The White House has branded Star Wars actor Mark Hamill “a sick individual” after an AI-generated image showing Donald Trump in a shallow grave, with the words “If Only” as an overlay was posted to one of star’s social media accounts.

Hamill, who played the lead character of Luke Skywalker in six movies of the iconic science fiction franchise and is a longtime critic of the US president, apologized and removed the post from his Bluesky account on Thursday.

The American actor replaced it with another message clarifying that he was not advocating the president’s demise.

“Actually, I was wishing him the opposite of dead, but apologize if you found the image inappropriate,” Hamill wrote, adding that Trump “should live long enough to be held accountable for his crimes”.

The White House, through its Rapid Response 47 account on X, immediately seized on Hamill’s original post, which portrayed the president lying beneath a gravestone inscribed with “Donald J Trump, 1946-2024”.

“Mark Hamill is one sick individual,” the post said. “These Radical Left lunatics ‌just ⁠can’t help themselves. This kind of rhetoric is exactly what has inspired three assassination attempts in two years against our President.”

Violence has become prevalent across the political spectrum in recent months and years. Last month a gunman stormed the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in Washington DC in an apparent attempt to reach Trump.

In September last year, Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist, was shot and killed during an appearance at a Utah university campus.

There was also a hammer attack on the husband of the Democratic former House speaker Nancy Pelosi in 2022; and the killing of Democratic state lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband in Minnesota last year.

Trump himself has often led calls for physical aggression, with the Atlantic in 2024 documenting 40 occasions in which the president had incited or praised violence against US citizens, including one episode when he spoke of training guns on the face of Liz Cheney, a Republican former congresswoman and political enemy.

Hamill, meanwhile, continued to raise Trump’s hackles on Monday when he appeared with Barack Obama, another perceived foe, in a short video on YouTube promoting the new Obama Presidential Center in Chicago.

“Hope has a new home,” a caption of the video said in the style of the Star Wars movies opening titles, as Obama and Hamill discussed how the campus would be “a force for change”.