Three fully functional arcade games satirizing Donald Trump’s war with Iran were installed this week at the District of Columbia War Memorial on the National Mall, turning a stretch of Washington just south of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool into a playable protest. The work, titled Operation Epic Furious: Strait To Hell, lets users choose whether to “order a Diet Coke” or “invade Iran.”
The games were created by Secret Handshake, the anonymous activist group that placed a golden statue of Trump and Jeffrey Epstein in front of the Capitol in March. One game puts Trump on a map set in the White House and adds caricatures of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and FBI Director Kash Patel. In the Hegseth version, the character tells Trump to “Go outside and borrow Kid Rock’s helicopter to get to the war zone” and says his “delts are combat ready.”
The installation landed at a moment when the White House is already using pop-culture imagery to sell the conflict. Since the war began on Feb. 28, the official White House account has posted clips from Iron Man, Top Gun, Wii Sports and Call of Duty, spliced with real U.S. military footage of airstrikes in Iran. Secret Handshake said those posts inappropriately “gamify” war, and built its answer in kind. A plaque beside the arcade machines says the Trump administration knows the best way to sell combat is by making it a video game and says it has been pumping out the “sickest” Iran war video game hype reels. Another plaque introduces Operation Epic Furious: Strait to Hell as a “high-octane, flag-waving, boots-on-the-ground simulator where freedom isn’t debated, it’s deployed,” adds that there are “No briefings, no hesitation; just pure pixelated patriotism,” and warns, “Strap in and play hard, because this game may never end.”
The title itself folds in the administration’s own language, echoing Operation Epic Fury and the Strait of Hormuz, a nod that makes the joke harder to miss. Secret Handshake also said the game is available online. Its description of the play was even more blunt: the game features “furious tweet battles against Iranian schoolgirls, low-flow shower heads, and other threats to American freedom like DEI and The Pope,” and says the only way to lose is by trying to hold Melania’s hand, while also saying that in the Middle East “you also can’t win either.”
That friction is what gives the piece its edge. The White House has used polished meme culture to frame a live military effort, and the artists have responded with a literal arcade cabinet planted in a public memorial space. The games are expected to remain at the War Memorial for the next few days. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment, leaving the protest to do what it was built to do: force the people passing the memorial to decide whether war can be packaged as entertainment, and whether that is exactly the point.
