https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/03/25/veterans-backlash-white-house-iran-memes/
When the retired U.S. Army colonel Joe Buccino first saw White House posts mixing Iran war footage with clips from cartoons and video games, he felt something he had rarely experienced from American military messaging: disgust.
But President Donald Trump’s top communications team, he said, had decided to treat the international conflict like a big joke. Veterans who were already questioning the war’s strategy and endgame, he added, were unnerved to find the nation’s highest office posting pop-music-scored clips of missile strikes, mixed with footage from Call of Duty and “SpongeBob SquarePants.”
However, officials there have also said that public outrage is key to driving up views. When the singer Kesha complained that her song had been used in a war meme TikTok, White House communications director Steven Cheung said on X: “All these ‘singers’ keep falling for this. This just gives us more attention and more view counts to our videos because people want to see what they’re bitching about.”
John Vick, the executive director of Concerned Veterans for America, a conservative advocacy group, told The Washington Post in a statement that the military’s success deserves to be celebrated, but that “gamifying or making light of war also undermines the sacrifice of the Americans who have died, and obfuscates the cost of open-ended conflict.”
Ironic that his name is John Wick
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