To the chagrin of every elder millennial raised on the progressive patriotism of Hamilton and The West Wing, the cultural touchstone of Trump’s White House appears to be closer to 4chan and Grand Theft Auto. Trump has always had a knack for rallying the anonymous posters of meme-world to his banner. Now in power, he appears to have handed official government social media to a crew of memelords and simply told them to do whatever works.

Does the result, well, work? In pure engagement terms, definitely. Since the joint US-Israeli bombing of Iran began two weeks ago, official messaging by the White House has prompted equal parts amazement and outright horror — but either way, plenty of viral engagement.

Splicing footage of bombing with clips from bowling videos and SpongeBob SquarePants is, at least by the aesthetic standards of the Hamilton worldview, eye-poppingly crass. Still more recent efforts have upped the ante further, filtering the realities of American military violence through the visual register of a Wii game.

How did we end up here? One of the more insightful memes that sloshes around Trump discourse presents the President as the end result of a domino cascade, precipitated by Gamergate. For the uninitiated, this was a 2010s internet argument that concerned, in very crude summary, whether or not the (largely young and male) culture of online gaming should be pressured to soften its habitually agonistic tone so women and minorities would feel more welcome. The fight ran for months, and helped consolidate a set of online-Right battle lines, one of whose downstream consequences was, eventually, Trump.

The distinctive mix of CGI unreality and callousness that now suffuses the White House war comms feels like a belated victory lap for the gamer faction. By the mid-2010s, this group seemed to have lost the field, finding itself expelled to the digital fringes, while Hamilton fans wrote the mainstream social rules.

Now, everything is different. The mutineers have the White House X login, and no one seems to be telling them to tone it down. From an overseas perspective, this is — to put it mildly — not a winning-hearts-and-minds approach. These are, after all, not actually video games. They’re real explosions, causing the deaths of real human beings. We’re all feeling the real aftershocks of the ensuing energy crisis.

But aside from épater les femmes bourgeoises, perhaps that’s the point. The hearts-and-minds thing that structured the last round of American Middle East interventionism drew on a vision of the US as combining hard power with moral example. It didn’t entirely work, but the attempt entailed a certain self-imposed seriousness.

By contrast, the gleeful aggression that suffuses the new White House comms style seems calculated to salt the earth permanently for this missionary model of American power. In its place is a militarized chauvinism so obnoxious from an overseas perspective as to foreclose any return to the notion of inspiring global change through moral leadership.

In this sense, the current round of rat-a-tat-tat-boom White House videos isn’t really directed at an international audience, except in a secondary sense. The real audience constitutes those internal enemies, who would seize the American ship of state and steer it back to the Shining City on a Hill vision for American global leadership. The gamers are determined to ruin this plan forever, by leaning into a self-presentation of the USA as an unabashed exemplar not of moral force, but just force.

The patriotic gamer boys making these videos may come to realize that, on balance, presenting their country to the world in this way does not serve the American national interest. But for now, this feels like an overcorrection in an important, long-running quarrel over the proper ordering of values at the highest level. Once again, the rest of the world is a reluctant audience to a livestream of the world’s pre-eminent superpower in the midst of a family row. Only now, this comes with added CGI and real explosions.

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Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at UnHerd.

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