Is it too much to say that the progress bar for the soft power of the United States now reads 99 per cent uninstalled? Maybe only 75 per cent has gone from the system, or 50 per cent.
Either way, this legacy software is not operating as it once did. It’s a bug-ridden shadow of itself, corrupted from within and left to glitch along on devices in alarmingly poor battery health. A complete reset is its only hope.
There’s a jadedness to appalled online comments these days, a weary sense of “we made clear our disgust about these warmonger memes yesterday and still nothing has changed” about them. You click on any White House post expecting the worst. And yet neither this anticipation nor any protests you spy first can prepare you for the crassness and degeneracy of the Justice the American Way video uploaded on March 5th.
This self-sabotaging inversion of soft power, styled JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY, will drill a hole in your brain and flood it with a slurry of imperialistic yeehaw triumphalism not deserving of the term propaganda. Even “slopaganda”, a portmanteau acknowledging the proliferation of AI-generated slop, seems too kind.
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Only men and cartoon men feature in its taunting, deluded montage of lines from Iron Man, Gladiator, Braveheart, Top Gun: Maverick, Better Call Saul, John Wick, Tropic Thunder, Superman, Breaking Bad, Transformers, Deadpool, Star Wars and Mortal Kombat.
Screen rage is interspersed to chilling effect with a cameo appearance by US defence secretary Pete Hegseth – of “they’re toast and they know it” fame – and real footage of US forces bombing Iran.
Donald Trump’s internet-addled communications acolytes have achieved the impossible here by engendering sympathy for Hollywood, an industry with a long history of merry collusion with US military aims. Watching it, I actually cringed on behalf of the makers of Top Gun: Maverick, which, much like the Reagan-era original, doubles as a combat-glorifying, weapons-fetishising recruitment tool for the US navy.
Among those to object was Ben Stiller, who directed, co-wrote and starred in Tropic Thunder. He asked for the clip of the 2008 comedy to be removed, informing the White House that “war is not a movie”. The plea was in vain, and you suspect the clarification was too. There’s no point telling someone who wakes up in the starring role of his own real-time biopic, the rest of us mere extras, that war is not a movie.
The culture of Washington, DC, is now so mediated through entertainment imagery that the US president’s critics also reach for it, with anonymous artists this week unveiling a sculpture of Trump and the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in the Jack-and-Rose “king of the world” pose from James Cameron’s epic film Titanic.
The visual language of cinema and the metaphors of political commentary are intertwined. But something new is happening. As an industry, Hollywood was used to being a force of soft power. Now, through these twisted videos, it has become part of the means by which it’s being dismantled.
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The Harvard professor Joseph Nye, who developed his theory of soft power in the late 1980s, died in May 2025 but lived long enough to observe that the United States’ capacity to gain international influence through aid, culture, news and the promotion of human rights, democracy and freedom of speech was being squandered.
Brand Finance, a consultancy that measures these things, still ranked the US as the nation with more soft power than any other, as of January, but said it was experiencing the steepest decline. Every day Trump is in office he hacks away at the credibility and relative subtlety that underpins this form of persuasion.
“It’s referred to widely as soft-power suicide,” Samantha Power, the former US ambassador to the United Nations, told the BBC this week. She was talking about Trump’s shutdown of the US Agency for International Development, though her words could equally apply to a range of actions taken and messages unleashed. She went on to say that there were “plenty of other soft-power suicides and hard-power blunders afoot”.
You can picture Trump – whose administration has been busy trying to defund Voice of America, the US’s largest international broadcaster – just shaking his head in bafflement whenever someone mentions the existence of the BBC World Service (which is itself under severe financial strain).
[ ‘They’re toast and they know it’: the Trump team’s hyper-aggressive war rhetoricOpens in new window ]
Soft power? He’s not going to like the sound of it, is he? It won’t be masculine enough for him. Who needs soft power when you have an arsenal of Tomahawks and open misinformation at your disposal?
Hollywood, however, will understand that it is much easier to destroy the stuff than it is to amass it. Naively, perhaps, I like to imagine still-sane studio heads finding a quiet moment at the Oscars this weekend to collectively vow never to make another superhero film.
Producing mindless, semi-diverting popcorn accompaniments is one thing. Providing content for the nasty White House slop machine is another.
