‘A piece of supremely nasty mischief’: Peter Bradshaw on the White House video

Could anything be more embarrassing yet more chilling than the White House’s giggling new teen-YouTuber-type supercut of badass moments of imagined American or quasi-American machismo from film and television, crassly interspersed with real infrared kill-shot footage, boosting the new military attacks in Iran. We get flashes of, among others, Braveheart, Gladiator, Superman and that well known legend Pete Hegseth, a moment that gives us a clue as to whose idea this all was.

Here is an administration pre-celebrating the real victory – over its own “whiny libs”. The video is of course designed to troll the Dems and the “wokesters”. Why didn’t Franklin D Roosevelt think of this before D-day? Of course, some of that creative energy and political acumen might have gone into imagining who they want to take over in Iran. But that isn’t as exciting – and not as much of a sure thing – as baiting the Hollywood progressives and the lamestream media. The zone can once again consider itself well and truly flooded.

And of course, there are the ambiguous and semi-conscious ironies. In Braveheart, Mel Gibson is the underdog fighting against the overdog, in which latter category the US military fits more securely. But maybe Braveheart’s blue-faced fight against the British makes more sense, given Trump’s new (or newly acknowledged) contempt for Keir “Not Winston Churchill” Starmer.

Russell Crowe in Gladiator also adheres to some kind of triumphalist logic, as does Tom Cruise in Top Gun, while including a bit from Cruise as balding movie exec Les Grossman, rocking out over the final credits to Tropic Thunder – a comedy satirising the fatuous fantasies of war movies – could in other circumstances almost count as witty self-awareness or even self-deprecation. But this video is beyond irony.

We get also get Walter White, the teacher turned meth dealer from Breaking Bad, and Walter’s amoral lawyer Saul Goodman, because this maverick administration is impatient with the pearl clutchers whingeing about caution and due diligence. It’s a piece of supremely nasty mischief from very humourless and naive people.