Otten: Largely, this war is very unpopular, and it’s incredibly hypocritical considering Trump ran on being the peace president and getting America out of forever wars. But maybe he thinks because he stopped eight wars, he can start one of his own as a treat.
Sargent: Yeah, right. Well, I think you get at something important there, which illustrates another reason they’re trying to avoid calling it a war. It’s because the MAGA base—or at least some of the main MAGA influencers—are really in an uproar over this, and they’re basically saying that it was a broken promise. MAGA is supposed to be all about opposition to forever wars and no foreign entanglements, and making sure that all of our military arsenal is focused on the enemy at home—immigrants and their U.S. citizen allies—and not on foreign adventures.
Sargent: Yeah, I thought JD Vance’s tap dancing on this was pretty interesting. He was out there basically saying, okay, we did run against forever wars, but those past forever wars were ones that were launched by stupid presidents and this is a smart president.
Now, putting aside the absurdity of that—no one’s going to be fooled into thinking that Trump has really strategically thought this through in a very smart way, especially since at the exact same time that Vance is saying that, they’re giving 15 different rationales for—or definitions of—what success would look like, right?
Otten: Yeah, it’s hard when the administration itself doesn’t seem to have created a cohesive message for what this war is about and why we’re doing it. I saw Marco Rubio just a few days ago saying that we entered the war because we knew Israel was going to, and so we may as well have struck first. That’s paraphrasing quite heavily, but the gist of it was we entered the war because Israel was planning to. And then the very next day, he said he hadn’t said that at all. And in fact, when a reporter asked him about it, he said, “You weren’t there yesterday when I explained it.” And the reporter said, “Yes, I was. I asked the question that prompted that answer.”
Sargent: Yeah. In fact, that kind of gets at another reason Republicans, I think, are getting anxious. Trump just isn’t even bothering to try to create what you’d call a cohesive message or a coherent story about what they’re doing. He’s just not bothering. And that’s sort of something you would expect Trump to be doing since there’s a midterm election coming up, but he’s just not.
Adding to the anxiety among Republicans might be just how fundamentally unserious the White House is being about this in another way. We just saw the White House Twitter feed post this absolutely disgusting video which presented footage from the war—bombings and so forth—but packaged it as a video game, complete with dramatic music and the trappings of a video game visually on the screen. It’s just awful.
And so you’ve got on the one side Leavitt protesting that no, we’re not trivializing American troop deaths by making them all about Trump—but then you’ve got them absolutely trivializing what the troops are going through. You wrote a piece about this broader tendency of Trump world to reduce everything to a kind of video game fantasy realm. Can you talk about all that? What did you make of that video, and what’s the broader context?
Otten: Yeah, that video—it actually is footage of the conflict spliced with animation scenes from a Call of Duty video game. And it includes little point counters on the screen whenever the U.S. lands a strike in the conflict footage.
And this isn’t the first time that the administration has, sort of, portrayed attacking foreigners—shall we say—as a video game. There was a campaign to promote the Department of Homeland Security that used the phrase “destroy the flood,” which is a tagline from the video game Halo. In Halo, you’re trying to get rid of a literal outer-space alien horde. Obviously, this Department of Homeland Security is trying to get rid of immigrants.
I wrote this piece with our political reporter Grace Segers—we co-authored it—just looking at the way that this administration, in particular, has harnessed video game language and imagery to try and encourage people to almost distance themselves from violence a little bit in order to make it more palatable.
And that’s not to say that social media and video games on their own are going to make people more violent, but in the context of this administration and the way that they are encouraging people to view violence, it can create a pretty dangerous situation, I would say.
Basically, if you encourage people to see real life as a video game, then you stop thinking of other people as human beings and you start to think of them as just players who don’t have feelings—and it’s a lot easier to become okay with removing people, particularly violently, from the country if you don’t consider them human beings. And so that’s why you’re seeing this administration really encourage Americans to view people of color, in particular, as subhuman.
Trump and Stephen Miller have used language like this before. Stephen Miller said “savages” today, and Trump’s used the word “vermin” on the campaign trail a lot. And this is something that they’ve been doing for a while. It’s not just Halo, it’s not just Call of Duty imagery now. They have, I think, always tried to trivialize human beings and deportations.
And that’s why we’ve seen other videos of deportations being set to popular songs, or AI being used to create Studio Ghibli-inspired imagery. You’re just really being encouraged not to view these things as something that’s happening in the real world. You’re being told to think of it as it’s all just a game and you’re going to win.
Sargent: Yeah, I think you’re getting at this deep tension in MAGA that I just want to close on. So on the one hand, it’s just simply true that the MAGA masses view a lot of this stuff as entertainment. You saw those pictures early on of the now-fired Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, posing in an almost weirdly suggestive way in front of prisons full of dark-skinned people with tattoos—migrants, right?
You see, as you said, the DHS Twitter feed is constantly pumping out this sort of violence-against-migrants content—it almost actually is like that. And so MAGA does thrill to the sadism of things like that. And it does thrill to the idea of Trump blowing up things in the Middle East, right?
And so when they portray it like that on the White House Twitter feed, they are actually speaking to some big segments of the MAGA base that do view things that way. But it is happening in the real world. And when it actually becomes clear that they view this in trivial terms, it looks really terrible.
And so you’ve got Karoline Leavitt lashing out when people point out the trivialization of all this. And so they’re caught in this weird place where they have to minister to a base that—at least parts of it—do live in the fantasy world you’re talking about. But on the other hand, there’s a real world that’s blowing back on Republicans politically. Can you just talk about that weird tension a little bit?
Otten: Yeah, I think we saw it start on the campaign trail, where Trump made a very clear effort to court young male voters with a, sort of, chronically online personality. They listened to podcasts that really talked up men’s rights. They were big fans of Andrew Tate. They were big fans of UFC matches. And typically—not always, but a lot of the time—young men like that tend to be very isolated, particularly after the pandemic.
Younger men have said they really struggle to make connections offline and instead view online relationships as some of their most important and most aspirational. They really view men like Andrew Tate and Joe Rogan as role models. And instead you get these men who are encouraging really horrific views about women and minorities and anyone who is not a straight white man.
That is the audience they’re trying to appeal to now with these video-game-esque videos and promotions of conflict. But when that is the main base that you’ve cultivated, you have to keep them. And you can already see there are polls coming out showing that many of those young male voters are starting to get buyer’s remorse over the 2024 election.
And so if you’re trying to hold on to those voters, you are then left with the reality that you’ve isolated the majority of everybody else—who do not like what this war is, who didn’t vote for it, who don’t support it, and whose elected representatives have not declared war.
Sargent: Yeah. And this is a real problem for Republicans. There’s a through-line here between the mass deportation campaign and all the horrific violence that’s been unleashed and the war. It’s not a coincidence that you’ve got the big podcast bros turning hard against both the mass deportations and the war—because these guys who, sort of, have a foot in that weird fantasy world are suddenly confronting the reality of what Trump was actually peddling to them. And the dissonance is very profound, I think.
Otten: Yeah, there’s a real divide between what Trump said he would do and what he is currently doing. And it’s one of those weird situations where we, as journalists, saw that coming—we remember the first time we kind of knew it was coming. But he marketed himself very well on the campaign trail to the right kind of people who would be fired up enough to vote for him. And now they’re really getting the short end of the stick.
Sargent: I think that really sums it up. He’s a brilliant pitchman and an absolutely awful president. Tori Otten, it was a real pleasure to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.
Otten: This was fun, Greg. Anytime.
