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On Wednesday, or Day 5 of the U.S.-led war in Iran, the official X account of the White House uploaded a sizzle reel remixing real-life footage of rocketing cruise missiles with the makeup of Call of Duty. Understanding the contours of governmental policy didn’t previously require fluency in a military-themed first-person-shooter game, so let me talk you through it. Basically, when a player mows down one of their opponents in Call of Duty, a yellow number—indicating points based on their value—appears above the head of the recently slain. Collect enough of those points, and players are granted access to devastating ordnance. (Twenty kills in a row is traditionally rewarded with a tactical nuclear missile.) Accordingly, in the White House video, a +100 integer flashes on-screen when a mortar shell connects with its target, as if the president himself were landing trick shots on his Twitch stream. I also immediately clocked the soundtrack accompanying the video—it’s the instrumental to the impossibly horny Childish Gambino song “Bonfire.”
This is propaganda designed to stimulate the Trump administration’s prime constituency—unsocialized Discord incels, Joker-fied elder millennials, and bloodthirsty Gen Xers—by speaking the language they understand best: a disorienting blend of asserted evil and hammy kitsch. And that seems to be the aesthetic of this adventure in Iran, which will likely be the most significant moment in Donald Trump’s second term. The administration has yet to articulate a clear vision for what it hopes to accomplish, but already this seems to be the sort of war that makes the history books, replete with region-tilting implications that will surely be compiled in countless slide decks and debated among quarter-zip NatSec types for decades to come. But right now, all I am thinking about is how impossible it will be to explain the conditions of this era to future generations, who will surely be baffled as they sift through the seriousness of this moment to find nothing but cloying frivolity. Put more directly, any scholarship about this Iran invasion must also contend with the fact that, simultaneously, Melania Trump was presiding over the U.N. Security Council.
Writing for Defector last year, Barry Petchesky attempted to wrap his head around the unique rankness of the latter-day Trump directive. He was chronicling the wildly overheated reaction to the death of Charlie Kirk, as well as how quickly MAGA partisans consecrated their deceased podcaster as a saint through ghastly, unsightly means—A.I.-rendered Greek statues, horribly overwrought tribute music, a collectively low-culture assault on good taste. At the end of his piece, Petchesky saliently resolves his feelings about this mess. What does the Trump era feel like? “Campy, openly and equally hateful and opportunistic, and above all, shameless.”
His words have rattled around in my head ever since. The campiness charge is what I find most resonant. Petchesky’s thesis can be applied to everything the Trump operation touches, no matter its apparent gravity. Consider the title of our Iranian intervention. Operation Epic Fury shares DNA with a lineage of similarly buzzy code names throughout military history, but generally speaking, they typically maintained some semblance of consultant-speak restraint. (Consider, if you will, Operation Iraqi Freedom.) Trump, meanwhile, went in the other direction. He opted for pseudo-macho pastiche, with a distinct Reddit-ish tang: Operation Epic Fury might as well translate to Operation Epic Bacon. Naturally, when he addressed the nation at the beginning of the war, he was wearing a gigantic white baseball hat emblazoned with USA, which is the sort of thing you’d wear if you had front-row seats at Talladega. The entire affair is anti-solemn on principle. It comes off loud, blustery, and overconfident, as if to signal a blasé disengagement with the incredible stakes of the moment. But what did you expect? This same administration made the redubbing of the Gulf of Mexico a signature policy priority. Adam Serwer famously summed up the character of Trump’s first term by stating that the cruelty is the point. That’s still true, but now the unseriousness is the point too: We’re all living in the nightmare of an evil-yet-also-camp presidency.
A lot of this institutional campiness surely trickles down from the beguiling psychological makeup of Trump, who, at the end of his eighth decade, has never seemed less interested in the rudiments of the presidency. Indeed, at another briefing this week, where Trump was ostensibly supposed to be awarding the Medal of Honor, the president took the opportunity to prattle on about the ongoing ballroom renovations at the White House—perhaps the perfect encapsulation of his trademark gaudy malice. Unsurprisingly, the people he has surrounded himself with have matched that same disposition—this unsightly hybrid of car-salesman diction and war-criminal aspiration. Pete Hegseth has been talking like a Marvel villain lately, threatening fire and brimstone with LLM-tinged evocations of doom. (“Flying over their capital. Death and destruction from the sky all day long. We’re playing for keeps,” he said, with all the subtlety of a Judas Priest chorus.) Meanwhile, outside the administration, Glenn Beck used the Iran crisis to promote his interview with an A.I. rendering of George Washington. You’re not going to believe this, but George is very much of the opinion that foreign entanglements are crucial to American sovereignty.
I guess this is how things are now. The partition that once sealed out the cranks and mediocrities has been permanently sundered. Any idiot can wrest the controls of a government agency or, barring that, make a little bit of money trying. I noticed that Skip Bayless, semi-disgraced sports talking head—who built a lucrative career off his status as a dogmatic LeBron James hater—is now weighing in on Iran. (He is cautiously optimistic about the intervention.) Meanwhile, the Israeli military, which is responsible for one of the most annoying social media presences on the planet, is currently rage-baiting everyone with a video mashing up “Fortunate Son”—the most famous anti-war song ever recorded—over footage of a fleet of its fighter jets cruising over the desert.
There is, in fact, a war going on. One that threatens to conflagrate the whole Middle East. Anyone who tells you they know what will happen from here on out is lying. There is a chance the crisis widens, its unknowables blooming into view, the crows coming home to roost. Or who knows? Maybe all of this chaos will be tidily wrapped up before the end of the month and any fallout will be mercifully avoided. What I can say for sure is how this war will be remembered: a montage of Call of Duty memes—tuned to the tastes of the insidiously nonchalant—while the rest of us hold on for dear life.
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