White House Goes Full Gamer, Tries and Fails to Pump Meme Stock

White House Goes Full Gamer, Tries and Fails to Pump Meme Stock
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White House Goes Full Gamer, Tries and Fails to Pump Meme Stock

by Tarun

On Friday, Microsoft announced that a new Halo video game would be coming to Sony’s PlayStation, a longtime rival to Microsoft’s Xbox. That prompted video game retailer GameStop to issue a press release joking about the console wars being over. But that’s when things started to get weird, as President Donald Trump’s team jumped in and sparked a back-and-forth of memes and chatter from the federal government that helps illustrate how much the online culture of the White House has changed.

It began with a jokey press release issued by GameStop, formatted to resemble an official government proclamation.

From there, the X account Rapid Response 47 quote-tweeted the press release with “NUMBER 9: President Trump presides over the end of the 20-year Console Wars,” a reference to Trump’s false claims that he’s settled over half a dozen wars.

Rapid Response 47 is an official White House account that serves as the online attack dog of the administration, disseminating propaganda to counter messaging that the Trump regime dislikes. Though, in fairness, that’s pretty much every government social media account these days.

GameStop followed up with its own quote-tweet, including an image of Trump shaking hands with Master Chief, the main character of the game.

The main X account for the White House also got in on the jokes, sharing an AI-generated image of Trump as Master Chief without his helmet, along with the caption “Power to the Players.”

GameStop quote-tweeted the White House, this time with not just an image of Trump as Master Chief, but with Vice President JD Vance as the character Cortana, an intelligent AI from the game series. It’s not just a straightforward image of Vance, though. It’s one of those bloated Vance memes where he’s made to have long curly hair and a beard.

The CEO of GameStop, Ryan Cohen, is a big fan of the president. After the 2024 presidential election, he tweeted “Trump has now won 3 elections in a row,” in a reference to the false claim that Trump won the 2020 election against Joe Biden.

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By Monday, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security had created its own meme image, which took things even further. The agency tweeted a manipulated image from Halo along with the caption “Finishing this fight.” But the text on the image was even more extreme. It read, “Destroy the Flood,” a reference to the primary alien life forms fought by the good guys in Halo. 

The Flood is a parasitic alien species that can infect other hosts. And it’s not hard to see what DHS is implying by the call to destroy the flood. DHS even includes a call to join ICE, one of the agencies that’s deployed masked goons to U.S. streets in an effort to purge immigrants, especially non-white people.

404 Media reporter Matthew Gault talked about the bizarre posts on Jordan Uhl’s podcast The Insurgents, noting that comparing an out-group to insects or to monsters is what fascists do.

“This is about as fascist as you get, right?” said Gault. “It’s directly comparing people coming into the country looking for a better life with monsters that are here to assimilate and destroy you. This is straight out of the fascism textbook.”

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You can always count on DHS to take things even more extreme online. There’s a significant mystery around who actually runs the DHS account, but they’re clearly tuned in with the far-right and extremist meme culture. Just last week, DHS posted a dog whistle for Nazis with a video of the anti-ICE protests in Portland, Oregon, that included MGMT’s 2018 song “Little Dark Age.” The song was slowed down in a way that became extremely popular with white supremacists in the early 2020s.

Border Patrol also posted a video in recent months that only gained widespread attention two weeks ago, featuring antisemitic slurs. DHS, which oversees Border Patrol, pushed back hard when Gizmodo asked about the incidents, an attitude that’s another hallmark of right-wing grievance culture online. DHS didn’t respond to emailed questions on Tuesday about its Halo content.

The Halo references are all part of a trend now where the Trump regime uses video games and animation-adjacent videos to distort the meaning of the original pop culture references. Last month, DHS posted a video on its social media channels that used Pokémon characters and music to “catch ’em all.” The thing they were catching, of course, was human beings.

GameStop stock surged in premarket trading on Monday but has since fallen back to the downward trajectory that it’s been on in recent weeks. The stock is down 1% today and down 11% over the past month, according to The Street. GameStop’s stock is down 24% over the past year.





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