Rap and electronic music. Action movie clips. Video game heads-up displays.
As the war with Iran heads into its second week, the White House has leaned into an online propaganda campaign that appears to be aimed less at intimidating Iran or projecting U.S. strength abroad than at reaching a fairly specific domestic audience: young, right-wing Americans who spend a lot of time online.
In recent days, the White House and officials affiliated with the Trump administration have shared on
The videos are short, quickly edited, and seem designed to appeal to the attention spans and tastes of Gen Z men fond of video game trash talk, though it’s unclear whether those Gen Z men universally appreciate the Trump administration’s narrowly personalized jingoism.
One video, released Thursday and titled “JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY,” lasts less than a minute but maniacally mixes footage from iconic action movies like Braveheart, Gladiator and Iron Man with seemingly real footage of American artillery attacking Iranian military targets. Pulsating, fast-paced electronic dance music plays in the background as Russell Crowe, in Gladiator, says, “Strength and honor,” and a face-painted Mel Gibson, in Braveheart, asks, “What will you do without freedom?”
(It is unclear whether the White House obtained film and music permissions for these clips, although it appears not.)
Another video, titled “Courtesy of Red, White & Blue,” begins with someone calling for an airstrike in the style of Call of Duty, the first-person shooter video game. Loud music begins and the video gives way to a series of clips of American bombs destroying Iranian vehicles and facilities. As each target is destroyed, a video game display screen announces that the viewer has earned another 100 points.
A third video also combines real combat footage with video game clips, this time from Grand Theft Auto. A character from the game walks down the street as the video cuts to periscope footage of an American torpedo destroying an Iranian warship. “WASTED,” the screen announces.
The White House appears aware that fast-paced, low-budget or self-produced videos have been popular in recent years among the right and far-right online. The videos tend to embrace an adrenaline-pumping, retro-futuristic aesthetic that appeals to nostalgia—especially music and movies from the 1980s and 1990s—while predicting a boisterously optimistic near future with a renewed industrial heartland, fewer immigrants, roaring prosperity, and defiant national self-confidence.
The videos sometimes also use memes or animations. In 2023, a staffer was fired from Ron DeSantis’ campaign after producing an unauthorized campaign video for DeSantis, set to the Kate Bush song Running Up That Hill, which featured animated soldiers marching under a Sonnenrad, a symbol associated with neo-Nazis.
The White House’s aggressively sexist propaganda also matches the rhetorical style of Pete Hegseth, the US defense secretary, who has frequently criticized political correctness, boasted about US military prowess and promised remorseless death and destruction to Iran.
Before joining the administration, Hegseth, a conservative media personality and national guard veteran, pushed for pardons for American soldiers who had been accused or convicted of war crimes. He is also known for sporting nationalist Christian tattoos of a Jerusalem cross, the Crusade-era slogan Deus Vult (“God wills it,” in Latin), and the word “kafir,” which in Arabic means unbeliever.
The strategy behind the propaganda campaign – to the extent there is a coherent strategy – is revealing in what it appears to say about the Trump administration’s priorities.
Americans are overwhelmingly skeptical about attacks on Iran, according to a recent NPR/PBS/Marist poll, and only 36% of the public say they approve of Trump’s handling of the war. The White House’s own messages have been confusing and tautological.
However, rather than trying to persuade the American people as a whole of the necessity and effectiveness of war, the administration seems more concerned with pacifying a small fraction of its base: a very online, very male, and often younger segment of the Maga “new right” that is skeptical of foreign interventionism and especially cynical of anything reminiscent of the misadventures of the George W. Bush years in the Middle East.
So far, that audience seems unimpressed. On
Comments referred to Hegseth as “GI Joke” or suggested the war with Iran be known as “Operation Epstein Diversion.”
“The exaggerated edits are stupid,” a former Heritage Foundation employee said in response to one video. “We want mass deportations, the legislative agenda you campaigned for and no more wars.”
