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“JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY,” reads a White House post accompanying a propaganda video that celebrates the US and Israel’s bombings of Iran.
The video is a supercut of drone footage spliced with extracts from action films and TV shows, featuring the likes of Robert Downey Jr’s Tony Stark from the Marvel films, Russell Crowe as Maximus in Gladiator, Tom Cruise in Top Gun: Maverick, Adam Driver as Kylo Ren in the Star Wars franchise and Bryan Cranston as Walter White in Breaking Bad.
Also featured are shots from Braveheart, John Wick, Superman, Deadpool and Halo.
Check it out below:
One of the clips is an extract from the comedy Tropic Thunder, directed by and starring Ben Stiller.
The actor has responded to the White House mash-up, writing: “Hey White House, please remove the Tropic Thunder clip. We never gave you permission and have no interest in being a part of your propaganda machine. War is not a movie.”
This is not the first time that Donald Trump and his administration have co-opted Hollywood clips and references, but this testosterone-fuelled video is a whole new low.
It has been widely mocked online, with many calling out the clip as ‘slopaganda’ (a conflation of ‘slop’ and ‘propaganda’) and accusing the Trump administration of behaving like immature teenagers – the biggest of all being “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth, who cameos in the video.
It’s worth pointing out that the White House clip features vocal Trump critics (Downey Jr. actively campaigned for Kamala Harris, Bryan Cranston has been outspoken in his criticism of Trump); morally bankrupt characters (Walter White, Saul Goodman, Kylo Ren); films which satirise war and the American Dream rather than glorify it (Tropic Thunder, Breaking Bad); narratives which center on defying imperialism (William Wallace was fighting against an invading foreign army and resisting imperial occupation); and the death of irony, as many of the stars being used to trumpet the “American way” are not American (Crowe and Mel Gibson are from New Zealand and Australia, while Keanu Reeves is Canadian).
Beyond plummeting maturity levels and the irony of misusing culture touchstones – revealing once more a dearth of self-awareness and cultural literacy – there is an unabashed crassness to this video that is hard to overlook.
While the Trump administration may consider the video another way of “trolling” or “rage-baiting” its opponents, it only highlights a cruel lack of empathy towards the victims of war. Preliminary figures from the Iranian National Health, defence and interior ministries state that more than 1,300 people have died in Iran, at least 13 in Israel, and a seventh US service member has been killed in Saudi Arabia.
Also, there have been calls for an independent investigation into the attack on Minab primary school which killed 165 young pupils, with United Nations experts denouncing the deadly bombing as “a grave assault on children”. Rights advocates have pointed to the school attack as evidence of potential war crimes being committed by Israel and the US in a war that legal experts say was launched in violation of the UN Charter.
But who needs to worry about charters and international law when you can edit together a compassionless clip of your favourite Hollywood action movies, thereby transforming deadly conflict into bite-sized mass entertainment?