Iran has trolled Donald Trump with an AI-generated propaganda movie featuring demented Lego-style figurines wreaking revenge for U.S. and Israeli airstrikes on the country.
The two-minute video, titled “Narrative of Victory,” was aired by Iranian state media on Tuesday, The Times of London reported. It opens to dramatic orchestral music as a dismayed plastic Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Satan read through a folder marked “Jeffrey Epstein File.”
The president quickly becomes enraged and punches a big red button that launches a missile bearing the U.S. flag against an Iranian classroom. The clip does not show the impact, only a child’s backpack sitting abandoned in the resulting rubble. An Iranian soldier then cradles the backpack, tears of anger in his eyes as he launches missile attacks against Israeli targets.
Trump launched the war on Iran on Feb. 28. with joint U.S.-Israeli airstrikes that wiped out much of Iran’s leadership, including the 86-year-old Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. That same day a stray U.S. Tomahawk missile is thought to have hit a school near a naval barracks in the city of Minab, killing more than 150 people, most of them young girls.
Iran responded by sending missiles and drones at U.S. and allied targets across the Middle East, including Cyprus and Turkey. More than 1,000 people have been killed so far in Iran. Seven U.S. service members have been killed in Iranian strikes, and at least 140 wounded.
In the 12 days since the launch of military operations, the administration has offered multiple justifications for the war, most recently that the U.S. is attacking Iran to defend U.S. military assets in the Middle East from strikes in the event Iran came under attack.
Critics have accused Trump, long an opponent of U.S. “forever wars” in the Middle East, of launching the conflict, along with his lightning invasion of Venezuela in January, as part of a wider effort to deflect scrutiny of files on the crimes of sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein released by the Justice Department.
Lawmakers forced the president to sign a law mandating the publication of materials on the Epstein case late last year following a concerted campaign of pressure over his once-close friendship with the pedophile financier, who died in a Manhattan jail 2019. Trump himself features multiple times in the files released by the DOJ.
The animated Lego video features further strikes on Cyprus, Turkey, Dubai, Tel Aviv, among other targets of Iranian attacks since hostilities broke out, along with armed regime speedboats showing racing toward tankers in the Persian Gulf, and stockbrokers and Saudi businessmen weeping over rising oil prices.
Also featured are coffins being carried out of U.S. aircraft bearing the American flag. The clip ends as the Iranian soldier who searched through the rubble of the classroom looks out at a U.S. aircraft carrier blazing, child’s backpack in the dirt by his side.
It marks the second time the Iranian regime has used the beloved children’s building blocks for propaganda purposes. State media released a similar video, again featuring Trump, Netanyahu, and Satan, in response to U.S. and Israeli strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities last year.
Trump himself is also no stranger to posting animated videos when lambasting his opponents online. He has shared AI-generated clips of himself as a king dumping feces over protesters from a military jet; of himself basking in the sun with Netanyahu at a luxury resort built on the ruins of the Gaza Strip; of Democratic lawmakers dressed up as mariachi band players; and of Michelle and Barack Obama depicted as apes.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment on this story.
