The Meme War: Trump Sells Iran Conflict With Video Games | U.S. News Decision Points

Two weeks after the first American and Israeli bombs pummeled targets in Iran, President Donald Trump’s strategy for selling the war on the homefront has come into focus:

How well the approach is working is unclear, with Americans facing sharply higher gas prices, Democrats attacking his management of the war and the military enduring its first casualties – all months before voters will decide in November who controls Congress.
To be clear: U.S. forces have established air supremacy over Iran and dealt crushing blows to its navy and ability to launch drones and missiles at its neighbors. The question is whether Trump can win the political homefront.

That the government would broadcast clips of American missiles and bombs finding their targets is nothing new. And that footage has always been a little surreal, showing disembodied strikes on unknown targets without any real sense of the human cost of war.

What’s new is that, since Feb. 28, the Trump administration has taken the general sense of watching a video game and actually spliced real-world explosions with video game footage to exult over the destruction in the language of Internet memes.

And then there’s the more-is-more video the White House posted that draws on “Top Gun: Maverick,” “Braveheart,” “Better Call Saul,” the “Halo” games, “John Wick,” “Superman,” “Transformers” and “Deadpool,” among others. It ends with the “Flawless Victory” message players get from the “Mortal Kombat” franchise when they win a round without sustaining any damage.

Trump, who denounced the “fake news media” as “enemies of the people” in his first term, has regularly fallen back on attacks against journalists in his second term. He seems to be ramping things up in the face of skeptical coverage as the Iran war continues.

But the weekend brought a new escalation. After Trump posted a rant about newspapers in which he said the news media “actually want us to lose the war,” FCC Chairman Brendan Carr on Saturday threatened to cancel the broadcast licenses of outlets that don’t report on the war to the administration’s liking.

While that amounted to a remarkable censorship threat, it’s not clear to what extent Carr could follow through. Cable channels, like regular Trump punching bag CNN, don’t have FCC licenses. Neither do streaming services. Nor do national networks like ABC.

The FCC does license local affiliates. But a revocation sparked by editorial content (rather than, say, unpaid regulatory fees) would trigger an immediate legal battle, with an outlet seizing on prohibited viewpoint discrimination and asserting First Amendment rights.

Trump followed that on Sunday with a social media post saying some media outlets reporting critically about the war were guilty of “TREASON.”

The president has certainly been exercising his First Amendment rights to describe how the conflict is going. But just like there was a bushel of rationales for launching the operation, he’s given various and sometimes conflicting predictions for when it will end.

Like many a president before him, Trump seems caught between wanting to reassure Americans while also bracing them for more conflict. And perhaps no single utterance captures the confusion better than when he told CBS, “The war is very complete, pretty much.”

So is it “very complete”? Or just “pretty much” complete?

Trump, a veteran of New York City construction projects, has also repeatedly said the war is “ahead of schedule.” Early this month, he predicted a timeframe of roughly four to five weeks from Feb. 28, although he said “we have capability to go far longer than that.”

“We’ve won. Let me tell you, we’ve won,” he said, in a statement reminiscent of a certain “Mission Accomplished” banner. “You know, you never like to say too early you won. We won. We won the, in the first hour, it was over. We won.”

Earlier, he gave Fox News a different timeline. The war will be done “when I feel it in my bones.”