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

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The Public Intellectual

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.

Authoritarianism rarely arrives all at once. It does not begin with tanks rolling through the streets or the abrupt suspension of rights. It emerges more gradually through the corrosion of language, the collapse of civic trust, and the steady normalization of cruelty. In such moments, culture becomes a decisive battleground. Images, spectacles, and staged performances reorganize how people see the world, training the public to experience domination as thrilling, cruelty as justified, and violence as spectacle. In a media-saturated culture where entertainment and politics increasingly merge, war itself becomes a staged performance, packaged and circulated as if it were simply another form of digital entertainment. Under such circumstances, memory is corroded and violence is no longer relegated to the fringes of culture; under the Trump regime, violence is openly celebrated. Language has succumbed to the spectacle and become a crucial instrument in the microphysics of power. Drained of any substance, it has become a crucial element in the acceleration of violence in the United States. As Jonathan V. Crary reminds us, we live in a historical moment in which the misuse of language and history has become complicitous with the production of new technologies, modes of consciousness, identities, and values that are “complicit in the perpetuation of violence on a mass scale.”

The Trump administration’s horrific Iran propaganda videos provide a striking example of how this aesthetic logic operates in contemporary political culture.

During a recent segment on The Lead, Jake Tapper questioned why the Trump administration was circulating a promotional video celebrating U.S. strikes on Iran. The video, a single and particularly egregious example of the administration’s war propaganda, stitched together real footage of bombing raids with stylized graphics resembling video games and scenes lifted from action films. Explosions were presented through cinematic cuts, dramatic music, and digital overlays that mimicked the visual language of gaming culture, collapsing the boundary between real warfare and entertainment. The segment highlighted how this montage blended authentic combat imagery with the grammar of digital spectacle, prompting widespread concern that the White House was effectively turning war into a form of entertainment. This episode illustrates how contemporary propaganda operates less through argument than through the visual seductions of spectacle.

The controversy surrounding the video is not simply about tone or political messaging

What the montage reveals is something far more troubling about the evolving culture of authoritarian politics. The imagery does not present war as a grave event demanding reflection or democratic deliberation. Instead, it transforms geopolitical violence into a stylized performance of national power. Explosions flash across the screen with cinematic precision, targets vanish in bursts of light, and the sequence unfolds with the rhythm of a digital combat game.

Such imagery signals a broader transformation in political culture. Violence is no longer justified through argument or strategic explanation; it is aestheticized, and destruction becomes a visual performance designed to excite audiences and affirm national power. As Guy Debord, John Berger, and Susan Sontag have variously suggested, we increasingly inhabit a culture shaped by the spectacle, one that invites viewers to identify emotionally with displays of domination while remaining detached from the human suffering such violence produces. In the age of social media, this spectacle circulates with unprecedented speed, amplified by algorithms designed to privilege images that provoke outrage, fascination, and emotional intensity over reflection or critical judgment.

The theoretical foundations for understanding this transformation were articulated long ago. Walter Benjamin warned that fascist movements seek to aestheticize politics. Rather than encouraging citizens to deliberate collectively about power, they mobilize sensation, spectacle, and emotional intensity. Politics becomes theater, and war becomes the ultimate aesthetic experience, a demonstration of technological beauty and national vitality meant to overwhelm reflection and judgment.

Benjamin’s insight resonates powerfully with the Iran montage. The video does not attempt persuasion through argument or evidence. Instead, it overwhelms viewers through visual intensity. Rapid editing, dramatic explosions, and cinematic framing create a spectacle designed to short-circuit critical distance and immerse the viewer in the intoxicating thrill of power.

Richard Etlin’s work on culture under the Third Reich deepens this analysis by revealing the moral sensibility embedded in fascist aesthetics. Etlin emphasizes that fascist culture normalized cruelty through what he calls the politics of the “sneer.” The sneer is not simply an expression of contempt. It signals that certain groups are considered disposable. It communicates the assumption that those outside the national community are inferior beings whose suffering is irrelevant.

In Nazi cultural production this contempt was reinforced through the depiction of enemies as degraded cultural and biological “types.” Jews, dissidents, and other targeted groups were portrayed through caricature and stereotype as morally corrupt, physically degenerate, and fundamentally alien to the national body. By reducing individuals to abstract types, fascist imagery made it easier for the public to accept their persecution and elimination. The aesthetics of contempt prepared the psychological conditions for political violence.

The Iran montage echoes this logic of disposability. The targets of the bombing appear not as human beings but as abstract coordinates. Explosions resemble cinematic effects rather than catastrophic acts of destruction. The viewer is invited to identify with technological power while remaining detached from the human lives that vanish behind the screen. Images of war, shattered cities, and dead children are stripped of the horror they convey. War is rendered as a video game, while the suffering it produces disappears beneath the seductive veneer of entertainment. What emerges is a form of brutal cruelty forged in the toxic fusion of technology, power, social media, and everyday life.

The sneer, in this sense, has migrated into the digital age. It appears not only in gestures of open contempt but also in aesthetic frameworks that render the suffering of others invisible. When violence is packaged as entertainment, the victims of that violence effectively vanish from moral consideration.

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.

The Iran video exemplifies this transformation with disturbing clarity. By merging real bombing footage with the visual language of gaming and cinematic action sequences, it dissolves the boundary between war and entertainment. Explosions appear as cinematic effects, targets as digital objects, and violence itself becomes a consumable spectacle. In such representations, destruction is no longer experienced as tragedy or political catastrophe but instead as visual performance, inviting viewers to admire the display of power while remaining detached from its human consequences. Étienne Balibar’s analysis of cruelty further clarifies the political stakes of this spectacle. Balibar argues that contemporary forms of power increasingly operate through the public staging of violence. In such contexts, violence becomes not only a tool of domination but also a form of political theater that reinforces systems of power sustained by militarism, nationalism, and the brutal inequalities of contemporary capitalism.

For Balibar, cruelty in such contexts is not simply the imposition of suffering. It is a form of extreme violence that threatens the very foundation of democratic politics. When societies become accustomed to watching violence as spectacle, the ethical and civic sensibilities necessary for democratic life begin to erode. Citizens are transformed into spectators who consume images of domination rather than participants capable of judging power.

The Iran montage illustrates this transformation vividly. The spectacle does not invite democratic debate about the moral consequences of war. Instead, it mobilizes fascination with technological power and national triumph. The viewer is positioned not as a citizen deliberating violence but as an audience applauding it.

Such spectacles also play a crucial role in shaping what might be called the fascist subject. Authoritarian regimes do not rely solely on coercion. They cultivate specific modes of perception and emotional response. Through repeated exposure to spectacles of domination, individuals learn to admire power, distrust empathy, and view violence as both natural and exhilarating. As Mabel Berezin argues in Making the Fascist Self, fascist regimes actively sought to produce citizens whose identities were forged through public rituals, mass spectacles, and emotional identification with the nation rather than through democratic deliberation. Politics was staged as a series of dramatic performances that fused belonging, authority, and spectacle, encouraging individuals to experience power collectively rather than question it critically.

Within such environments, individuals are gradually educated to experience domination as affirmation and to interpret cruelty not as a moral failure but as evidence of strength, discipline, and national vitality. Within this formative pedagogical culture, fascist narratives circulating through social and digital media become powerful instruments for shaping subjects who identify with domination rather than question it. The deeper danger of such spectacles lies not only in the violence they display but also in the moral sensibilities they cultivate.

The fascist subject emerges gradually within this cultural environment. Images of cruelty train viewers to identify with authority rather than with those who suffer. Emotional responses such as compassion or solidarity are replaced by fascination with strength and domination. The capacity to recognize the humanity of others begins to erode.

Primo Levi warned that the seeds of fascism often take root long before they appear in the form of overt political regimes. They germinate in everyday attitudes, in climates of contempt, indifference, and the willingness to treat others as less than human. Fascism begins to grow when humiliation and cruelty become ordinary features of public life, when violence is normalized and empathy stripped of its moral force. In such conditions, authoritarian politics no longer appears as a shocking rupture but as the logical outcome of a society already accustomed to contempt, exclusion, and disposability. Writing in 1974, Levi captured the enduring danger with chilling clarity:

Every age has its own fascism, and we see the warning signs wherever the concentration of power denies citizens the possibility and the means of expressing and acting on their own free will. There are many ways of reaching this point, and not just through the terror of police intimidation, but by denying and distorting information, by undermining systems of justice, by paralyzing the education system, and by spreading in a myriad subtle ways nostalgia for a world where order reigned, and where the security of a privileged few depends on the forced labor and the forced silence of the many.

The aestheticization of violence contributes directly to this moral climate. When destruction becomes entertainment, and when suffering disappears behind the spectacle, the ethical sensibilities necessary for democratic life begin to weaken.

This aesthetic logic does not remain confined to the representation of war. It migrates across the broader culture of authoritarian politics, shaping how cruelty is staged, circulated, and normalized across multiple arenas of public life. The spectacle that glorifies violence abroad also prepares the public to accept repression at home, where migrants, protesters, and dissenters are increasingly cast as enemies to be subdued rather than people with rights.

Immigration enforcement provides one of the clearest examples. Images of detention centers, deportation raids, and militarized borders are staged as demonstrations of strength. Public officials pose before razor wire and prison walls while celebrating the supposed restoration of national order. The suffering of migrants becomes the backdrop against which state power performs itself.

Political figures themselves increasingly embody this aesthetic logic. Carefully choreographed images of militarized patriotism, hyper-stylized public appearances, and theatrical displays of authority function as visual markers of loyalty to the authoritarian project. Governance becomes inseparable from spectacle.

Under the Trump regime, morality collapses in the celebration of power. When New York Times reporter Katie Rogers asked Trump whether he saw “any checks” to his “power on the world stage,” he answered: “There is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me, and that’s very good.” In an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Stephen Miller, Trump’s chief of staff for policy and homeland security advisor, echoed the fascist belief in raw power and brute force as the ultimate arbiter of politics. He stated without the slightest embarrassment: “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”

As the editors of Equator magazine note, under the Trump regime and its allied Western governments, the adoration of force has become a ruling passion. Due process is ignored, opponents are abducted or threatened, world leaders are intimidated, and military violence is carried out with little regard for international law or human life. From the bombing of migrants and refugees at sea to the massive flow of weapons that have enabled Israel’s assault on Gaza and the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians, the abandonment of restraint has become increasingly visible. War, both abroad and at home, is a defining feature of contemporary politics that increasingly threatens to become the organizing principle of society itself. As Equator’s editors observe:

Under the current regime, the United States has little left to offer the world but a shameless display of coercion and destruction. Trump and his lieutenants appear intoxicated by their own impunity, indifferent to international law and uninterested in manufacturing consent. Instead, they practice a form of political gangsterism marked by intimidation, abductions, and the open threat or removal of rival heads of state.

This intoxication with force is not simply a matter of policy; it is also staged and circulated through images that normalize domination and train the public to accept cruelty as a legitimate expression of power. These images share a common structure. They transform violence into visual affirmation. The public is encouraged to identify with the power being displayed rather than question its consequences. Cruelty becomes normalized through repetition and the spectacle rather than through argument.

The Iran video stands as a particularly stark example of this cultural logic. It demonstrates how easily digital media can convert acts of war into consumable entertainment. In doing so it reveals the deeper transformation of political culture in an era dominated by the spectacle.

Resisting such politics requires more than opposing specific policies. It requires confronting the aesthetic regimes that normalize cruelty and desensitize the public to suffering. Authoritarian power operates not only through laws and institutions but through images, narratives, and emotional appeals that shape how people perceive the world.

The Iran video is more than a piece of militaristic propaganda; it signals the emergence of a political culture in which destruction is aestheticized, domination becomes pleasurable, and war itself is staged as a spectacle. The spectacle is reinforced by a deeper ideological current circulating within parts of the Trump coalition. Reports from military watchdog groups indicate that some commanders framed the conflict with Iran as “part of God’s divine plan,” invoking biblical imagery of Armageddon and the imminent return of Christ. Such rhetoric reveals how militarism can fuse with apocalyptic religious narratives, transforming war not merely into spectacle but into a sacred drama in which violence becomes the instrument of divine destiny.

The obscenity of this spectacle becomes even clearer when one considers the reality it conceals. Behind the cinematic explosions and video-game imagery lie acts of devastating human violence. Among the most horrific was the U.S. bombing of an elementary school in Iran in which 175 people were killed, most of them children. Such atrocities expose the grotesque gap between the spectacle of technological triumph circulating through White House propaganda videos and the human devastation those images erase.

Meanwhile, within parts of the Trump coalition, the war has been framed not merely as strategic necessity but as a sacred mission. Political figures including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Sen. Lindsey Graham, House Speaker Mike Johnson, and current ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee have invoked biblical language suggesting that the conflict with Iran carries the meaning of a holy war. Hegseth has quoted scripture in military briefings and, in his own writing, boasted about ignoring the constraints of international law, further collapsing the fragile boundary between religion and the conduct of war. At the same time Trump surrounds himself with figures associated with militant Christian nationalism, including Pastor Paula White-Cain, whose apocalyptic rhetoric and speaking in tongues have led even a conservative commentator to describe her as a doomsday cultist. In such a climate, militarism fuses with religious fanaticism to produce a political theology of violence in which bombing raids can be framed as instruments of divine destiny.

History teaches that authoritarianism rarely begins with dramatic ruptures. It often begins with subtle shifts in sensibility. Democracy depends on citizens’ capability of recognizing the humanity of others and judging power critically. When contempt becomes ordinary, when suffering is turned into a spectacle, and when cruelty becomes a source of entertainment, the moral foundations of democracy begin to erode.

These developments are what Antonio Gramsci described as the “morbid symptoms” of an interregnum, moments when democratic institutions weaken and spectacles of cruelty and militarism rush in to fill the vacuum of a collapsing political order.

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.

The spectacle of domination now circulating through digital culture is inseparable from a form of gangster capitalism that feeds on militarism, racialized exclusion, and the erosion of public life. Challenging this order will require mass movements willing not simply to temper its excesses but to dismantle the structures that sustain it. The struggle ahead is therefore not only to defend democracy from authoritarianism but also to build a democratic socialist society in which human dignity, shared prosperity, and collective freedom replace the brutal logics of profit, disposability, and permanent war.