Annie Comes Home: As the death toll rises, the White House is meme-ing their way through a horrific war

Sunday, March 29, 2026

As the death toll rises, the White House is meme-ing their way through a horrific war

War isn't a game, Pamela. But you wouldn't know that by the way the Trump administration is pitching the misguided, unjustifiable violence they've unleashed across the Middle East to the American people. Their plan looks something like this:

Step 1: Join Israeli PM Netanyahu in an unjustified war of choice on Iran — with no authorization from Congress, no clear goals, and no exit plan.

Step 2: Use lowbrow memes, images from SpongeBob SquarePants, and cheap video game cuts, in a shameless, desperate attempt to build support for this historically unpopular war.

Step 3: Demand hundreds of BILLIONS of additional taxpayer dollars to keep it all up.

You won't see the child victims from an Iranian school that the U.S. bombed in their videos. You won't hear about the 13 servicemembers killed and the hundreds more wounded. They're not talking about families across the globe who are rationing cooking oil, facing astronomical bills at the gas pump, and watching their retirement savings shrink. That's why Win Without War is working overtime to make the human impacts of Trump's aimless, illegal war impossible to ignore.

Lives are on the line, and we're racing to stop Congress from handing the Pentagon another $200 BILLION for more bombs and bloodshed. It looks like sounding the alarm on CNN[1], relentless anti-war advocacy across the movement[2], powerful installations on Capitol Hill[3], and that's just the last two weeks.

We need to keep reminding decisionmakers that war isn't a game — it's a costly, devastating, terrible, political choice. Will you chip in to fuel our urgent work so we can continue pushing back on Trump's depraved pro-war propaganda and keep building a movement powerful enough to end the violence?

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"By making war like a game or cartoon, that removes the reality of war from people's minds," political scientist Peter Loge told The Hill.[4]

The juxtaposition between the Department of War's propaganda and the situation on the ground is chilling, Pamela: Students, U.S. servicemembers, and people across the Middle East have been killed in Trump's illegal war with Iran. Meanwhile, Trump and Hegseth have worked to make a spectacle of horrifying violence — giving it a name, "Operation Epic Fury," a logo, and a "highlight" reel complete with clips from video games like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto.

This goes way deeper than lame, crude attempts to popularize war on Iran. It's propaganda, designed to normalize violence and stage militarism as entertainment, pushing the public to experience war not as the catastrophe it is, but as an exhilarating spectacle worth celebrating.

If groups like ours and people like you don't push back, we give Trump and others like him the power to push the narrative away from the horrific costs of war, and toward a made-for-social-media extravaganza that they are eager to glorify. This erasure is how we end up with endless wars.

As lawmakers consider a $200 BILLION supplemental funding request to keep up this war, we must remind them of the human impact and political costs — that's how we push them to pass a war powers resolution, refuse spending one more dime, and save lives now.

To do it, we need to ramp up our work to cut through the propaganda Trump and Hegseth are peddling and leverage the power of our growing anti-war coalition. Are you with us?

Win Without War was built for moments like this, and we refuse to let our government succeed in dehumanizing their catastrophic war. Will you contribute $12 right now to power our anti-war advocacy?

Since even before the first bombs fell, our team has been countering the dangerous pro-war messages by ensuring the true, devastating costs can't be ignored.

Because the sleazy memes and cheap video game clips are only the tip of the iceberg, Pamela. From a sharp, dangerous rise in anti-Muslim bigotry in the halls of Congress to a lack of accountability for a government whose bombs have killed hundreds of children, each act to dehumanize the impacts of war creates a permission structure for more violence.

Together, we are pushing back on every front. Ignoring these costs of war erases our humanity and allows the violence to drive forward — and we won't let that happen.

Thank you for working for peace,
The Win Without War team