War Becomes Spectacle in Trump’s Horrific Propaganda Promoting War in Iran

The White House has circulated videos that fuse footage of bombing raids with visuals from video games and action films.

By Henry A. Giroux , Truthout, March 21, 2026

During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump promised to be an antiwar candidate, boasting that, unlike his predecessors, he would end endless wars and keep the United States out of new military conflicts. Yet the trajectory of his presidency has unfolded in the opposite direction. From expanding military confrontations in the Caribbean to the escalating war with Iran, launched through large-scale strikes that risk igniting a wider regional catastrophe, Trump’s rule has increasingly relied on the language and machinery of war. As Zachary Basu points out in Axios, “he has attacked seven nations [and] authorized more individual air strikes in 2025 than President Biden did in four years.”

What makes this moment particularly disturbing is not only the violence itself, but also the way it is staged and celebrated. As the conflict with Iran intensified, the White House circulated promotional videos that fused real footage of bombing raids with visuals drawn from video games and action films, transforming acts of destruction into a spectacle of national triumph. In such images, war appears not as tragedy or political catastrophe but as thrilling display, inviting viewers to admire the technological performance of power while remaining detached from the human suffering it produces. These spectacles are more than crude propaganda.

They reveal a deeper shift in political culture in which violence is aestheticized, cruelty normalized, and militarism staged as entertainment, training the public to experience domination not as a catastrophe but as an exhilarating display of power.

We live in an age of monsters. More than two centuries ago, Francisco Goya captured such a moment in his haunting 1799 etching, “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters,” an image that now reads less like a relic of the Enlightenment than a prophecy of our own time. The Italian political thinker Antonio Gramsci described moments like this as periods of historical crisis, writing that “the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Our present moment bears all the marks of such an interregnum.

We inhabit a time in which the promise of democracy has been kidnapped, stripped of its moral language, and cast into the abyss of authoritarian rule. Reason, once the fragile guardian of justice and collective responsibility, now suffocates beneath what Jeffrey Edward Green describes as an ocular politics of lies, corruption, and organized cruelty. It has been subordinated to a visual culture that “sparks deep emotional responses” while deriding solidarity, democratic values, and informed judgment. Justice itself has been weaponized, transformed into an instrument of state terror wielded by an army of thugs who abduct, assault, and kill protesters, migrants, and people of color. Hope is mocked as naïveté, memory is erased, and historical consciousness is censored in a political culture where resistance itself is treated as a crime…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Susan Sontag anticipated this danger in her reflections on photography and war imagery. Sontag argued that modern visual culture has the capacity to transform suffering into a spectacle. Images that depict violence may initially provoke shock or anger, but repeated exposure can produce a form of moral anesthesia. The viewer becomes fascinated by the visual power of the image itself while the suffering it represents recedes into abstraction…………………………………………………………………………………………………

A society that learns to watch war as if it were a video game risks losing the capacity to recognize the humanity that disappears behind the screen. The danger lies not only in the violence such spectacles celebrate but also in the sensibility they cultivate, one that numbs moral judgment and prepares the ground for authoritarian rule. Resisting this culture of cruelty demands more than outrage or cosmetic reform. It requires a broad democratic awakening capable of confronting the economic and political system that feeds on war and inequality……………………………… https://truthout.org/articles/war-becomes-spectacle-in-trumps-horrific-propaganda-promoting-war-in-iran/?utm_source=Truthout&utm_campaign=4da2782418-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2026_03_21_07_27&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_bbb541a1db-4da2782418-650192793