War Is Not a Meme
The Trump Administration Goes to War, by Any Memes Necessary
A series of White House social-media videos turn the carnage in Iran into gleeful entertainment.
On Feb. 28, the Trump administration launched war on Iran. The following week, it drafted Iron Man, Walter White and SpongeBob.
These characters, and many more figures from movies, TV, sports, music and video game memes, appeared in a series of short, trolling videos from the White House, on platforms including TikTok and X (formerly known as Twitter), that reduce the war’s carnage and upheaval to flippant, dystopian amusements.
New York Times March 11, 2026
~650 words · 3 min read
There’s a moment in every war when the abstraction becomes real — when the maps and strategy sessions give way to the unbearable weight of a knock on a front door, a folded flag, a name read aloud at a memorial. That weight is supposed to matter to the person who ordered the war. It is supposed to haunt them.
Donald Trump doesn’t appear to be haunted by anything.
On February 28, the Trump administration launched military action against Iran. Within days, the White House communications apparatus — the official voice of the most powerful government on earth — responded to this act of war by posting meme videos on TikTok and X. Iron Man. Walter White. SpongeBob SquarePants. Gleeful, trolling content designed to reduce the carnage and upheaval of war into a kind of viral entertainment. Likes, shares, reposts — people are dying, but did you see the meme?
This is not a communications strategy. It is a confession.
It tells us something devastating about the man in charge: that war, to him, is content. That the families of the soldiers he commands are an audience. That the geopolitical consequences of striking Iran — the blowback, the regional destabilization, the allied relationships strained or severed, the lives on both sides of the conflict — simply do not register the way a good engagement rate does.
Think about what it takes to watch your country go to war and think: TikTok. X. Think about the emotional architecture required to be unmoved enough by death and destruction to reach for SpongeBob as your messenger. There is no grieving here, no solemnity, no acknowledgment that the young men and women in uniform are anything other than props in a performance.
Empathy requires you to imagine yourself in someone else’s position. It requires you to sit with the discomfort of consequences. Trump has never demonstrated he can do either. He has spoken of casualties the way a businessman speaks of overhead — unfortunate, sometimes necessary, quickly moved past. He has mocked POWs, dismissed Gold Star families, and now, apparently, decided that the opening of a war deserves the same treatment as a campaign rally clip.
The memes aren’t just offensive. They’re diagnostic. They reveal a man who processes the world entirely through the lens of performance and reception — who measures every action by whether it lands, whether it owns the libs, whether it trends. The idea that bombing Iran has consequences that will ripple through years and decades, through alliances and economies and the lives of people who will never appear in his feed, seems genuinely beyond his frame of reference.
This is what happens when you put someone fundamentally incurious about the world in charge of the most consequential decisions in the world. He doesn’t understand the implications because he has never tried to. He doesn’t feel the weight of command because he has never believed the weight applied to him.
Wars have endings. Sometimes those endings come quickly. More often they sprawl — metastasizing into insurgencies, regional conflicts, generational grudges, blowback that arrives years later in forms no one predicted. The people who wage war casually, who treat it like a move in a game, rarely have to reckon with what they’ve set in motion. That reckoning lands on soldiers, on civilians, on allies, on the children of people who weren’t paying attention when the memes were posted.
Someone’s kid is going to die in this war. And the President marked the occasion with a SpongeBob clip.
That should make every one of us furious. And it should terrify us that it apparently made him laugh.
FTS
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