Trump’s White House has launched a series of video games via whitehouse.gov and predictably, they are terrible. The largely aimless games, complete with Atari 2600 rip-off graphics, went live September 3. At the end of a trailer in the Twitter announcement, the MAGA acronym steals the shape of the SEGA logo. Beneath the blatant copyright violation runs an irksome tagline straight from the gacked-out mind of Charlie Sheen: “Can’t stop winning.”
These games are so mind-numbingly bad that reading a description of one feels like being held back in school. In Supply Line, a conveyor belt moves cargo past an assigned worker—you—and it’s carrying mixed-up goods. Your job is to sort pre-packaged junk food from healthy vegetables, otherwise it’ll tumble into the “School Lunch” basket. And we wouldn’t want that! Your objective after all is to “Make America Healthy Again.” Every time you let a junk food item pass inspection, a boxer comes to rough you up. The boxer resides in the center of the screen like a prison guard. Poor definition makes his gloves look like a pair of cherry-dipped ice cream cones. He’s allowed to beat you until your factory shuts down for polluting America’s precious children with sugar.
Behold the training module for the unregulated factory Trump would have you work in for the rest of your life. From whitehouse.gov
It shouldn’t surprise you that these games get boring fast. More interesting is how they highlight the hypocrisy and impotence of Trump’s government policies. Supply Line doesn’t just train your brain for a future in menial, unregulated labor. It holds itself to a higher standard than any actual White House policy. Forget Trump’s promise to regulate processed foods and ban artificial dyes in production. He sure has. Think of the drastic cuts he made to the Food & Drug Administration, the organization that enforces safe shipping/handling practices. Afterwards came lettuce laced with parasites, berries carrying deadly E. coli bacteria, jasmine rice concealing shards of glass. It is downright degrading to make you simulate the preventative work necessary to keep you safe.
Meanwhile, Trump plans to cut around $200 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. The people that seek SNAP benefits, also known as food stamps, are overwhelmingly low-income. About 40% of those people are under eighteen. Does it look like Trump really cares about children and their nutrition? Trump’s promise to Make America Healthy Again extends no further than your screen.
Another game that would be laughable if not for the poetic irony is Trump Savings Tycoon. It’s as dumb as you’d expect yet cruel in the way it taunts the impoverished. You chase falling cash and treasures with a crudely drawn butterfly net trying to collect as much as you can. Your imaginary winnings get funnelled into “your kids’ Trump accounts,” like their futures can be won in a money booth. But it’s only a fantasy, as if to remind you that accruing wealth in Trump’s America is also mere fantasy.
You’ll never save enough for a home, retirement, medical emergencies, or your children’s education, but you can pretend! Only at whitehouse.gov
The reality is, Donald Trump has undercut and dodged payments to employees and contractors for decades. He was fleecing hotels and casinos in 2016 when he first gained the presidency. In the years since, he instituted tariffs and cut funding for government programs to enrich himself and his cronies. And the reality that you’ll never afford a home or retire in his economy, he thinks that shit’s hilarious.
The most mean-spirited game of the bunch without a doubt is the blatantly racist Build The Wall. In this low-rent Tetris mimic, whose look-alike bricks absolutely violate some sort of trademark, your goal is deceptively simple. As your player stacks blocks in a barricade, immigrants move in by car and on foot, crashing into the wall. You’d think Trump would have you stack them up high, keep the immigrants out, but you’d be wrong. Once you finish your wall, the game abruptly ends, declaring your “BORDER BREACHED.” But the bricks occupy your entire screen. They were doing the job until now. It makes zero sense; why are you being punished for doing your job? You were simply following orders.
By the way, the blocks in Build The Wall don’t disappear once you arrange a uniform row like they do in Tetris. It’s such bullshit.
Can the makers of Tetris sue for this? The makers of Tetris should sue for this. Look out, whitehouse.gov
Trump’s video games are the newest and laziest vehicles for his incontinent brand of fascism. It is propaganda defanged and robbed of venom. It has nothing to offer, not even to devoted video game nerds firmly rooted in that classic console gaming era. That said, Trump didn’t get rich or steal political office by underestimating the intelligence of his fan/voting base. Then again, how do you underestimate something so scant?
