jA few days after Microsoft announced Halo: Campaign Evolved, the next game in its famous science fiction series, the White House shared an interesting image on X. The image, which appears to have been generated by AI, shows President Donald Trump wearing the armor of iconic Halo protagonist Master Chief, saluting in front of an American flag with several stars missing. In his left hand is an energy sword, a weapon used by the alien enemies in Halo. games. Posted in response to a tweet from American gaming retailer GameStop, the text accompanying the image reads “Power to Gamers” in reference to the store’s slogan.
GameStop and the White House traded a Halo meme or two, and then on October 27, the Department of Homeland Security’s official X account joined in, using Halo images of a futuristic soldier on an alien world to encourage people to join its increasingly militaristic Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE). Stop the Flood, he says, equating the immigrant population of the United States with the parasitic aliens that the Master Chief eliminates.
“Yet another war ended under President Trump’s leadership: only one leader is fully committed to empowering the players, and that leader is Donald J. Trump,” White House deputy press secretary Kush Desai said via email, when I asked for the official line for this publication. “That’s why it’s so popular with American people and players.” (Microsoft has not responded to requests for comment.)
This spate of video game image sharing may seem strange, but Trump and his various allies have leaned into gamer culture for nearly a decade. Trump has courted gamers — a demographic that includes a significant subsection of disaffected young people — since his first presidential campaign. Media executive Steve Bannon joined that campaign as chief strategist and senior advisor in August 2016, bringing with him a wealth of knowledge about gaming culture and the online behavior of its biggest fans.
Bannon had previously worked and obtained funding for Internet Gaming Entertainment, a Hong Kong company that He paid low wages to Chinese workers to farm gold. in the multiplayer game World of Warcraft. According to Joshua Green’s book on Bannon (The devil’s deal: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump and the assault on the presidency), it was during this time that Bannon learned that “these guys, these rootless white men, had monstrous power.” In 2014, Bannon watched as Gamergate, an amorphous online army concentrated in the darkest corners of the web, routinely attacked women and other marginalized people in the video game industry. He saw how the movement’s behavior led to real-world actions, such as organized harassment and doxing (the sharing of private information with the public).
Once Bannon joined the Trump campaign, he leveraged his understanding of gamer culture to push Trump’s presidential campaign into previously untouched places. “You can activate that army. They come in through Gamergate or whatever and then they turn to politics and to Trump,” Bannon told Green.
That army was ready to engage in a memetic war at any given moment, and it did so. Throughout the campaign, Trump’s meme army monitored then-candidate Hillary Clinton’s every move, sharing fabricated accusations of health problems with the hashtag #HillaryHealth. He regularly produced memes supporting Trump based on Internet inside jokes and nerdy pop culture references. Trump arguably defeated Clinton in the 2016 presidential campaign with the help of this army.
When Trump failed to defeat Joe Biden in the 2020 election, he took to his own social media platform, Truth Social, to regularly criticize Biden and Democrats during his four-year term. He continued to court gamers and the reactionary right online, before winning the presidency again. The second Trump administration still uses the tactics and frameworks of online agitators (or trolls), but this time there is one important difference: Elon Musk.
The South African businessman bought Twitter in October 2022 and quickly reinstated Trump’s account and many others that had been banned. Musk, who regularly invokes gamer culture and posts memes on his own
Since Trump’s inauguration in January, the White House and several federal institutions have begun posting memes. Last month, the Official Department of Homeland Security X Account and the Official White House TikTok account shared a video of ICE raids set to the Pokémon theme song, interspersing footage from the animated show with clips of agents arresting people and using the franchise’s “Gotta catch ’em all” tagline. He Pokémon Company International told the BBC that “permission was not granted for the use of our intellectual property.” The video is still up at the time of writing.
The video game industry as a whole has long remained silent when it comes to reactionary policies and ideologies spreading among its communities. For millions of Americans who play but feel enormously embarrassed by an administration that warns pregnant women not to take Tylenol, or that promotes the narrative that immigrants are parasites, or that diversity, equity, and inclusion movements result in unskilled workers, watching this play out is incredibly frustrating. The more the administration leans toward video game iconography and Internet memes, the more video game companies become associated with the divisive and reactionary politics of the right, whether they want to or not.
