At 5:20 PM tonight, the official White House social media accounts posted a 34-second video featuring a cartoon of Donald Trump inside a fake version of a very loved video game. With exactly the same music as the real video game playing in the background, this hijacked recreation swapped out the hero with the president of the United States as he made his way through the White House to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN. They even wrote two very simple words in the caption: “Hey! Listen!” But what they forgot was that in the game they were copying, those words are said to get the hero’s attention when there is something nearby he needs to notice, including dangers or threats.
They posted a cartoon video of Donald Trump, and then they used the game’s words to warn us to pay attention to what was right in front of us.
The game they stole their inspiration, graphics, and sounds from was launched years ago. That game, part of The Legend of Zelda series, that was being celebrated today by Nintendo with a worldwide celebration of its 40th anniversary, before the White House hijacked it. For anyone who has not played it, or like me, hasn’t played it in decades, the hero of the series is a young man named Link. He does not come from royalty, nor is he powerful. He is just a normal kid from a small village who’s called to do something greater than himself. In the game, his role is to protect people, and he sacrifices everything because it is the right thing to do. The villain of the game is Ganondorf, who is a tyrant consumed by greed and who will destroy everything and everyone to seize control. The entire franchise is built around the idea that the courage of an ordinary person can stand up and win against a corrupt man with absolute power.
That is the game the White House chose to make Trump the hero of. The irony that they took a game played by generations of children spanning over four decades, that showed them how to fight a tyrant, and added Donald Trump to it is not lost on any of us. Whether the person who designed this knockoff version understood that or not, millions of people who grew up playing these games understood it immediately.
But maybe the most ridiculous part was what the end of the video said: “President Trump is working tirelessly... TO MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!!” Yet when I saw that, I immediately thought back to when Trump told New York Magazine that sitting through his cabinet meetings, the ones he has because he is the president of the United States, is “boring as hell” and that when we see him move his hand, he is doing it “so that people will know I’m listening.” He also said, “I’m hearing every word, and I can’t wait to get out.” The reality is that the only place Donald Trump is actually working tirelessly is inside that fake video game.
The games and other propaganda-riddled videos shared by the White House have been escalating in numbers and observed for more than a year now, with the launch of the White House Arcade on the official White House website. Those too were rip-offs of well-known retro games, all with MAGA messaging added to them. And then there was the video the Department of Homeland Security shared a while back of ICE agents set to the Pokémon theme song. When they were called out for it, the White House posted its response on social media: “Nowhere in the Constitution does it say we can’t post banger memes.” That is the entire philosophy of the Trump Administration and, by extension, the United States government.
Even the Japanese government had to get involved this year after the unauthorized use of these Japanese characters and intellectual property became so blatant it could no longer be ignored. Most gaming companies, on the other hand, have stayed silent, and a Forbes article went deeper into why. The main remedy for the unauthorized use of copyrighted material involves filing an intellectual property lawsuit. In this case, they would be filing against an active administration. Forbes explained that doing so “creates immediate regulatory friction” for corporations that rely on the federal government for antitrust approvals, trade policy, federal contracts, tax regulation, and other parts of their business. Meaning, the government has enormous power to make their lives and businesses very difficult if they rock the boat in any way. The Trump Administration knows this power exists, and companies have reason to consider the possibility of political blowback before pushing back. That creates a coercive dynamic, with companies potentially afraid to defend their own work because the government they would be challenging also has enormous power over their businesses. This is not how a country rooted in democratic principles is supposed to act.
Rep. Ted Lieu of California had some choice words about the arcade games earlier in the week, which he shared on X, “November is coming.”
The Tetris Company also released a statement on September 4: “At Tetris we believe in the power of connection and bringing people together, not dividing them.” They also added: “P.S. The Tetris Company was not involved in the creation of ‘Build the Wall.’ P.P.S. We take copyright infringement very seriously.” Just four days later, sometime over the last day, the “Build the Wall” game that was based on their game was removed from the White House arcade website. We might never know if it was public pressure or legal pressure, but the game did come down.
Today was a particularly rough day for the President in the public eye. As my post last night highlighted, Donald Trump is on a rampage over his place in the history of 9/11. While my comments last night highlighted his past comments, he couldn’t help himself, and during a speech earlier today, he dug in even deeper, declaring that he had been saved on 9/11 by two firefighters. At the “Steel Across America” event, Trump told an even more outrageous story of what happened that day.
“I’ll never forget two firemen, we thought it was coming down on top of us, and two firemen, big, strong guys. And I’m not the smallest guy in the world. They grabbed me under the arm, said, ‘Got to get out of here.’ They literally lifted me up. This is not easy to do. I’m big. They lifted me up, and they started running with me.”
Donald Trump is now claiming he was rescued from Ground Zero by two firefighters. This story too has no evidence to back it up. As it was being aired live, MSNBC’s Peter Alexander stopped to fact-check it, saying: “We should note as a point of clarification and to fact-check the president, who has famously embellished his relationship to 9/11, did share a story about which there remains no evidence.” Multiple outlets have all reported that Donald Trump was never at Ground Zero on September 11. The Daily Beast called it a “jaw-dropping lie.” Hours later, he walked back what he said when the outrage became too big to ignore. In a post he made on Truth Social, he clarified he was not there “on the same day as the collapse, but shortly thereafter.”
It is growing increasingly hard to share about this each night with nobody around him stopping this madness, because stopping it would mean caring about something beyond their own proximity to power and their ability to profit from his insanity and incompetence. There is no actual governing happening, and nobody is even pretending there is anymore. Each one of these people is riding it out, accumulating power and wealth and trying to stay as close as they can to Trump because they keep mistaking proximity for safety. They still think that when this all collapses, they will have enough money or connections to save them from whatever is coming. If we do not stop this, they will run this government and country into the ground and take the entire world with them.
They continue to take the worst impulses from past authoritarians, dictators, and fascists and use them to create their own special evil playbook. So much of what we are seeing in this moment of political absurdity shared by our own government is what Berlusconi did in Italy beginning in the 1990s. He, too, used clownishness as a strategy. Like what we are seeing today, people laughed and blew it all off instead of organizing against him. They treated the spectacle being created by their government as entertainment instead of recognizing it as dangerous propaganda. By the time they saw it for what it was, he had already reshaped Italian politics for a generation. The memes, videos, and outlandish comments are not just a distraction. They are a look into what he plans to do next and a warning of the danger to come, and they normalize terrible things so that when the regime does them, we are already softened to them. And they exhaust us. We have to keep saying that. They make the public want to look away and ignore what is happening. They train each one of us to believe that this is just how things are now and that there is nothing we can do to change it.
The worst part is that this is what generations are now growing up with. This is their new normal. Few remember a world without Donald Trump in politics because even when he was out of government during the Biden years, he was still right off the stage, creating drama, spreading disinformation, and instability. Politics was supposed to be the thing running quietly in the background of our lives. Something we kept an eye on but did not have to fear, or spend all our waking hours thinking about. Politics was never supposed to consume everything, but what we are living through long stopped being about politics and quickly became about survival.
I think about that constantly. When I was a young adult in the late nineties and early 2000s, my biggest concerns were taking care of my children and trying to build a life with my husband and our little family. I didn’t have to spend my weekends fighting against an authoritarian takeover by my own government. Right now we are living through the messy middle. There are people who are beyond hopeful that this all starts to end with the midterms, and then there are other people who are starting to lose hope that better days are even a possibility.
But here is the thing: better days are not just possible. They are probable. The numbers are telling us that. More people are paying attention, and the midterms will give voters the opportunity to decide not just what they want the next two years of this government to look like, but decades to come. Trump himself has repeatedly told his supporters that they need to make elections “too big to rig.” And that is what we need to do too.
We have to make sure we win in large enough numbers that they can’t easily refuse to seat duly elected members of Congress. We have to make it too big for the rigged election lies to stick. We have to make it too big for lawsuits and other legal challenges that could be used to contest or delay election results. That is our only way through this.
Our focus should not be on converting people still clinging to MAGA, although we should take any opportunity we can to share what is really happening and open their eyes to the truth. But we need to get those millions who are already against this, yet who do not plan to vote because nothing ever changes, to give it one more try. Those are the people who decide elections, and who we desperately need to reach.
The next two nights, my posts might be a bit later than usual. I’ll be watching the Republican Midterm Convention and bringing it to you that same night. No doubt he will say something ridiculous and damaging. But what we are seeing is that the damage isn’t being done to us, it’s being done to him and his own party. People are sick of his lies and living like this, and every time he speaks, he does the resistance work for us. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.
I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather
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This commentary represents my personal opinions and analysis of matters of public concern, informed by publicly available information. Any references to individuals constitute opinion and commentary protected under the First Amendment.
Picture of the day: We took another walk by the ocean today. It is still unseasonably hot here in San Diego, so we keep going later in the day to avoid the worst of it. I’m always surprised how much better I feel after getting some fresh air. As we get closer to 9/11, my thoughts keep going to how all of Trump’s words sting that much worse right now. At this point, nothing he says or does should surprise us, but I’m still shocked when he comes up with a complete fabrication on such an important moment in our history. I can’t even imagine what the outcry would have been if Obama had said even 1% of what Trump has. It’s just a very sad and frustrating moment in time.
Sources used in the writing of this post:
President Trump Participates in a Steel Across America Event: YouTube Video
https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/08/politics/fact-check-trump-9-11-claims
No ifs and buts your president is nuts
Working tirelessly?! WTF! This corrupt stinky demented thing is playing and cheating at golf most of the time. Lies pure lies again and again. Lock ‘em all up. Time to clean Augias stables. And send some to Iran or Gaza. A welcome committee is waiting them all. Lmao