You know, I was just joking, but turns out, Middle Endian really does exist!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness#Middle-Endian
And it's just as crazy as one'd think. It's a 32bit value consisting of two 16bit little endian words jumbled together in big endian. So the byte order is B A D C.
Whenever I think "This is a really stupid idea, nobody would do that", turns out, someone actually did that.
That doesn't really contradict what the person before you said.
At least according to our current understanding the universe has a pretty harsh speed limit and with that it's pretty much impossible to govern a multi-star empire, let alone a galactic or universal one.
Even the closest other star to us would have a round trip time of 8.5 years at light-speed. That's maybe good enough for a self-governed colony for resource extraction, but in no way is that fast enough for any form of direct government, and that's at light speed.
If Bush sent a message to the colony in the last half year of his government time, the response would appear during Trump's tenure.
And if we consider that light speed travel is difficult and only reach, say, 0.2c, that's a round-trip time of 42.5 years. That means, something sent during Nixon's last months would arrive during Trump's first term.
No way to govern like that. And without the actual threat of military showing up in any relevant time frame, also the concept resource extraction from a colony is very unlikely to hold up. Same with trade in general. That's just far too slow.
And that's just with the nearest star.