Hate will never make America great

Sep 06, 2026

After days of hints, videos of old-school gaming cords being plugged into old televisions, and messages that something big was coming, the official White House account posted one final teaser: “It’s time to level up, patriots… something new dropping soon.” Then, at 4:51 PM last Thursday, they revealed it. “CAN’T STOP WINNING. Build the wall. Deport. Fill a Trump Account. LIVE - PLAY NOW ARCADE.GOV.”

The website they linked to didn’t have a collection of classic childhood games, or even updated ones to help teach the next generation civics and how the government operates. Instead, the arcade games, all targeting children, were MAGA versions. There were ones to build a border wall, to chase down immigrants for deportation, and even one to collect money for Trump Accounts. Yet the message behind all of these games was clear: make cruelty fun. Teach children to see racism and the dehumanization of immigrants as normal. Make the hatred of black and brown people a good thing and turn chasing them into entertainment. But mostly, turn the suffering of real human beings into entertainment.

They didn’t even try to hide their motives or separate this from the president, and they even hosted them all on an official .gov domain, which is paid for with our taxpayer dollars. As of the writing of this post, five games are already live, and there is an empty box with “COMING SOON” and “A new adventure awaits” as a placeholder for a sixth game. These despicable games appear to be just the beginning. Sadly, they are building more.

The games themselves are disturbing in every way imaginable. The one called “Rio Run” might be the worst of them all. It is a Snake-style arcade game where the player controls a pixelated version of Tom Homan, the border czar, as he chases migrants with different skin tones along a stretch of the Rio Grande meant to represent the southern border. When the migrant is “captured,” their clothes instantly turn into orange jumpsuits, with each “capture” counting as a “deportation” on a score counter at the top of the screen. The more people you deport, the higher your score. This game actually rewards hunting down human beings.

Their “Build the Wall” game is a take on the game from many of our childhoods, Tetris. The player stacks sections of a wall to, in the game’s own words, “Protect the border from the coming horde,” while the subtitle reads, “ZOMBIE BORDER SIEGE.” But what that wall is actually stopping are little green aliens and other out-of-this-world creatures, again making the imagery difficult to miss. The wall is being built to stop “aliens” from getting across it. “Illegal aliens,” of course, is the preferred language this administration uses when talking about migrants, and here the game creates a sense of extreme urgency around the idea that there is a dangerous “horde” coming toward us that must be stopped. As the aliens rush toward the wall, they smash against it when they reach it, their bodies essentially splattering against the wall before they die and disintegrate. Each block added to the wall stops more of them from getting through, and if the player isn’t quick enough, one breaches the wall, and the game ends. Players are given a score based on how many of these supposed “threats” they were able to block.

The last three games round out the other propaganda this administration is pushing. There is one, “Trump Savings Tycoon,” where the player catches cash and gold bars falling from the sky to make it seem like the Trump Accounts for babies is a huge amount of money just falling from the sky.

Supply Line shares dangerous disinformation that appears to be straight from RFK Jr.’s mouth, meant to make our country sick again and confuse children about what is healthy and what is not. In it, players knock out bad food, and a turkey punches toward the player when they make a mistake. The top graphic instructs players not to consume seed oils and tells them that beef tallow is healthier, a claim the majority of cardiologists and other medical professionals dispute.

A group of cardiovascular and nutrition experts published a review earlier this year in JACC: Advances that concluded that there is no evidence supporting beef tallow as a healthier alternative to seed oils, and that there is “considerable evidence of possible harm” because beef tallow raises LDL cholesterol, the kind of cholesterol that causes heart attacks and strokes.

The game also says we shouldn’t read food labels and was clearly made to push the “Make America Healthy Again” agenda on children not old enough to understand that this administration does not actually want to make any of us healthy.

The final game features “Flappy Bill,” a bald eagle who is tasked with carrying legislation across the National Mall. Changes to the National Mall have become an important vanity project for the president, so this one may have been included to placate his need for this to be at the center of everything.

Some of these are more grotesque than the others, but they all serve the same purpose: distract us with pixelated nostalgia and brainwash our children.

The Tetris Company, which had nothing to do with any of these games, released a statement distancing itself from this online arcade: “At Tetris we believe in the power of connection and bringing people together, not dividing them. To our fans everywhere: we love you, we see you, and we’re grateful to have you in our community.” They closed with four red heart emojis. Above their statement, they wrote, “P.S. The Tetris Company was not involved in the creation of ‘Build the Wall’. P.P.S. We take copyright infringement very seriously.” It is a very upside-down world when a company that made a game about falling blocks had to remind the United States government what kindness looks like. The Tetris Company’s response received 3.8 million views and 123,000 likes. There are still good people in this world.

Like so many of us, I never imagined the United States of America ever publishing something like this on its official website, but that is where we are as a country right now. After decades of fighting racism and making strides toward finally ending this deeply rooted injustice, the Trump administration is pulling us back to darker times, and they know one of the fastest ways to do it. Through our children.

Kids are not born racist. No child comes into this world hating someone because of the color of their skin. That is learned and absorbed after being exposed to it. We have known this for a long time. Studies show us that children begin noticing and categorizing race remarkably early, long before they can understand what those differences mean, and by the preschool years they are already beginning to pick up on the social cues around them, including which groups are treated positively and which are treated negatively or as threats. They don’t even have to be told any of this explicitly. They learn it from their surroundings. Images, words, and tone teach them how to feel, all things they can see in an online game on their screens. When a child sits down and plays a game where the objective is to chase people with brown skin, collect them, and then be rewarded with bragging rights and a higher score, that can teach a child an important lesson. These types of lessons are ones they might not even realize are being taught. It all becomes automatic and just the way things are. By the time that child is old enough to question it, they might not even realize there is another way, and so they don’t even know to ask the important questions.

Every parent and parental figure understands this. We can see our children start absorbing the world around them in the smallest ways that often have the biggest impacts. When my youngest was little, she went through a Peppa Pig phase. One winter, we were up in Carmel while I was writing a travel story, and she kept asking us for a “bucket and spade.” We had no idea what she wanted as she grew more frustrated by the moment, resorting to charades to get us to understand. We understood the bucket part easily enough; she wanted to go down to the beach and play in the sand, even though it was cold outside. But the spade request kept throwing us off. Finally, she made a digging motion with her hand, and I said, “A shovel?” She said, “I don’t know.” I pulled up a picture on my phone and showed her, and she said, “Yeah, a spade.” In a British accent. Because that is what Peppa Pig called it. A cartoon pig that she loved but only watched a handful of times. At that age, she was so impressionable that her vocabulary had been rewired without us even realizing it had happened.

It was a funny moment that we still laugh about. But it illustrates how dangerous these games are to our children’s minds. Children take in whatever is placed in front of them and build their understanding of the world from it. That is how their brains are supposed to work so that they can learn language, empathy, boundaries, humor, and trust. It is also how they learn fear, suspicion, and hatred. These games are not trying to educate our youth; they are trying to indoctrinate them into the MAGA universe.

Authoritarian regimes have long understood this, which is why the indoctrination of children has been such a large part of their strategy and why they often begin in ways that do not necessarily look violent at all. The Hitler Youth drew young people in with camping trips, athletics, camaraderie, and a sense of purpose and belonging. The ideology was woven into those activities until obedience, sacrifice, and loyalty to the regime became part of what children were being taught. Eventually, they were being prepared to fight and even die for the cause. A cause they had been taught was worth fighting and dying for. Mussolini had the Opera Nazionale Balilla. The Soviet Union had the Young Pioneers. These regimes and movements understood the same principle: raising children inside these systems made it far less likely that they would ever question them.

That is what this arcade is; it is not just a distraction; it is how they are normalizing the cruelty and the takeover of our country. And they are targeting our most impressionable minds. At any other time in my life, I would never have hesitated to let one of my children explore the White House website. We have used it as a resource in the past. It had a wealth of information on the branches of government, the history of the building, and the names of the presidents. My children used it for school projects, and I felt comfortable that the information they saw was reputable and could be trusted. That is no longer the case. The trust is completely gone now.

That official website now has a kids’ game where they can hunt people for points. That loss of trust creates an even greater issue because that lack of trust does not stay pointed just at our government or its leaders. It trickles into everything. It changes how we look at our other institutions, our law enforcement, doctors, neighbors, and each other. Even when we do not want it to, and when we actively resist it, the erosion they have created seeps into all aspects of our lives. When a government proves it cannot be trusted with something as basic as its own website, that suspicion just keeps spreading.

Everyone needs to know that the White House website is now hosting games designed to teach kids that chasing immigrants is fun and that deportation is a competition with a measurable score. We need to make sure that everyone responsible for a child knows to keep their young one away from them. They seem flashy and fun, and that makes them even more dangerous. Share this information online and offline. Let’s make sure the people in our lives who have children understand exactly what these games are, and what they are teaching. This isn’t about politics. This is about protecting children from being trained to dehumanize other human beings.

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