructive whirlwind of B.S. he created that our characters have to navigate in order to survive. There are no real heroes in this story, just regular people responding to the terrible things happening right in front of them, their lives being thrown away at the whims of one, single, awful individual. 

It's Andor's ability to paint that unflinchingly painful portrait that makes it so effective as both an extremely high quality piece of entertainment, and as a cautionary tale for what our future may look like if we fall too far down into an authoritarian's pit of lies.

The final three episodes of Andor premiere next Tuesday at 9 p.m. ET/6 p.m. PT on Disney+.