Trump treats war as entertainment

Previous American presidents have treated their role as commander-in-chief with great respect bordering on dread. Abraham Lincoln’s depression deepened during the Civil War, and the physical toll the conflict took on him can be seen in a series of famous daguerreotypes by Alexander Gardner, Matthew Brady and others. During the Vietnam War, Lyndon Johnson appeared to age in real-time as he and his military advisers sent tens of thousands of American soldiers to their deaths. 

How is Donald Trump behaving compared to Lincoln and Johnson? He is reportedly bored by the war, which has killed 13 U.S. service members and nearly 1,500 Iranian civilians. According to the United Nations Refugee Agency, up to 3.2 million Iranians have been displaced. As the war progresses, Trump is reportedly being shown daily compilation videos of “stuff blowing up” — two-minute highlight reels of death and destruction, curated to hold his attention due to his famously short attention span.

Trump’s reliance on the videos risks creating an echo chamber effect where he is not getting the best advice. Pushing back against the reports, the administration claims the president receives advice throughout the day from senior military leadership, the intelligence community, diplomats and foreign leaders. He also watches the news. But this does not appear to be reflected in the planning and execution of the war, or its long-term strategic implications for American power and global stability. According to NBC News, the reels have also contributed to Trump’s “increasing frustration” with how the war is being covered by the media: “Trump has pointed to the success depicted in the daily videos to privately question why his administration can’t better influence the public narrative, asking aides why the news media doesn’t emphasize what he’s seeing, one of the current U.S. officials and the former U.S. official said.”

On Wednesday night, the president attempted to take control of that narrative by giving a primetime address on the war. While casting the administration’s objectives as “nearing completion,” Trump promised that Iran would be hit “extremely hard” over the next two to three weeks. Instead of a draw-down, he telegraphed that escalation was a possibility, promising to hit key energy targets, including the country’s electricity-generating plants, if the regime didn’t agree to a deal, and vowing that the U.S. would blow Iran “back to the Stone Ages [sic] where they belong.”

Bombastic phrases like this and others scattered throughout the speech are of a piece with the destruction on display in the president’s highlight clips, and they would not be out of place in violent video games like those in the Mortal Kombat series.

Steven Cash, executive director of the Steady State, a nonprofit organization of more than 360 former senior national security and diplomacy officials that promotes American democracy and the rule of law, told me that Americans expect the president to be “listening carefully to a range of expert voices” across the government during military operations to help “guide the nation’s defense.” This does not appear to be what is happening. Instead, the process has been reduced to a closed circle of advisers reinforcing Trump’s instincts while screens display short, dramatic clips of explosions and destruction. War, Cash observed, “is not a spectacle, and it is certainly not a form of entertainment. Treating it that way is both obscene and dangerous.”

The consequences are already visible, he said. “The president has publicly suggested that basic strategic realities — such as the central importance of the Strait of Hormuz to the global economy — were somehow overlooked by ‘the experts.’ That is simply not true. These are among the most well-established facts in international security. When a president appears unaware of such fundamentals, it raises serious concerns about whether he is receiving — or is willing to absorb — the information he needs.”

The president’s daily brief is designed to prevent exactly this failure. This practice, he said, isn’t “meant to flatter or entertain” but to provide objective intelligence and information that often includes “uncomfortable or inconvenient truths.” While presidents have used and engaged with the daily brief differently, its objective is consistent, he explained: “to ensure the commander-in-chief understands the world as it is, not as he might wish it to be.”

That’s why Cash and other experts are so alarmed at recent reports about Trump’s video montages. “This is not a video game,” Cash warned. “The consequences are real.”

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Trump’s two-minute briefings point to more than an underlying lack of intellectual engagement and sophistication. Former members of his inner circle have described needing to find creative ways to hold his focus as he famously does not read and is said to defer to the last in the room — behavior that reflects Trump’s mind, personality and understanding of power and leadership.

As a function of his authoritarian personality, Trump has repeatedly shown he is deeply attracted to violence. With the war against Iran, he is acting like a warlord in demanding that Iran give him all their oil, or the country’s citizens will suffer greatly, and an absolute monarch who is literally demanding tribute, and he is bragging about receiving “secret gifts” due to Iran’s leaders supposedly being terrified of his power. The daily highlight video of destruction encourages these pathological power fantasies.

At his core, Trump is an authoritarian and a personalist ruler; the state, society and culture must become extensions of his own mind, will and emotional needs. Reality must conform to him.

But David Altheide, a leading scholar on the media, sees something more systematic at work involving the Big Lie, gaslighting, manipulating the American people and what he describes as “gonzo politics.”

Trump, Altheide said, “wants people to believe what he sees in two-minute video reels of ‘things blowing up’ are the whole of reality itself.” This is gonzo governance, a logic that “delegitimizes social institutions by promoting the politics of fear and violating conventional standards of reason and objectivity.” When paired with gaslighting, “the result is a powerful and destabilizing political dynamic” in which “political disagreements can [no longer] be adjudicated — and wars ended — through shared facts.” Gonzo governance, Altheide noted, “accelerates events, dramatizes policy, and centers personality over process, precedent, and tradition,” mobilizing supporters and disorienting critics. “The cost, however, is a critical loss of trust that is difficult to restore.”

The two-minute videos of airstrikes in Iran — along with the White House and Pentagon’s propaganda videos that splice together scenes from Hollywood action movies, videogames and actual combat — reflect the media logic of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. There are no universal truths or facts in this ecosystem, only constant stimulus, endless content, a lack of narrative coherence and a surreal version of reality filtered through nihilism, in which nothing is quite real and therefore nothing quite matters.

Trump is a product of this culture, if not its distillation. He is now more of a character and a symbol than a real person. A warlord, an absolute monarch and a Mafia don all rolled into one. And as a former reality television star, the president thinks about governance the way a producer thinks about television: the audience must never be bored, the drama must never stop, the spectacle must always escalate.

Under Trump, social theorist Henry Giroux said, “leadership [has] collapse[d] into spectatorship” and “decision-making is shaped less by deliberation than by affect, impulse and the visceral thrill of destruction.” This is deliberate, he said, arguing that fascism “does not rely on force alone; it works through images, rhythms and effects that teach people how to feel before they are able to think.”

The two-minute war videos are not an aberration — they are a mirror. Trump is us.

The implications of this, Giroux warned, extend well beyond any single presidency. A society trained to consume violence as entertainment “loses its capacity for judgment, memory, and resistance.” In such a culture, “war does not simply destroy lives abroad; it erodes the ethical and political foundations of democracy at home, producing subjects who are more attuned to the pleasures of domination than to the demands of justice.”

Too many Americans are distracted, impulsive, attracted to violence, anti-intellectual and hostile to expertise. They are married to screens, to self-curated realities and spectacle. The rise of AI is a civilization-level danger that is making these dynamics much worse.

A serious people would not have elevated Trump to the White House — twice. A healthy society, with functioning elites and institutions, would have restrained him and the MAGA project long before now.

Trump may enjoy his bloody two-minute highlight reels. But the damage to human lives, to the Middle East, to the world, to America’s credibility and power, will last much longer. Does he care? Beyond his own self-interest, I doubt it.

“Things blowing up” will continue to be fun for Trump until he gets bored and wants to destroy something else. This is not a side effect of his politics; the destruction is the point. And everyone else is collateral damage.