‘Operation Epstein Distraction’: Trump’s bloody Iran ‘hype videos’ seem to target niche audience

Rap and EDM. Clips from action movies. Heads-up displays from video games.As the war with Iran approaches its second week, the White House has leaned into an online propaganda campaign that seems less about intimidating Iran or projecting US strength abroad than it is about reaching a rather niche domestic audience: young rightwing American men who spend a lot of time online.Over the past couple of days, the White House and officials affiliated with the Trump administration have shared on X a series of hype videos that aggressively, and tastelessly, show off deadly combat footage from the strikes on Iran, sometimes in combination with footage from fictional movies and video games.The videos are short, rapidly edited, and seem designed to appeal to the attention spans and tastes of Gen Z males fond of video-game trash-talk – though it is unclear whether those Gen Z males universally appreciate the Trump administration’s narrowly tailored jingoism.One video, released on Thursday and captioned “JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY”, is less than a minute long but manically mixes footage from iconic action movies such as Braveheart, Gladiator, and Iron Man with apparently real footage of American ordnance striking Iranian military targets. Pulsing, fast-paced electronic dance music plays in the background as Russell Crowe, in Gladiator, says, “Strength and honor,” and a face-painted Mel Gibson, in Braveheart, demands: “What will you do without freedom?”(It is unclear if the White House obtained permissions for the film and music in these clips, though it seems not.)Another video, captioned “Courtesy of the Red, White & Blue”, opens with someone calling in an air-strike in the style of Call of Duty, the first-person-shooter video game. Thumping music starts and the video segues into a series of clips of US bombs destroying Iranian vehicles and facilities. As each target is destroyed, a video-game heads-up display announces that the viewer has scored another 100 points.A third video also melds real combat footage with video-game clips, this time from Grand Theft Auto. A character from the game strolls down the street as the video jump-cuts to periscope footage of a US torpedo destroying an Iranian warship. “WASTED,” the screen announces.The White House seems aware that fast-paced, low-budget or self-produced hype videos have been popular in recent years among the online right and far right. The videos tend to embrace an adrenaline-boosting retro-futurist aesthetic that appeals to nostalgia – especially to the music and movies of the 1980s and 1990s – while also predicting a boisterously optimistic near-future America with a renewed industrial heartland, fewer immigrants, roaring prosperity and defiant national self-confidence.The videos sometimes also use memes or animation. In 2023, a staffer was fired from the Ron DeSantis campaign after producing an unauthorized pro-DeSantis campaign video, set to the Kate Bush song Running Up That Hill, that included animated soldiers marching under a Sonnenrad, a symbol associated with neo-Nazis.The White House’s aggressively macho propaganda is also of a piece with the rhetorical style of Pete Hegseth, the US secretary of defense, who has frequently railed against political correctness, boasted of US military prowess, and promised unapologetic death and destruction on Iran.Before joining the administration, Hegseth, a conservative media personality and a veteran of the national guard, lobbied for pardons for US soldiers who had been accused or convicted of war crimes. He is also known for sporting Christian nationalist tattoos of a Jerusalem cross, the Crusades-era slogan Deus Vult (“God wills it,” in Latin), and the word “kafir,” Arabic for unbeliever.The strategy behind the propaganda campaign – to the extent that there is a coherent strategy – is revealing in what it seems to say about the Trump administration’s priorities.Americans are overwhelmingly skeptical of the strikes on Iran, according to a recent NPR/PBS/Marist survey, with just 36% of the public saying that they approve of Trump’s handling of the war. The White House’s own messaging has been confusing and tautological.Rather than try to persuade the American people as a whole of the necessity and efficacy of the war, however, the administration seems more worried about pacifying a small sliver of its base – a very online, very male, and often younger segment of the Maga “new right” that is skeptical about foreign interventionism and especially cynical about anything redolent of the Middle East misadventures of the George W Bush years.So far that audience seems less than impressed. On X, commenters have responded to the White House war propaganda videos by mocking the videos’ ham-fisted and bloodthirsty aesthetics, describing the US as a cat’s-paw of Israel, or disparaging the Trump administration for betraying the MAGA movement’s promise to put “America first”.Comments referred to Hegseth as “GI Joke” or suggested that the war with Iran be known as “Operation Epstein Distraction”.“The hype edits are stupid,” said a former Heritage Foundation staffer in response to one video. “We want mass deportations, the legislative agenda you campaigned on, and no more wars.”