Trump revels in fire and might while selling the Iran war's end
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As fresh U.S. strikes hit Iran, President Trump's Truth Social profile became a visual diary of distant violence, distilling the Iran war into shareable clips and memes even as he demanded an end to hostilities.
The big picture: While Trump revels in the video game-like spectacle of raw military power in Iran, Venezuela and the Caribbean on social media, he's also scrambling to find an off-ramp to a war Americans don't support.
- The president's online megaphone shapes how Americans view and consume military operations, often diminishing the human toll of combat, experts warn.
Between the lines: Trump's grab bag of posts shows he's "shooting from the hip" rather than following a classic PR playbook, Roger Stahl, a University of Georgia professor who has written two books on the presentation of war, tells Axios.
- Trump has repeatedly claimed America was on the verge of reaching a deal with Iran only to have those efforts crumble. This week, Trump declared a temporary ceasefire "over" after Iran attacked ships in the Strait of Hormuz.
- Stahl argues, "It's the only hand that he has to play at this point" as the war drags on.
Friction point: While the White House has pitched Trump as the "peace president," Stahl says his Truth Social posts frame him as the "wartime president."
- Playing up military might "historically is a winning strategy that is a way of suppressing any kind of resistance or second-thinking criticism from the American public, and he's going to press that button as often as possible," Stahl says.
Catch up quick: Trump on Wednesday posted several videos capturing the sounds and scenes of explosions across Iran amid new strikes.
- "The President has been clear that he will do what is necessary to protect our homeland and troops abroad, and he will never apologize for honoring the incredible talent of our warfighters who are putting their lives on the line to keep our country safe," White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said in a statement.
The administration has followed Trump's lead with splashy videos that play up war-as-entertainment by adding Call of Duty, Wii Sports, Hollywood blockbusters and sports clips.
- "What these posts of distant explosions do is desensitizes not just the people who are viewing them, but also the person or people that are posting them," says Samuel Woolley, the University of Pittsburgh's Dietrich endowed chair in disinformation studies.
Flashback: The 1991 Gulf War brought conflict to living rooms, creating an illusion that war is a "bloodless clinical endeavor" with uncanny technical precision, explains Susan Carruthers, a professor of history at the University of Warwick in England.
- Now, she says: "There's so much excitement and sort of gleefulness ... about the fact that human life is being taken."
The bottom line: Trump's promise of a quick war has become an open-ended battle over a critical trade artery.
- "It seems that Donald Trump has given up caring about what the broader public feels or thinks about this war," Woolley says.
- "The posting of this kind of content seems not only ill-advised for national security reasons, but also for political and electoral reasons."
Go deeper: The gamification of war
