6 hours ago
11
A Hollywood-themed propaganda video released by the White House promising “justice the American way” for Iran features movie stars from Australia, New Zealand and Canada, and promotes characters including a corrupt lawyer, a drug dealer and a freedom fighter who stands up to the overwhelming force of an invading foreign army.
The 42-second video posted on the official X account of the White House on Thursday was met with almost universal mockery online, with comments accusing the Trump administration of immaturity, and likening its social media strategy to one run by teenagers.
The sequence opens with a scene from Iron Man 2, with Robert Downey Jr’s character Tony Stark the first of a number of featured superheroes. “Wake up, Daddy’s home,” he says as he claps his hands to activate a bank of computers.
Downey Jr has been a vocal critic of Trump, and actively campaigned for his Democratic opponent Kamala Harris during the run-up to the 2024 presidential election.
The next two actors, Russell Crowe in Gladiator, and Mel Gibson in Braveheart, are from New Zealand and Australia, respectively, although the latter was born in New York before moving to Sydney with his family as a child.
Both movies have a premise of small, seemingly helpless entities defying powerful, empirical forces who seek to subdue them, with Gibson as the Scottish freedom fighter William Wallace resisting the invading English army.
The next character to appear, after a short clip of Tom Cruise as the macho fighter pilot Maverick in Top Gun, is Jimmy McGill, an attorney with questionable ethics from the long-running TV series Breaking Bad, and its spin-off prequel Better Call Saul.
The lawyer, played by actor Bob Odenkirk, is best known for defending teacher turned methamphetamine producer Walter White, after his alter ego Saul Goodman evolves into an unscrupulous and moral-free con artist. “You can’t conceive of what I’m capable of,” he screams in the White House edit.
Next comes Keanu Reeves, who was born in Beirut and is a Canadian citizen, announcing “I’m thinking I’m back!” from the 2014 movie John Wick; then Bryan Cranston – who plays White in Breaking Bad – saying “I AM the danger!” in a snippet from the series.
Cranston, like Downey Jr, has been outspoken in his criticism of Trump, telling the Guardian in 2017 he was “disheartened” that Trump won the presidency, having already called him a “Shakespearean serio-tragic-comedic character”. He went further in an acceptance speech at the 2019 Tony awards, calling out Trump’s “demagoguery”.
The rest of the video shows a succession of costumed and cartoon action heroes – and Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary – and it concludes with a voice declaring “flawless victory”, from the Mortal Kombat series of video games and live action movies, over the caption “The White House”.
The Trump administration has increasingly turned to provocative visuals to convey its messaging, mirroring the president’s own confrontational social media strategy of mockery, insults and trolling. In January, it digitally manipulated the photograph of a woman who was arrested at an immigration protest to make it appear she was crying.
It has unashamedly harnessed AI technology in videos and still images to produce what critics call “slopaganda”, including one last October portraying Trump dumping feces on US citizens attending that month’s No Kings protests.
It is also unclear when, or if, the White House secured permission for use of the clips in the latest video. Countless high-profile artists and musicians, including Abba, Beyoncé, Bruce Springsteen, George Harrison and the Rolling Stones, have clashed with the White House after it used their material without consultation.
