There is now a new destination on the Internet for those who want to combine xenophobia and video games: the official website of the White House.
The American presidency inaugurated, Thursday, September 3, a space on its official website for games that feature classics of the genre, such as Tetris or Snake, the antediluvian arcade game from the days of Nokia phones.
Rio Run and Build The Wall
But with a Maga coloring, because the official purpose of this playful invitation is to celebrate the “accomplishments” of Donald Trump. Particularly in the area of the fight against immigration.
Indeed, the Snake Maga version – which is called Rio Run – offers players the chance to go hunting for migrants by playing a virtual avatar of Tom Homan, the director of ICE, the controversial immigration police.
In the White House version, Tetris is no longer just about stacking bricks to form rows and columns. The game, renamed “Build the Wall”, consists of making digital ramparts on which highly pixelated migrants crash.
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Cover image: The White House releases 5 video games aligned with D. Trump’s anti-immigration policy © WHITEHOUSE.COM
The American presidency seems very proud of its video game PR stunt. On The Trump administration has also multiplied posts to hijack several famous video game brand logos, notably transforming that of Sega into Maga.
Amusing ? “This is quite classic in the communication strategy of populist movements which seek to avoid overly political discourse and prefer to adopt a tone in tune with popular culture,” underlines Massimiliano Demata, specialist in political communication, particularly in the United States, at the University of Catania.
The use of memes, or the grammar of video games, uses “down-to-earth language to give the impression of being close to the people, while trivializing and oversimplifying to the extreme issues that are otherwise very serious,” adds this expert.
A “distracting” dehumanization of migrants
In the case of the video games designed for the White House site, behind the apparent simplicity of Tetris, “it is a new example of a systematic strategy of the Trump administration to dehumanize migrants”, assures Scott Lucas, specialist in American politics at University College Dublin.
In Rio Run or Build the Wall, the migrants are simple characters who, roughly sketched in a few pixels, all look the same. The Maga version of Tetris takes the vice a little further by explicitly comparing the immigrants who approach the digital wall to “zombies” who must be stopped. “It’s a way of reducing immigrants to ‘enemies’ or ‘adversaries’ who must be caught or against whom we must protect ourselves,” explains Scott Lucas.
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Cover image: The debate © France 24
For him, it’s very Trump 2.0. Since his return to the White House, the president has published a series of video montages and retouched photos on his social networks to represent immigrants in their worst light. Dehumanization should be “distracting and entertaining, thereby completely overshadowing the more serious discussions about immigrant rights and the effectiveness of border protection measures,” continues Scott Lucas.
The use of video games to discuss migration policy is also part of an evolution in Trumpian discourse. “During his two previous campaigns (2016, 2020, NLDR), Donald Trump essentially used a speech to scare, not hesitating to dramatize the subject of immigration. For some time now, he has added a new dimension to his anti-migrant speech by incorporating elements of popular culture in order to recontextualize a serious theme into a lighter subject,” assures Massimiliano Demata.
Making the hunt for migrants a game like Rio Run makes mass deportations “more banal”, suggests Massimiliano Demata. As such, “the incidents in Minneapolis – during Operation Metro Surge from December 2025 to February 2026 – represented a tipping point,” assures Scott Lucas.
A “gamification” to “troll” the Democrats
After the highly publicized rampage of violence by ICE agents during migrant apprehensions, “the White House needed to regain control of the narrative on migration policy that could no longer afford to be solely militaristic and aggressive. There needed to be a personnel change, with the departure of figures like Kristi Noem, the former secretary of Homeland Security, and the replacement of Gregory Bovino, who led the action on the ground by ICE agents in Minneapolis. Then, it “We needed to change the message so that anti-migrant policy becomes less painful and easier to watch while eating popcorn,” emphasizes Scott Lucas.
The “gamification” of migration policy makes it possible to make virtual a policy which showed during the events in Minneapolis that it had a very real human cost, underline the experts interviewed by France 24.
Also readWho is Gregory Bovino, the face of Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown?
Putting these arcade games online has another political advantage: “It’s a way of trolling the Democrats,” says René Lindstaedt, a specialist in American politics at the University of Birmingham. For this expert, it is a diversion tactic and a trap set for the opposition. “If the Democrats are outraged by this degrading way of presenting migrants, the Republicans will respond by saying that the Democrats have no sense of humor, while the White House is simply looking to have a little fun with their accomplishments,” explains René Lindstaedt.
He warns Democrats against the temptation to attack the Trump administration in the video game field “which will take up media time that Democrats would do better to use to discuss other problems”, believes René Lindstaedt. In other words, Republicans would be too happy to talk about video games a few weeks before the risky midterm elections for them rather than subjects, such as the war in Iran or the cost of living, which are currently weighing down Donald Trump’s popularity rating.
