The White House celebrated the Trump administration’s lethal strikes on Iran with a bizarre video-game mashup posted to social media.
The video, posted to the official White House X account on Wednesday, opens with footage from the 2023 video game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 before transitioning into footage of real strikes conducted on Iran since Trump launched his war against the Middle Eastern nation on Saturday.
“Courtesy of the Red, White & Blue,” read the caption associated with the post.
The video opens with the player activating a Mass Guided Bombs killstreak, a feature that is only activated for players who achieve 30 kills without dying themselves.
After showing three clips of a plane and two projectiles blasting off, the video then shows black-and-white footage of multiple strikes, complete with ‘+100’ kill scores, as an instrumental version of Childish Gambino’s 2011 hit ‘Bonfire’ plays.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House, Activision, which publishes the Call of Duty games, and representatives for Childish Gambino—aka actor Donald Glover—for comment.
The video comes after days of strikes on Iran conducted by the U.S. and Israel that began on Saturday when President Donald Trump announced that U.S. forces had begun “major combat operations” in the country.
The strikes have resulted in more than 1,000 deaths so far, including that of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and dozens of other top officials. Another strike, which Iran has blamed on American forces, hit a girls’ school, killing more than 150 students and staff.
The Trump administration is no stranger to using gaming culture to promote its more brutal policies. The Department of Homeland Security faced a backlash after using Pokémon imagery and branding to promote its controversial ICE raids in September, prompting the company to distance itself from the bizarre videos.
“Our company was not involved in the creation or distribution of this content, and permission was not granted for the use of our intellectual property,” a spokesperson for the Pokémon Company told the Daily Beast at the time.
The blurring of the line between video games and reality has caused confusion for at least one prominent Trump supporter, with Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas mistakenly sharing footage of what was supposedly a U.S. vessel shooting down an Iranian plane.
In reality, it was taken from a World War II video game, War Thunder. Abbott later deleted the post.
The decision to embrace violent video games as propaganda tools is a far cry from previous statements the president has made about the medium.
In 2012, three years before he would run for president, Trump tweeted, “Video game violence & glorification must be stopped—it is creating monsters!”
He later sought to incorporate this view into his platform once in the White House, calling for society to take a firm stance against violent video games in 2019.
“We must stop the glorification of violence in our society. This includes the gruesome and grisly video games that are now commonplace. It is too easy today for troubled youth to surround themselves with a culture that celebrates violence. We must stop or substantially reduce this and it has to begin immediately,” Trump said in August 2019.
The remarks were made after shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, killed at least 31 people in one weekend. His aides initially began seeking to shift blame for gun violence onto video games following the devastating shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in February 2018.
