Director and actor Ben Stiller torched the White House for using a clip from his 2007 film Tropic Thunder in a promotional video on X.
“Hey White House, please remove the Tropic Thunder clip. We never gave you permission and have no interest in being a part of your propaganda machine,” Stiller, 60, wrote. “War is not a movie.”
On Friday, the official White House X account posted a 42-second video with the caption, ”JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY. 🇺🇸🔥" The video is a compilation of unclassified footage of missile firings in Iran, with clips from a range of Hollywood films mixed in throughout.
The video included a one-second clip from Tropic Thunder, in which Tom Cruise’s character Les Grossman dances between the film’s credits.
Though Stiller wrote, directed, and starred in the film, its copyrights are held by Paramount Pictures, which is owned by Trump ally David Ellison. The MAGA CEO recently attended Trump’s State of the Union Address and is currently seeking approval for his $111 billion merger with Warner Bros. Discovery.
The video, which has already been viewed more than 26 million times, also includes clips from The Gladiator, Braveheart, Transformers, and Top Gun: Maverick, among others.
Stiller’s Twitter takedown is not the first time this week that Trump’s social media team has taken fire from a celebrity.
On Monday, the White House’s social media team was lambasted by pop star Kesha over the use of one of her songs in a promotional TikTok video to “incite violence and threaten war.”
“Trying to make light of war is disgusting and inhumane. I absolutely do NOT approve of my music being used to promote violence of any kind. Love always trumps hate,” the Grammy-nominated singer, 39, said in a statement on X.
The February 10 video used Kesha’s song “Lethality” as the soundtrack to a clip of a fighter jet destroying a ship with a missile, among other military imagery.
“Also, don’t let this distract us from the fact that criminal predator Donald Trump appears in the Files over a million times,” she added.
White House communications director Steven Cheung replied to Kesha’s post, saying that statements like hers actually bring more attention to the MAGA posts.
“All these ‘singers’ keep falling for this,” Cheung wrote on X. “This just gives us more attention and more view counts to our videos because people want to see what they’re bitching about.”
Less than an hour later, Kesha responded, “Stop using my music, perverts @WhiteHouse.”
