President Trump has made us all that astronaut in Interstellar who aged 23 years in 3 hours

The time-bending nightmare of Donald J. Trump

Romilly is all of us.
(Image credit: AF archive / Alamy Stock Photo)

Midway through the 2014 science fiction thriller Interstellar, impossibly good-looking astronauts Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway plan to spend an hour exploring a planet right next to a black hole. They know going in that because black holes warp space-time, what they will experience as an hour on this planet will actually be seven years for whomever they leave behind on their ship.

The planet turns out to be weird and hostile, an inhospitable and uninhabitable waterworld of constant tsunamis. Disaster forces the team to stay a bit longer than expected. When they return to their ship, 23 years have passed for their orbiting crewmate, Romilly, who is now old and understandably irritated by the whole fiasco.

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David Faris

David Faris is an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. He is a frequent contributor to Informed Comment, and his work has appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times, The Christian Science Monitor, and Indy Week.