The White House released a new website on Tuesday: Arcade.Gov, which offers five (so far) playable games promoting symbolic patriotism, fighting off migrants, and getting rich like Trump.
The games posted to date, all of which are comically crude, are:
Flappy Bill: Fly the bald eagle down the National Mall
Build the Wall: Protect the border from the coming horde
Rio Run: Border patrol along the Rio Grande
Supply Line: Sort the school lunch to Make America Healthy Again
Trump Savings Tycoon: Fill your kids’ Trump Accounts
The intent is obvious but bears stating. Gamifying the fascist movement dehumanises it. Framing irregular migrants as the “coming horde” on a simple, free, playable game lowers the age of potential entry into the MAGA worldview.
That “coming horde” game is essentially Tetris with slightly different behaviour. The Make America Healthy Again game offers several unidentifiable food-like items on a conveyor belt and expects you to reject all the ones that come with individual packaging.
Trump Savings Tycoon is beyond bizarre, simply catching flying valuables out of the air with a fishing net to accumulate ‘money’ in the game. It is not clear what message this is intended to convey besides the idea of associating the name Trump with amassing unearned wealth. That, at least, is honest.
Clearly not much thought has gone into the games themselves.
The point here is that the administration is openly mocking the American people. Producing these games, and offering them as an official part of the White House website, is an insult to the intelligence of the entire country, making easy to spread propaganda, and desensitising people to the very real actions behind the entertainment.
In Albania, the country has descended into three straight months of widespread protests demanding the resignation of the president for making a real estate deal with Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump in what has been dubbed the Flamingo Revolution.
In Canada, most of the country is rallying around severing ties with the United States and building relationships with just about anyone else.
In the United States, the president wants you to fly an animated eagle over DC while teaching the people that aspiring immigrants are nothing but a horde of zombies — and there, it is just another day in what they believe to be the freest country in the world.