White House video games — President Donald Trump (Lucas Parker/.com)
In recent months, we’ve seen the Trump administration grasp at every straw it can to appeal to youth who, by and large, think its figurehead is a spray-tanned monster concerned only with his own self-enrichment by any means necessary. Paying off TikTokers is one thing, but as an inveterate gamer, I’ve been simultaneously fascinated and appalled by the ways in which the White House has co-opted my beloved hobby as a vehicle for propaganda.
This is propaganda, it should be said, that assumes you’re already the kind of grinning sociopath that seems to thrive on the right wing. We’ve seen them set deportation videos to the Pokémon theme song (gotta catch ’em all, get it?) and use Halo‘s imagery to recruit for ICE, likening migrants to the mindless, parasitic horde Master Chief takes up arms against. All without permission, and largely without pushback from the companies whose IP they’re using.
Just photoshopping Trump into power armor clearly hasn’t been enough, though. The White House is now creating pro-Trump video games of their own, and I use the word ‘creating’ very loosely. Seeing shitty Flash games hosted on an official .gov website is almost as surreal as the games themselves:
At the moment, there are five games, with a sixth threatened to release in the near future. Some of them are more egregious than others. All of them are knockoffs of classics you’ve played before.
Flappy Bill is an obvious and inoffensive Flappy Bird knockoff. Supply Line is a take on Punch-Out!! where you hit seed oils off a conveyor belt before they get sent to corrupt the kids. Trump Savings Tycoon, near as I can tell, is a “click on things until you get bored” simulator.
No, the true headliners here are Build the Wall and Rio Run. The former, as you may have guessed, is just Tetris, but you’re building a border wall to protect the US from a “zombie horde” storming the border from Mexico. Rio Run does away with that thin pretext entirely. It casts you as a cute chibified version of border czar Tom Homan as you detain an ever-growing trail of uniformly brown “border hoppers,” with each capture ticking up a helpful “Deported” count in your top-left.
Hannah Arendt once said that “the death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism.” In other words: the cruelty is the point. Reduce your opponents to points on a screen or enemies from your favorite FPS, and disposing of them is that much easier. If you can have fun doing it, all the better, right?
At least one of the games “parodied” has pushed back: Tetris took to Instagram to clarify that they were not involved, they would not be involved, and that they take copyright infringement very seriously.
Whether anything comes of that is anyone’s guess.
More about White House propaganda:
The administration’s habit of borrowing pop culture without asking isn’t limited to games. This fall the White House set an ICE deportation video to Sabrina Carpenter’s song “Juno” without her permission, prompting the singer to call the video “evil and disgusting” and demand the administration stop using her music.
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