Policy / March 13, 2026
In a new X post building on a previous Hollywood action clip montage, the White House attempts to recreate the horrors of war in the form of a Wii game.
Iranian bomb site touted as Wii target by Trump White House.
(Image via X.com) Yesterday, the White House released a second pop culture clip to promote its war in Iran. Adorned with the alpha male’s trademark “UNDEFEATED”, the message appeared on the Official White House X.com account. Made 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 on a white background. A cursor moves to click “start” and the game plays like a commercial for a game, intercutting scenes from the Wii lineup with actual footage of bombs and missiles hitting (one is led to believe) Iran over the past two weeks.
The Wii’s warm, friendly, cartoonish sports settings are kid-friendly and filled with cute little avatars in the game’s Candy Land world. Upbeat keyboard music plays while players roll bowling balls, hit golf balls, bat baseballs, or shoot arrows into the target. When the user succeeds, the video switches to real black-and-white nighttime war footage of U.S. munitions hitting an Iranian target which then explodes in flames. Then a colorful Wii graphic crowds the battle site, singing “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 images of a American Tomahawk missile an attack on a girls’ primary school in Minab that killed at least 170 people, most of them students. The world also saw images of Tehran’s oil fields burning after intense Israeli bombardment, forcing millions of civilians to live under black clouds of toxic smoke that they will breathe.
The clip appears to be inspired by recruitment reels produced a decade ago by the Islamist terrorist group ISIS aimed at radicalizing young men to come and fight in Iraq. ISIS used graphics similar to video games like Call of Duty And Grand Theft Auto which show ISIS fighters shooting at what appear to be American soldiers. ISIS made these images to sell children on jihadist violence because it has no problem recruit child warriors; in contrast, the Trump administration recruits its adult base with endless childishness.
The Wii clip follows last week’s official White House reel featuring stolen clips from various movies and TV shows, including Iron Man, Transformers, Tropical Thunderthat of Christopher Reeve Superman, Brave heart, Gladiator, dead PoolAnd Break the badWalter White’s threat “I am the danger!” and Saul Goodman, his lawyer, saying, “You can’t imagine what I’m capable of!” » When Superman says he fights for “truth, justice and the American way”, the clip cuts to actual footage of a target being successfully hit and blown up. The only real person in the reel is not the president but his so-called Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth.
It shouldn’t surprise us to see Hegseth as the central character in an explosion of amoral messages indistinguishably mixing heroes and villains. Hegseth first met Trump during his first administration; the then-Fox host and former Iraq War veteran sought to persuade the president to pardon three American soldiers convicted of war crimes, including murder. As The New York Times ” wrote this week, Hegseth considers it a weakness of a declining civilization to try to give war a moral purpose. Earlier this year, he said what he wanted from the Trump-era military was “maximum lethality, not lukewarm legality” and assaults that emphasize “violent effect, not political correctness.” He called the Corps of Judge Advocates General (JAG) “ajagoff lawyers» and this week ordered the military to “conduct ruthless, unapologetic scrutiny» JAG officers have sworn to respect the fundamental rules of engagement and military ethics in order to reduce their numbers.
Current number
The president himself – clearly convinced by Hegseth’s worldview after their introduction – also exults in the destructive nihilistic force of American war. On Friday, he posted on Truth Social about his current campaign in Iran: “Look what is happening to these deranged bastards today. They have been killing innocent people all over the world for 47 years, and now I, as the 47th President of the United States of America, am killing them. What a great honor to do so! Thank you for your attention to this issue. President DONALD J. TRUMP.”
Hegseth says he wants unfettered war “stupid rules of engagement”, but that is not what is reflected in the repackaged images that he and his communications team are circulating. The two clips released by the White House describe the fictional “flawless victory” of a Transformers a movie, not the ugly chaotic fragments of the current US-Israeli “excursion,” as the president calls it, to Iran. (Many have suggested that the president probably meant to call the invasion of Iran an “incursion,” but given how much fun Hegseth seems to be having with this war, perhaps the president meant exactly what he said.)
The casual, 4Chan-style depiction of the massacres in the form of a Comicon teaser or a video game raises a key question: Who are Hegseth and Trump trying to win over here? Joe Rogan and Andrew Schulz, once kings of the Trump fanboy podcast, have already defected because of the ill-conceived and strategically failed war in Iran — or simply the fact that we’re even in another war. Despite the charade of lordship that Hegseth obviously enjoys, the war remains deeply unpopular and has divided the president’s base.
The America First wing of the Republican Party hates it and sees it as a betrayal of Trump’s promise to keep America out of “stupid wars.” The criticism from this key branch of the MAGA base is that the “forever wars” in the Middle East are complicated, costly, long-term affairs that drag the country deeper and deeper into foreign entanglements. These videos make war easy and fun; It is unclear whether the intention behind these measures is to convince America First’s war critics, or simply to troll them.
It is likely that the White House itself does not know its own intentions. Trump has fought the most incoherent war of all, one that is already beyond the control of our military as Iran fires missiles at neighboring Arab states and Israel prepares an attack on Lebanon. For those of us who never take the president at his word and expect him to say whatever he believes will deflect blame or extol his leadership genius at any given moment, efforts to sell the war in Iran do not provoke surprise or betrayal — it is just further confirmation of this administration’s adolescent cruelty. For the manosphere, Trump’s Iranian adventure is a rude awakening.
Hegseth’s Iran War trailers never try to clearly show the purpose of this war. This is not in the tradition of Frank Capra’s WWII documentary series. Why we fightwhich sought to educate the American people about what Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan were and why they needed to be destroyed. The clips never present President Trump’s case for war – again, no surprise, given his incredible failure to do so himself. They do not honor our ideals or values; they are simply celebrating the fact that we started a war. And they typically describe it as painless entertainment, without any hint of a confusing and violent offensive that has so far displaced 3.2 million Iranians at a cost greater than $11.3 billion from taxpayers in the first six days only.
Many commentators have pointed out that there is no moral argument for this war. It becomes clear that the lack of moral center comes from above. After all, it was precisely this kind of celebration of military amorality that first brought Trump and Hegseth together, with Trump’s pardon for three war criminals Hegseth had defended him. Trump and Hegseth have elevated their gleeful amorality to bloody incompetence on a global scale, and now they are trying to sell it as a nihilistic comedy.
Support independent journalism that breaks the rules Even before February 28, the reasons for Donald Trump’s imploding popularity couldn’t have been clearer: rampant corruption and billions of dollars’ worth of personal enrichment during an affordability crisis, a foreign policy guided solely by his own abandoned sense of morality, and the deployment of a murderous campaign of occupation, detention, and deportation on American streets.
Today, an undeclared, unauthorized, unpopular and unconstitutional war of aggression against Iran has spread like wildfire across the region and Europe. A new “forever war” – with an ever-increasing likelihood of US troops on the ground – could very well be upon us.
As we have seen time and time again, this administration uses lies, misdirection, and attempts to flood the zone to justify its abuses of power at home and abroad. Just as Trump, Marco Rubio, and Pete Hegseth offer erratic and contradictory justifications for attacks on Iran, the administration is also spreading the lie that the upcoming midterm elections are threatened by non-citizens registered to vote. When these lies go unchecked, they become the basis for further authoritarian encroachment and war.
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Ben Schwartz Ben Schwartz is an Emmy-nominated writer whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The New Republic, The New York Timesand many other publications. His Bluesky address is @benschwartz.bluesky.social.