Politics

The war on Iran, even as it spreads and destabilises the Middle East and the global economy, is not real. This is how it is being portrayed by the Trump administration. The war is a video game, a spectator sport, a social media festival of dunking. The architects of this war have made a virtue out of stupidity, and have been supported in that by a stupefying information ecosystem. The conflict waged by the US feels like the first of its kind in the modern age: distinctly remote and profoundly ignorant.

A week into the war, the White House uploaded a clip on its social media channels featuring montages of Top Gun, Braveheart and Breaking Bad, with the caption “Justice the American way” – itself a repurposing of a Superman motto. In another, entitled Touchdown, NFL players tackle each other and upon contact, boom, footage of a strike explosion tagged “unclassified”. SpongeBob SquarePants also makes an appearance, asking, “Wanna see me do it again?”, and then, an explosion. In another, Operation Epic Fury is rendered as a Nintendo Wii game.

“We’re over here just grinding away on banger memes, dude,” a senior White House official told Politico. “There’s an entertainment factor to what we do.” It is pure Donald Trump and his Maga base, to whom everything is not just a game, but a competition. Politics at home and abroad is about scoring, winning and humiliating the other side. For that competition to be fun, it has to be portrayed in the most low-stakes way possible. And so the war is not about death, destruction, calamitous fallout economically and geopolitically, but about the boom, the score, the fist pump. “Wake up, Daddy’s home,” starts one clip. The Trump administration is like a gamer in a dark basement, downing beers, nursing deep insecurities, hectically self-soothing through flashes of colour and noise on a large screen. Maximum hit, minimum effort.

Cool.