A White House website featuring arcade games is photographed on a computer screen (Picture credit: AP)
TOI correspondant from Washington: America has spent 250 years arguing about how it was built. The White House has now settled the matter in the most authoritative medium available to the United States: a video game. The Trump administration on Friday unveiled “Arcade,” five retro-style games on the official White House website, turning pieces of President Trump’s MAGA agenda into pixelated entertainment. The collection includes games titled “Build the Wall,” “Rio Run,” “Supply Line,” “Flappy Bill” and “Trump Savings Tycoon.” If this sounds like something dreamed up by a teenager who has consumed too much caffeine, that is roughly the aesthetic. The White House promotional material riffs on the loading screens of Xbox, PlayStation and Nintendo, even transforming the Sega logo into “MAGA.” The launch slogan was suitably subtle: “Can’t stop winning. Build the wall. Deport. Fill a Trump Account.” But two immigration games are generating fireworks. “Build the Wall” is essentially Tetris, a Soviet-era game, with immigration policy overtones. Players stack wall sections to “protect the border from the coming hordes.” “Rio Run,” modeled on the game Snake, puts a digital character resembling border czar Tom Homan on patrol along the Rio Grande, where the object is to collect illegal aliens. Captured characters trail behind in orange prison uniforms -- in other words, ICE meets Pac-Man. Immigration-rights advocates have reacted with fury, saying the games turn human beings and matters involving detention, family separation, deportation, asylum claims -- life-or-death issues for some — into entertainment. The criticism has also extended to the use of government resources, with the White House accused of misusing taxpayer money to produce political propaganda and of dehumanizing migrants. Trump supporters naturally see it differently, arguing that the administration is simply communicating policy in a language younger Americans understand. The White House says it is “laser focused” on innovative ways of telling the story of Trump's accomplishments and contrasting its “culture of fun and winning” with what it calls the Democrats' “dark socialist vision.” But critics say there is a larger MAGA project lurking beneath the pixels: the rewriting — or, supporters would say, correcting — of America's historical narrative. The MAGA folks have spent years pushing a more patriotic interpretation of the American story. Trump's 1776 Commission was explicitly created to promote “patriotic education,” – aka known among critics as “whitewashed history” – which the current administration revived in 2025. This year's official 250th-anniversary rhetoric celebrates the Founders, liberty and America's exceptionalism, emphasizing the nation's triumphs rather than dwelling on its darker chapters. Such an approach collides with the tradition represented by the historian Howard Zinn, whose A People's History of the United States deliberately shifted attention toward people left out of the conventional triumphal story -- Native Americans, enslaved people, workers, immigrants and the poor. Zinn's critics regard that account as excessively one-sided; his admirers regard it as a necessary antidote to sanitized history. The uncomfortable historical footnote is that America's story was never simply Europeans arriving, building, and prospering. Long before Ellis Island opened in 1892, the US already contained immigrants who never saw that gateway. African Americans, overwhelmingly descended from people brought forcibly to America during slavery, were moving from the South toward Northern cities in significant numbers beginning in the 1890s. And on the opposite coast, the first recorded Sikh arrivals in California came in 1899, before the great Ellis Island wave had run its course. Meanwhile, the people who were already here — Native Americans, also wrongly called Indians — disappear altogether from the arcade version of MAGA's immigration and national origin story. In the White House’s new version of America, history has been simplified, immigration has been gamified, and the uncomfortable parts have apparently been left on the cutting-room floor.
