Trump Iran War Video Game Artwork Appears On National Mall

At the D.C. War Memorial in Washington, D.C., the anonymous artist group Secret Handshake has installed Operation Epic Furious: Strait To Hell, a video game-style artwork that takes aim at the Trump administration's efforts to frame the Iran conflict through the language of entertainment. The piece is designed like a brightly colored arcade cabinet and includes images of Trump, Kash Patel, and Pete Hegseth, along with quotations from speeches and Truth Social posts.

A plaque accompanying the work makes the critique explicit. It argues that the administration has been using video game imagery to package war as spectacle, turning military promotion into a kind of digital hype reel. In an email, Secret Handshake said the project was a response to official military videos that borrow the look of games while promoting the conflict with Iran. The group described the work as an“ultra-patriotic Iran War video game,” a phrase that underscores the piece's deadpan, corrosive humor.

The installation also extends beyond the memorial. Secret Handshake has posted a playable version online, allowing the work to circulate outside Washington and into the same digital space it is mocking. That move gives the piece a second life, one that mirrors the very media environment it critiques.

The work recalls Cory Arcangel's Bomb Iraq (2005), a playable game made during the Bush administration's war in Iraq. That comparison places Operation Epic Furious: Strait To Hell within a longer lineage of artists using game mechanics to expose the absurdity of militarized rhetoric. In this case, the target is not only policy but the aesthetics used to sell it.

As anti-Trump artworks continue to surface in public spaces across the capital, Secret Handshake's installation suggests that the National Mall remains a potent stage for political dissent - especially when the medium is as familiar, and as disarming, as a video game.

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