Yesterday, the White House dropped a second pop culture clip to promote its war in Iran. Emblazoned with the trademark alpha-male boast “UNDEFEATED,” the post appeared on the White House’s official X.com account. Done in the style of Nintendo’s line of Wii games, it greets us with the words “Operation Epic Fury” in the light blue Wii font against a white background. A cursor moves to click “start,” and it plays like an ad for a game, intercutting scenes from the Wii line with actual footage of bombs and missiles hitting (one is led to believe) in Iran over the last two weeks.

Wii’s warm, friendly, and cartoonish sports settings are kid-friendly and filled with cute little avatar people in the game’s Candy Land world. Upbeat keyboard music plays as gamers roll bowling balls, hit golf balls, bat baseballs, or shoot arrows at bullseyes. When the user scores a hit, the video cuts to real nighttime black-and-white war footage of American ordnance battering an Iranian target that then explodes in flames. Then a colorful Wii graphic crowds over the battle site, crowing “Hole in one!” or “Out of the park!”

The clip only shows us American missiles destroying military structures or tanks. Unfortunately, the world has already seen footage of an American Tomahawk missile dropping on a Minab girl’s grade school that killed at least 170 people, most of them students. The world has also seen footage of Tehran’s oil fields on fire after intense Israeli bombing, forcing millions of civilians to live under black clouds of toxic smoke that they will be breathing.

The clip seems to be inspired by recruiting reels produced a decade ago by the Islamist terrorist group ISIS aimed at radicalizing young men to come fight in Iraq. ISIS used graphics similar to video games like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto that show ISIS fighters shooting what look like American soldiers. ISIS made this footage to sell children on jihadist violence because it has no problem recruiting child warriors; by contrast, the Trump administration recruits its adult base with endless petty childishness.

The Wii clip follows last week’s official White House fizzle reel of stolen clips from various movies and TV shows, including Iron Man, Transformers, Tropic Thunder, Christopher Reeve’s Superman, Braveheart, Gladiator, Deadpool, and Breaking Bad’s Walter White threatening “I am the danger!” and Saul Goodman, his lawyer, saying, “You can’t conceive what I am capable of!” When Superman says he fights for “truth, justice, and the American way,” the clip cuts to actual footage of a target successfully hit and exploding. The one real person in the reel is not the president but his smirking self-styled Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth.

It should not surprise us to see Hegseth as the central figure in a burst of amoral messaging mashing up heroes and villains indistinguishably. Hegseth first met with Trump during his first administration; the then–Fox host and former Iraq War veteran sought to persuade the president to pardon three American soldiers convicted of war crimes, including murder. As The New York Times wrote this week, Hegseth sees it as a weakness of a declining civilization to try to give war any moral purpose. Earlier this year, he said what he wants out of the Trump era military is “maximum lethality, not tepid legality” and assaults that stress “violent effect, not politically correct.” He has referred to the Judge Advocate Generals (JAG) Corps, as “the jagoff lawyers” and this week ordered the military to “execute a ruthless, no excuses review” of the JAG officers sworn to uphold basic rules of engagement and military ethics to cut back on their numbers.

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The president himself—plainly won over to Hegseth’s worldview after their introduction—also exults in the nihilistic destructive force of American war making. On Friday, he posted on Truth Social about his current campaign in Iran: “Watch what happens to these deranged scumbags today. They’ve been killing innocent people all over the world for 47 years, and now I, as the 47th President of the United States of America, am killing them. What a great honor it is to do so! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP.”

Hegseth says he wants a war unencumbered by “stupid rules of engagement,” but that’s not what comes through in the repackaged footage he and his communications team now circulate. The two clips the White House put out depict the fictional “flawless victory” of a Transformers movie, not the ugly chaotic fragments of the current American-Israeli “excursion,” as the president calls it, into Iran. (Many have suggested the president probably means to call the invasion of Iran an “incursion,” but given the fun Hegseth seems to be having with this war, maybe the president meant exactly what he said.)

The glib, 4Chan-style depiction of mass killing as a Comicon teaser reel or a video game raises a key question: Just whom are Hegseth and Trump trying to win over here? Onetime Trump fanboys podcast kings Joe Rogan and Andrew Schulz have already defected over the ill-conceived and strategically bungled Iran war—or simply that we’re even in another war. Despite the edgelord comedy that Hegseth obviously enjoys, the war remains deeply unpopular and has split the president’s base.

The America First wing of the GOP loathes it and sees it as a betrayal of Trump’s promise to keep America out of “stupid wars.” The critique from this key arm of the MAGA base is that Middle Eastern “forever wars” are complicated, costly, long-term affairs that draw the country deeper and deeper into foreign entanglements. These videos make war look easy and fun; it’s unclear whether the intent behind them is to win over the war’s America First detractors, or simply to troll them.

It’s likely that the White House itself doesn’t know its own intent. Trump has delivered the most incoherent war of all, one that has already spread out of our military’s control as Iran fires missiles into neighboring Arab states, and Israel mounts an attack on Lebanon. For those of us who never take the president at his word and expect that he will say whatever he believes will deflect blame or tout his leadership genius in any given moment, the effort to sell the Iran war doesn’t provoke surprise or betrayal—it’s just more confirmation of the adolescent cruelty of this administration. For the manosphere, Trump’s Iran adventure is a rude awakening.

Hegseth’s Iran war trailer clips never try to make plain the purpose of this war. These are not in the tradition of Frank Capra’s World War II documentary series Why We Fight, which sought to educate the American people on what Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan were and why they needed to be destroyed. The clips never make President Trump’s case for war—again, not a surprise, given his own incredible failure to do so himself. They do not honor our ideals or values; they simply celebrate the fact that we started a war. And they characteristically depict it as painless entertainment with no hint of it as a baffling and violent offensive that has so far displaced 3.2 million Iranians at a cost of more than 11.3 billion taxpayer dollars in just the first six days.

A long line of commentators have noted that there is no moral argument for this war. It’s becoming clear that the lack of moral center comes from the top. It was, after all, just this sort of celebration of military amorality that first brought Trump and Hegseth together, with Trump’s pardon of three war criminals Hegseth had championed. Trump and Hegseth have elevated their gleeful amorality to a global scale of bloody incompetence, and now they’re trying to sell it as nihilistic comedy.