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The Trump White House’s Vision of War As Nihilist Entertainment

In a new X post building on an earlier Hollywood action-clip montage, the White House tries to render the horrors of war as a Wii game.

An Iranian bomb site rendered as a Wii target by the Trump White House.

Yesterday, the White House dropped a second pop culture clip to promote its war in Iran. Emblazoned with the trademark alpha-male boast “UNDEFEATED,” the post appeared on the White House’s official X.com account. Done in the style of Nintendo’s line of Wii games, it greets us with the words “Operation Epic Fury” in the light blue Wii font against a white background. A cursor moves to click “start,” and it plays like an ad for a game, intercutting scenes from the Wii line with actual footage of bombs and missiles hitting (one is led to believe) in Iran over the last two weeks.

Wii’s warm, friendly and cartoonish sports settings are kid-friendly and filled with cute little avatar people in the game’s candy land world. Upbeat keyboard music plays as gamers roll bowling balls, hit golf balls, bat baseballs, or shoot arrows at bullseyes. When the user scores a hit, the video cuts to real nighttime black and white war footage of American ordinance battering an Iranian target which then explodes in flames. Then a colorful Wii graphic crowds over the battle site, crowing “Hole in One!” or “Out of the Park!”

The clip only shows us American missiles destroying military structures or tanks. Unfortunately, the world has already seen footage of an American Tomahawk missile dropping on a Minab girl’s school that killed at least 170 people, most of them students. The world has also seen footage of Tehran’s oil fields on fire after intense Israeli bombing, forcing millions of civilians to live under black clouds of toxic smoke that they will be breathing.

The clip seems to be inspired by recruiting reels produced a decade ago by the Islamist terrorist group ISIS aimed at radicalizing young men to come fight in Iraq. ISIS used graphics similar to video games like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto that show ISIS fighters shooting what looks like American soldiers. ISIS made this footage to sell children on jihadist violence because it has no problem recruiting child warriors; by contrast, the Trump administration recruits its adult base with endless petty childishness.

The Wii clip follows last week’s official White House fizzle reel of stolen clips from various movies and TV shows, including Iron Man, Transformers, Tropic Thunder, Christopher Reeve’s Superman, Braveheart, Gladiator, Deadpool, and Breaking Bad’s Walter White threatening “I am the danger!” and Saul Goodman, his lawyer, saying “You can’t conceive what I am capable of!” When Superman says he fights for “truth, justice, and the American way,” the clip cuts to actual footage of a target successfully hit and exploding. The one real person in the reel is not the president, but his smirking self-styled........

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