The White House has launched an online arcade featuring possibly vibe-coded knockoffs of five retro-classic arcade games modified to promote pro-Trump MAGA themes.
And yes, it’s everything you would expect: Poorly made, copyright-infringing, creatively and morally bankrupt nostalgia bait that perfectly exemplifies a government whose PR campaigns and social media usage often amount to memeified, AI-slop trolling with no underlying purpose or identity.
The Trump administration announced the arcade — built directly into the official WhiteHouse.gov website — in typical memelord fashion, dropping an onslaught of promotional videos, including one that opens with a SEGA logo before it morphs into MAGA and then features video of gameplay while the Sonic the Hedgehog theme music plays in the background. Another proclaims, “We got Trump Arcade before GTA 6,” riffing on a now three-year-old meme about how long the video game Grand Theft Auto 6 has been in development.
The games are part of a larger movement within MAGA to dip into gamer culture. Last year, ICE ran a Pokémon-themed recruitment campaign, encouraging ICE-wannabes to sign up with the Department of Homeland Security and “catch ’em all.” The White House has posted AI-generated images of Trump as Halo protagonist Master Chief and mixed Call of Duty footage to actual video of airstrikes in Iran.
It’s all a way to normalize, gamify and lessen the real-life feeling and impact of the Trump administration’s dehumanizing foreign and domestic policies.
But let’s move out of philosophical theory and historical background and get into these games. I spent about 30 minutes — mostly alternating between boredom, confusion and disgust — playing through them so you won’t have to. And I’m going to rank these from least to most offensive.
Flappy Bill
Hey, remember Flappy Bird? It was all the rage at the beginning of 2014, becoming the most downloaded free game in the iOS App Store at the end of January. On Feb. 10, 2014, game creator Dong Nguyen abruptly took the game down citing feeling guilty about the game’s addictive nature. In the 12 years since, there have been a lot of imitations and the concept remains popular, so it’s no surprise that the Trump administration chose this for their adaptation.
The MAGA version features a bald eagle clutching a scroll in its talons that is ostensibly a legislative bill. Like actual Flappy Bird, the eagle will bounce upward whenever the player taps the space bar or clicks the mouse and fall according to the game’s gravity otherwise. Players will strategically bounce the eagle through the side-scrolling platform, avoiding columns while traveling down what the game claims is the National Mall until they crash.
Given that the story behind the game is a bill being flown through the National Mall, maybe this is supposed to be a metaphor for how legislation is treated in the Trump administration — an exercise in futility where no matter how far you fly, you’ll eventually hit a governmental roadblock that puts you back at the starting point. 2025 saw the legislature pass a historically low 38 bills during the calendar year while Trump recorded 224 executive orders in the same time frame. As far as overt messaging, however, this game is inoffensive. There are just a dozen places online to play better versions.
Trump Saving Tycoon
Trump Saving Tycoon is a clicking game based on Duck Hunt, first released by Nintendo in the U.S. as an arcade game in 1984 before debuting alongside the NES in 1985. The MAGA version reimagines the gun as a net with players using point-and-click to grab icons of money flying across the screen. Miss three and the game is over. For each icon you grab, you get a certain amount of money that, added up, will comprise your final score. That score is supposed to be representative of how much money you made by opening a Trump Account.
Trump Accounts are a new type of investment retirement account geared for children under the age of 18. It’s a good idea with a bad design that, according to the Tax Law Center at NYU Law, “offers modest tax benefits, high risk and additional complexity.” Even MAGA-aligned finance guru Dave Ramsey has said the accounts “lack flexibility, restrict access and limit your investment options.” In other words, Trump Accounts are a Trump vanity project that are worse at doing what other already-established programs do.
One more note on the game. In the foreground, there is what looks to be a crystal-clear blue Reflecting Pool, which is quite the opposite of its real-life counterpart. The background shows a crane with a wrecking ball attached that is probably meant to portray Trump’s ballroom boondoggle but instead appears to be swinging into the Washington Monument. Take that however you’d like. Overall, the game is rather benign and I’m just thankful the one shooting game they ripped off wasn’t much worse.
Supply Line
Supply Line is a knockoff of the 1984 arcade game Tapper. This is the most confusing game and also the least like the game it is parodying. Various food items are running down a conveyor belt. There are 16 items you should knock off and 18 items to let ride. The conveyor belt leads with a sign called “school lunch,” insinuating that you are a MAHA food inspector whose job is to punch bad food — which the game describes as food that is plastic-sealed or food with seed oil, “colouring” (yes, it uses the British spelling) or additives.
Did I mention the MAHA food inspector is a shirtless boxer? And that allowing bad food through inexplicably beats him up and makes him punch you, the player, virtually cracking your screen. Because that is how the game is played.
I don’t have anything more to say about this other than Michelle Obama tried to make school lunches healthier and Republicans crucified her over it. Meanwhile, Trump-era budget cuts and policy changes have made healthy school lunches less accessible. This game is obviously propaganda, but it’s mostly just confusing.
Build the Wall
Things turn a quick corner with the final two games. Build the Wall is a Tetris knockoff that inexplicably has the opposite goal from actual Tetris. Players are encouraged to “protect the border from the coming horde,” using falling Tetris blocks to build a wall that keeps 8-bit stylized immigrants from getting through. This ignores the entire purpose of Tetris, which is to eliminate rows of blocks rather than build them.
And, indeed, in this anti-Tetris, completed rows of blocks do not disappear. You simply place blocks until you reach the top, with your score being determined by how filled in your wall is. There’s never a point when the blocks stop falling, so even filling it up leads to failure. In other words, no matter how hard you try to build the wall, it always falls down and is an ineffective solution to immigration control.
So maybe this game is an apt description of Trump’s border wall policy after all. As a sidenote, Tetris has released a statement saying they take copyright infringement very seriously.
Rio Run
It probably makes sense that the only game that was in no way fun to play is also the most racist. Rio Run is a Snake knockoff that features an 8-bit bald white man in a suit — who I think is supposed to be Tom Homan, Trump’s so-called border czar — wandering around a desert grid to pick up mostly brown-skinned people.
When the white man walks over them, they are transported to a line behind the man and are now wearing orange jumpsuits. It’s the Trumpian immigration philosophy made simple. In real life, Trump has continually dehumanized undocumented immigrants, calling them animals and launching unprecedented deportation raids, stripping legal immigrants of their legal status and detaining them in deplorable conditions. ICE has indiscriminately arrested and detained U.S. citizens and an unprecedented number of children — not to mention that deaths in ICE detention are higher now than at the height of the COVID pandemic.
This game is the latest, but certainly not the most directly harmful, thing the Trump administration has done to immigrants. But that’s not to say it’s without effect. To tell you how effective it can be, my 7-year-old walked in my office while I was testing this game, watched it with absolutely no context for about 5 seconds, and then announced “I think he’s picking up bad guys because jail people wear orange.”
What’s the point?
All this begs the question: What’s the point? What does the Trump administration hope will be accomplished? A White House official told Fox News: “This administration is laser focused on ways to innovate and tell the story of the president’s many accomplishments in a way that resonates with every American.” But the truth is they have a specific audience in mind.
This attempt to recruit and energize followers — especially young white men — through video games is nothing new. In 2014, an online controversy known as Gamergate involved misogynistic male gamers harassing women and others advocating for diversity in online communities. Steve Bannon, then at Breitbart, used his resources to co-opt the controversy for more general right-wing purposes. Two years later, he unleashed that community to support Donald Trump for president. Bannon, who served as executive director of Trump’s campaign, told journalist Joshua Green: “You can activate that army. They come in through Gamergate or whatever and then get turned on to politics and Trump.”
We’re now 10 years past that and Trump’s recruitment of young white men is perhaps only secondary to his recruitment of evangelical Christians as the reason for his success. So yeah, the games are low-effort knockoffs, but they evoke an unrealistic yet compelling nostalgia — a simpler time of community arcades, games that cost a quarter and the carefreeness of childhood, alongside a healthy undercurrent of white patriarchal authoritarianism.
They’re meant to energize the young disaffected white males who favored Trump by 14 points in the 2024 election but who are now souring on his second term. Trump can’t end a needless war in Iran that he started. He’s only made the affordability crisis worse. He’s unable and unwilling to do anything of substance to make the lives of average Americans any better. So, you’ll get a shoddy imitation of a favorite childhood game and a Great Lake renamed and you’d better be happy with it because owning the libs and doing it for the lulz is all he has left.
Josh Olds
Josh Olds is a public theologian and pastor for those disillusioned with institutional church. He is the creator of the small-group video series “Year on the Mountaintop” and a featured contributor to Fostering Hope: A Prayerbook for Fostering and Adoptive Parents. Follow his work on Facebook or at JoshOlds.com.