Bartlet is also not the only fictional US president to have had his words pirated. At the height of the coronavirus pandemic, the Argentinian politician Alejandro Torres was filmed trying to lift voters’ spirits with the words of Thomas J Whitmore, the fictional president played by Bill Pullman in the 1996 alien invasion film Independence Day. In 2017, the Mexican politician Miguel Ángel Covarrubias was accused of poaching lines from Frank Underwood, the machiavellian president played by Kevin Spacey in the Netflix series House of Cards. Covarrubias denied plagiarism and claimed it was a deliberate tactic to provoke interest. Five years earlier it was President Andrew Shepherd, played by Michael Douglas in the 1995 romantic comedy The American President, whose words were misappropriated by a real-life politician. “D’oh!,” Australia’s Anthony Albanese, then a cabinet minister, tweeted in embarrassment after being called out for lifting Shepherd’s lines.