Editorial Note
The descriptions and language below come from the official White House website and independent reporting. The links are included because this story sounds like satire. Unfortunately, the satire has a “.gov” address.
The White House unveiled an online arcade Thursday featuring five retro-style games built around Donald Trump’s political agenda. There’s a flying eagle, a school-lunch game, and something called Trump Savings Tycoon.
Then there’s the game where border czar Tom Homan chases migrants for points.
Welcome to the official website of the United States government.
The arcade includes Flappy Bill, Supply Line, Trump Savings Tycoon, Build the Wall, and Rio Run. The first three turn legislation, children’s savings accounts, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s food crusade into harmless-looking distractions. The other two turn immigration enforcement into entertainment. The White House | Associated Press
The Government Built the Punchline
Build the Wall is a knockoff of Tetris. Players stack sections of border wall while keeping people from crossing into the United States.
The White House description tells players to “protect the border from the coming horde.” Once the game begins, the screen calls it a “ZOMBIE BORDER SIEGE.” Migrants have been converted into the walking dead so players can keep them outside the wall. The White House
Rio Run borrows its mechanics from Snake. A digital version of Tom Homan races around the Rio Grande chasing figures with different skin colors. The people he catches join a growing line behind him while a counter marked DEPORTED keeps score. The White House | Agence France-Presse
That’s some sick shit.
These aren’t campaign games tucked away on a MAGA fundraising site. They’re hosted on the official White House website, alongside presidential actions, government announcements, administration biographies, and public information.
The presidential seal is right there.
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The Word They Chose
The word horde matters.
A horde has no names, families, histories, or legal rights. A horde doesn’t contain asylum seekers, longtime residents, farmworkers, parents, children, veterans, neighbors, or people who have never been charged with a violent crime.
A horde is something that swarms. Something that must be repelled.
Then the game goes one step further and calls the migrants zombies. Once the government has reduced people to monsters, the player doesn’t have to wonder what happens to them after Tom Homan catches them. Their lives end at the edge of the screen. The scoreboard moves, the music keeps playing, and another disposable brown figure appears.
That’s the point of dehumanizing language. It clears away empathy before the cruelty begins.
Fun and Winning
The White House promoted the arcade with a video that transformed the familiar Sega logo into MAGA and declared: “CAN’T STOP WINNING. Build the wall. Deport. Fill a Trump Account.”
Asked about the backlash, the administration said the arcade was part of an effort to tell the story of Trump’s accomplishments in a way that “resonates with every American.” It called the games a contrast between its “culture of fun and winning” and the Democrats’ “dark socialist vision.” Agence France-Presse
That defense is more revealing than the games.
The administration considers deportation fun. It considers a rising DEPORTED score winning. The trouble isn’t that critics misunderstood the joke. The trouble is that we understood it perfectly.
The people who designed these games knew what the words meant. Someone drew the migrant characters. Someone added the different skin colors. Someone programmed Homan to collect them. Someone created the deportation counter, wrote “coming horde,” added “ZOMBIE BORDER SIEGE,” tested the games, published them, and approved the promotional campaign.
This wasn’t an accidental social-media post somebody forgot to watch until the end.
The Pixels Hide the Bodies
The White House wants the player looking at pixels because pixels don’t scream, bleed, get sick, or ask where their children were taken.
Real immigration detention does all of those things.
By June, at least 50 people had died in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody since Trump began his second term. A Reuters analysis found that the death rate in ICE detention had more than doubled. Human Rights Watch reported that 39 people died during the first year of the second Trump administration, the highest annual total since ICE was created in 2003. Reuters | Human Rights Watch
Those deaths don’t appear in Rio Run.
Neither do the people sent to countries they have never called home. Neither do the families trying to locate someone swept up during a raid. Neither do the detainees waiting for medical treatment inside an overcrowded facility.
The arcade strips away every consequence and leaves only the chase.
Catch another one. Increase the score. Keep winning.
This Didn’t Begin With an Arcade
In February, Trump’s Truth Social account shared a video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. The White House initially dismissed the condemnation as “fake outrage,” removed the video after bipartisan criticism, blamed a staff member, and said it had been posted in error.
Trump refused to apologize.
“I didn’t make a mistake,” he said. Associated Press | Reuters
Now the administration has published a game filled with nonwhite migrants who are chased, captured, and counted. The people at the border have become another version of the Obamas in the jungle video. They’re no longer individuals. They’re racial caricatures placed on a screen for an audience that already knows who it is supposed to hate.
The first defense is always that it’s funny. The second is that the audience is too sensitive. The third is that Democrats are worse.
The actual content is never defended because it can’t be.
What the Seal Means
I served in the United States Air Force. Nobody had to explain that federal government symbols carry weight. When the United States puts its name and seal on something, it tells the world that this speaks for the country.
The White House has put that authority behind a game that calls migrants a horde, depicts them as zombies, and rewards players for deporting them.
This isn’t a comedian testing a bad joke in a nightclub. It isn’t some anonymous troll firing off garbage from a basement. The Executive Office of the President placed it on a government website and invited Americans to play.
So spare me the lecture about political correctness.
You can support border enforcement without celebrating suffering. You can argue for deportation without turning the people being deported into monsters. You can defend immigration laws without programming a cartoon Tom Homan to hunt brown people for points.
The decision to cross those lines was deliberate.
The Cruelty Is the Message
Trump’s White House has learned that outrage works for it. Every offensive post forces the country into the same argument. Critics condemn it. Supporters laugh. Cable television fills another day debating whether everyone has become too sensitive.
While that argument continues, the dehumanizing premise quietly settles in.
Migrants are a horde.
Migrants are zombies.
Migrants are points on a scoreboard.
Once people accept the language, the policy becomes easier to sell. Raids become content. Deportation flights become victory reels. Detention deaths become unfortunate footnotes. The government doesn’t have to persuade the public that every action is humane. It only has to convince enough people that the targets are less human.
The White House says it has created a culture of fun and winning.
Fine.
We now know who has to lose before anyone in that building can have fun.
From Off Script: The Bullshit Detector
Four fresh claims that wandered into traffic without adult supervision.
The United States isn’t at war with Iran
The claim: Vice President JD Vance said he “wouldn’t call it a war” because there was no active shooting at that particular moment.
Bullshit.
Why: The United States had completed another round of strikes against Iran two days earlier. Iran fired at Kuwait on Thursday in retaliation; American service members have been killed, and the fighting has continued for six months. A pause between explosions doesn’t magically turn a war into an awkward misunderstanding. Associated Press
“No tax on tips” saved Nevada workers an average of $10,000
The claim: Donald Trump said 440,000 tipped workers in Nevada saved an average of $10,000 on their taxes because of his policy.
Bullshit.
Why: Trump appears to have confused the amount deducted from taxable income with the amount saved in taxes. A worker in the 12% bracket receiving a $10,000 deduction would save roughly $1,200, and Social Security and Medicare taxes still apply to tipped income. The White House couldn’t produce the government data Trump claimed supported his numbers. FactCheck.org
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. caused obesity to fall 3% in one year
The claim: Kennedy said obesity dropped roughly 3% during the past year and credited the administration’s campaign for healthier food.
Bullshit.
Why: Gallup’s numbers show a 3.5-percentage-point decline spread across 2022 through the first half of 2026. About two-thirds of that decline occurred before Trump returned to office. Researchers also found little evidence that Americans suddenly transformed their diets, while increased use of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs offers one possible explanation Kennedy doesn’t seem anxious to advertise. FactCheck.org
Xylitol in gum has been proven to cause heart attacks
The claim: Frightening headlines say the common sugar substitute found in gum, toothpaste, and low-sugar foods causes heart attacks and strokes.
Bullshit.
Why: The certainty is manufactured. The newest research hasn’t been peer-reviewed, and earlier studies connected cardiovascular risk with naturally elevated xylitol in the bloodstream, not ordinary consumption of xylitol-containing food. More study is warranted, especially for people already vulnerable to blood clots, but nobody has proved that chewing sugar-free gum is a shortcut to the cardiac ward. PolitiFact
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One Question Before You Go
Is there any acceptable reason for the official White House website to turn deportation into a game?
If this article gave you something worth passing along, share it with someone who still thinks this is harmless political theater. The government has already provided the scoreboard.
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