There is a person — or maybe a team of people — inside the White House whose job it is to take footage of real airstrikes that have killed real human beings and edit them together with Nintendo Wii Sports clips.
That sentence shouldn’t make sense. But here we are.
On Wednesday, the official White House account on X posted a 52-second video set to the Wii Sports theme song. The title screen swapped out “Wii Sports” for “Operation Epic Fury” in the same playful font. What followed was a montage of animated golf swings cutting to drone strikes labeled “hole in one,” cartoon baseball hits spliced with explosions captioned “out of the park,” and archery bullseyes landing on missile footage. The caption: “UNDEFEATED.”
The video has racked up tens of millions of views. More than 1,300 Iranian civilians have been killed in the conflict so far. Thirteen American service members are dead. Among the Iranian dead are at least 168 people, most of them children, killed when a girls’ elementary school in the city of Minab was struck on the first day of the war — a strike that a preliminary U.S. military investigation found was likely caused by a targeting error.
None of that made the highlight reel.
UNDEFEATED. pic.twitter.com/Jt69bcag5y
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) March 12, 2026
The pattern that won’t stop
The Wii Sports video isn’t a one-off lapse in judgment. It’s the latest in what has become a full White House content strategy — one that treats an active military conflict like a meme page.
Days after the U.S. and Israel launched strikes against Iran, the White House posted a video using Call of Duty gameplay alongside real drone strike footage. Kill score animations appeared over actual military attacks. One shot showed a U.S. drone hitting a truck, labeled “+100.” That video was eventually deleted.
Then came a supercut pulling clips from Tropic Thunder, Braveheart, Gladiator, Top Gun, Iron Man, Breaking Bad, Star Wars, Halo, and Yu-Gi-Oh, spliced with real missile strikes. It ended with a Mortal Kombat voiceover: “Flawless victory.”
Then came a bowling video with AI-generated bowling pins holding signs reading “We won’t stop making nuclear weapons,” knocked down by a red, white, and blue ball as Lynyrd Skynyrd played over exploding buildings.
STRIKE.
pic.twitter.com/XMzNNtlT63
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) March 12, 2026
Then SpongeBob SquarePants.
Then the NFL.
Then the Wii.
Hollywood said stop. The White House said make me.
The people whose work keeps getting used started pushing back. And the White House started mocking them for it.
Ben Stiller posted a direct message after the Tropic Thunder clip surfaced: “We never gave you permission and have no interest in being a part of your propaganda machine. War is not a movie.” The White House Deputy Communications Director responded: “Still better than Zoolander 2.”
Kesha found her song “Blow” in a strike video and said the White House was using her music “to incite violence.” Communications Director Steven Cheung responded that celebrities complaining “just gives us more attention and more view counts.”
Steve Downes, the voice of Master Chief from Halo, called it “disgusing and juvenile war porn.” Dan Green, who voices the lead in Yu-Gi-Oh!, said the White House was using a beloved creator’s legacy to encourage violence. Former NFL players whose highlights were spliced with bombing footage said they were disgusted.
None of it has stopped. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt called the effort “highly successful,” noting the videos had generated more than 2 billion impressions. “People are talking about the tremendous success of the war,” she said. “And that’s exactly the point.”
And the playbook isn’t new. Before the Iran war, the White House used songs by Sabrina Carpenter, Olivia Rodrigo, and SZA in ICE deportation videos — all without consent. Carpenter called it “evil and disgusting.” The White House deleted that video, then posted a manipulated Saturday Night Live clip of her, altering the audio to make it sound like she was calling a Latino cast member “illegal” instead of “hot.” Rodrigo said to stop promoting “racist, hateful propaganda.” SZA called the whole tactic “evil and boring.” The Pokémon Company objected. Celine Dion objected. ABBA objected. Every time, the White House either ignored the complaint, mocked the artist, or came back with another video.
The quiet irony with Nintendo
There’s one detail about the Wii Sports video that almost feels too perfect. Nintendo — the company behind one of the most beloved and wholesome games in history — is currently suing the Trump administration over tariffs that forced it to delay pre-orders for the Switch 2 console. The White House took that company’s intellectual property and used it to celebrate airstrikes. Nintendo hasn’t commented yet. But anyone who knows their reputation for protecting their IP knows this story probably isn’t over.
Where this actually lands
Leavitt is right about one thing: people are talking. But not about the military’s success. They’re talking about a government social media operation that has turned real human suffering into content — and that treats the outrage of the people it steals from as a feature, not a bug.
Astronaut Scott Kelly may have put it most plainly when he responded to the Wii Sports video by asking which animated sports shot — the hole in one, the slam dunk, or the home run — was the one that killed those Iranian children.
Nobody at the White House has answered that question. They were probably too busy editing the next video.
