The Trump Administration Goes to War, by Any Memes Necessary

A social media video released by the White House mixed pop culture clips with bombing footage | Credit...A video released by the White House

On Feb. 28, the Trump administration launched war on Iran. The following week, it drafted Iron Man, Walter White and SpongeBob.

These characters, and many more figures from movies, TV, sports, music and video game memes, appeared in a series of short, trolling videos from the White House, on platforms including TikTok and X (formerly known as Twitter), that reduce the war’s carnage and upheaval to flippant, dystopian amusements.

For Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, war was hell. But as represented by the Trump White House’s social feeds, war is LOL.

In one video, footage of explosions is intercut with a clip of SpongeBob SquarePants saying, “You want to see me do it again?” In another, football tackles and battlefield detonations are synced to AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck.” Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, gives a briefing to the score of Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” (whose use by the Trump administration the band protested last year); munitions hit their targets to Nelly’s “Here Comes the Boom.”

A clip from the game “Grand Theft Auto” opens one video; a wartime scene from “Call of Duty” begins another. In yet another, munitions detonate over and over as an animated lizard — taken from an end credits scene of “Elio” — mashes a lizard icon on a touch screen and a voice repeats, “Lizard,” ushering in the brainrot era of wartime propaganda.

The magnum opus of the genre, however, is a 42-second mash-up of high-adrenaline movie, TV and gaming quotes and memes with battlefield pyrotechnics. Scenes from “Braveheart,” “Better Call Saul,” “Deadpool,” “John Wick” and more jostle with missile and torpedo hits to a frenetic soundtrack, climaxing in the “Flawless victory!” declaration from the 1990s arcade franchise Mortal Kombat.

What does it all mean? One could say that, like much of the terminally online posting that the administration has embraced to laud its immigration and other policies, the aim is a kind of brazen, joking-not-joking anti-meaning, a vibe of dominance unbounded by narrative, reason or moral argument.

The videos speak the percussive language of action-movie trailers — all blammo and no plot. (They’ve also been likened to “hype videos,” the high-octane reels designed to pump up sports fans.) They suggest that the rhetoric of entertainment and government and edgelord posting are now identical. They bypass the rational consciousness to yank at the viewer’s brainstem.

Yet there’s plenty in these brief clips to unpack. At times, they’re like a tour of the president’s subconscious. Mr. Trump has long favored violent imagery in his speeches and violent entertainment on his screens. He has criticized N.F.L. penalties for head-on-head collisions as having made the game “soft.” Now his administration is touting the virility of his military offensive with tackle after bone-crunching tackle.

There is also a none-too-subtle signal in the characters the White House has chosen for the videos. For one thing, they are almost all male, in keeping with the administration’s use of social-media memes to reach out to young men and its rhetoric of restoring masculinity, especially to the military. In the words of Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark/Iron Man, who opens one video, the subtext is “Daddy’s home.”

But also, look at the kind of men the videos enlist. Christopher Reeve’s Superman pledging to fight for “truth, justice and the American Way” segues straight into Walter White of “Breaking Bad” snarling, “I am the danger.” Maximus from “Gladiator” and the dark warrior Kylo Ren from “Star Wars” share equal billing.

What do they have in common? Mainly, a reputation for kicking ass. Otherwise, heroes, antiheroes and villains are interchangeable here. There is no good and evil, only strength and weakness, winning and losing.

This is not necessarily the philosophy of the works from which the memes are snipped and clipped. The “Star Wars” franchise, for all its laser blasts, is full of cautions against punitive warfare and giving in to hate. “Gladiator” was an indictment of a society that turned blood sport into theater. (“Are you not entertained?”)

But the White House’s Iran videos espouse no ideals beyond domination and power. There is little sense in them of the war’s purpose, besides to be won. The message can be summed up in the refrain of Miami XO’s much-memed song “Bazooka,” used in one video: “Ka-blow/Ka-boom.”

This is not the first administration to be accused of taking a desensitizing approach to military imagery. In 1991 the Pentagon briefings in Operation Desert Storm, with their emphasis on bloodless footage of high-tech weaponry, were accused of ushering in an era of “Nintendo War.”

Nor is it nearly the first time that war and pop culture have meshed; see, for instance, the pro-war Looney Tunes shorts made during World War II, or the warplanes decorated with pictures of Rita Hayworth.

Still, there were once boundaries. Official voices at least made gestures toward the gravity of asking soldiers to kill and die. A Bugs Bunny cartoon was a Bugs Bunny cartoon, not an organ of the highest office in the land. F.D.R. was not issuing newsreels splicing combat footage with “Three Stooges” clips.

But on the White House social feed, a somber video of the president receiving the bodies of American war dead now exists on equal footing with Mortal Kombat references.

There has been pushback from some of the subjects used unwittingly in the videos, including Ed Reed, a former Baltimore Ravens safety, and the voice actor Steve Downes of the video game “Halo.” The director Ben Stiller insisted that the White House remove a clip from his film “Tropic Thunder,” writing, “War is not a movie.”

But the meme videos suggest that war is a movie, and that movies are war, and so are sports and games — that American culture’s whole run of fireballs, smackdowns and shoot-’em-ups is of one piece with the administration’s militainment aesthetic.

It used to be only strident detractors of pop culture who argued that macho entertainments were priming their audiences for war. Now that’s simply the implicit position of the White House. Every first-person shooter you played, these videos suggest, every superhero movie you watched, every head-on tackle you thrilled to all your life — those were just the opening act. This is the big show.

James Poniewozik is the chief TV critic for The Times. He writes reviews and essays with an emphasis on television as it reflects a changing culture and politics.

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