White House aides have boasted about their “banger memes” getting billions of views while the Iran war widens and oil prices surge.
With no end to the conflict in sight, President Donald Trump’s team has turned its focus to TikTok-style war clips, stitching real strike footage to movie scenes, sports highlights, and video-game imagery.
One senior official bragged to Politico that the videos racked up more than 3 billion impressions in four days. Another described the effort in toe-curling terms: “We’re over here just grinding away on banger memes, dude,” the outlet quoted them as saying.
The timing makes the aides’ words even more jarring.
On Thursday, Trump, 79, sought to deflect blame for a massive escalation after Israel struck Iran’s South Pars gas field and Iran retaliated by vowing to widen the conflict to Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar. Trump claimed the U.S. “knew nothing” about the attack on Iran’s energy lifeline, despite reports that his administration actually coordinated with Israel in the strikes. Iranian attacks have since been reported in Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait.
Oil prices rose above $115 a barrel and countries meeting at the U.N.’s shipping agency proposed a safe passage plan for about 20,000 seafarers trapped by the fighting.
That is a staggering amount of chaos for an administration that still does not appear able to say with any clarity what winning looks like.
European allies have openly rebuffed Trump’s push for help reopening the Strait of Hormuz, with leaders including German Chancellor Friedrich Merz pointing to the lack of a clear American strategy.
Reuters has also reported that the administration is weighing even riskier next steps, including additional troop deployments tied to the strait.
Trump has not cleared matters up. Asked when the war would end, he said it would be over “when I feel it in my bones.”
The fallout in D.C. from the messy situation has been telling. Former National Counterterrorism Center director Joe Kent resigned in protest this week, arguing Iran posed no imminent threat.
It’s not just Trump who’s come in for criticism, with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, 45, being maligned across Capitol Hill.
In the last week alone the former Fox News presenter has been accused of dodging basic questions about casualties, attacking CNN instead of addressing dead troops, using “no quarter” language that legal experts and Sen. Mark Kelly said veered into talk of a war crime.
He also made lurid claims that Iran’s new supreme leader was “likely disfigured,” after the number of American dead rose to 13.
That has given critics an opening. Rep. Pat Ryan, 43, the New York Democrat and former Army intelligence officer behind FireHegseth.com, unloaded on Hegseth in remarks to Pablo Reports on the Meidas Network.
Ryan said: “Hegseth has literally become more deranged than the SNL skits at this point. Each time he screws up, he gets more desperate—he screams louder. He is f-----g pathetic. He has the blood of thirteen Americans on his hands, and he needs to be held accountable for that.”
Rep. James Walkinshaw had earlier told Pablo Reports that Hegseth can do little more than read from a script and is “in way the hell over his head,” as the Beast reported Wednesday.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House and the Pentagon for comment.
