Just a Game?

 Yesterday evening, the Trump administration's comms team apparently rolled out a set of retro flash games on the official White House website. 

One of them is called "Rio Run." God help me, I clicked on it. 

You play in the game as an old white man who wanders around the screen intercepting "border crossers."

 As soon as you "catch" one of them, they re-materialize in a line behind you wearing an orange jumpsuit—ready to be held captive, one assumes, in one of the administration's sprawling administrative detention camps, where people are routinely shackled and disappeared—sometimes to secret forever-prisons in places like Eswatini and Equatorial Guinea. 

For the most part, the "crossers" are depicted with brown and Black faces. But perhaps someone even in this administration thought that was a little too on-the-nose. 

So they are interspersed with a few seemingly pink or yellowish faces for good measure. 

Perhaps those ones represent the Russian asylum seekers this administration has confined in a family detention camp in Texas—or the Chinese asylum seeker they threatened with deportation to Uganda—for daring to oppose their own authoritarian governments and put their trust in American democracy. 

I know I'm being baited with all this. I know I shouldn't take the bait. 

I know the administration's mantra internally, as Maggie Haberman reports, is "controversy elevates message." In other words, they think anything they can do to get liberals like me to flip out will only play to their advantage. 

But I'm increasingly less convinced this tactic actually works for them. I'm not sure ordinary Americans are actually impressed with this type of performative schoolboy cruelty anymore. 

The more you read about American public opinion polling, the more you realize that the vast majority of Americans are actually far more generous, compassionate, and decent than anything reflected in our current government's behavior. 

I think some people were—alas—willing to tolerate more cruelty than they felt personally comfortable with for a time, so long as they thought these policies were in some sense "working." 

But Trump cannot possibly claim the mantle even of an unjust success at this point—given that his foreign wars are failing and his own policies are causing prices and bond yields to spike. 

The administration thinks it has a well-worn toolkit for these moments: bring out the schoolboy sadism and bullying. Pete Hegseth does things like hop on social media and make fun of children in a Canadian cadet program. 

There is no sadder sight that the unpopular playground bully whom no one is impressed with anymore thinking they can reclaim past glory by picking on someone smaller. 

It just doesn't work anymore guys. Nobody thinks you're big and tough just because you make a video game out of disappearing asylum-seekers to torture prisons. 

I recall that quote from Noam Chomsky about an exhibit he once saw in a museum showcasing the Vietnam War. It had an interactive feature for kids where they could follow a string of lights until they made contact with a Vietnamese village, indicating a "hit"!

"You want to weep for a country" that could put up a display like that, Chomsky wrote. 

So too, all we want to do for a country that can make a video game out of rounding up torture survivors and refugees and putting them in chains to be shipped to various black sites or internment camps is shed tears. 

It would seem, from the example Chomsky cited, that the "gamification" of war in the U.S. is not entirely new. 

Harold Pinter once made the same point by likening the unthinking tribal belligerence and sadism of American war hysteria to the shouts of a crowd at a sports game. One of his poems condemning the Persian Gulf War, after all, was called "American Football."

But the administration has carried this type of juvenile sadism to entirely new extremes. Early in their Iran war, they posted edited montages of explosions in the Iran war alongside footage from video games. 

Jamelle Bouie in his latest column calls attention to the fact that just last week, Trump posted AI-generated images of explosions in Kharg island. 

It is not clear whether Trump didn't realize these images were fake—or if he just doesn't care. 

Either way—it seems that war—like mass deportation and indefinite imprisonment—really is just a game to him. 

Bouie notes that Trump, instead of catching up on the state of his war with your standard military or intelligence briefings, prefers to be "shown a brief highlight reel of destruction, what one official described as 'stuff blowing up.'"

This president makes that grotesque museum display Chomsky described sound tame by comparison. 

We have indeed reached the depths of schoolboy depravity and sadism that Pinter satirized in "American Football." One can well imagine Trump or Hegseth cackling, like the speaker in Pinter's poem: 

Hallelullah!

It works.

We blew the shit out of them.

[...]

Now I want you to come over here and kiss me on the mouth.