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White House posts Iran strike video montage that includes "Call of Duty" footage

By Brian Stelter

The White House is facing criticism for a social media video that mixed “Call of Duty” game footage with clips of American missile strikes inside Iran.

The minute-long montage, captioned “Courtesy of the Red, White & Blue,” has garnered more than 30 million views on Elon Musk’s X, according to the social network.

Commenters replied with a mix of astonishment, amusement and disgust. Many said they were shocked to see a “Call of Duty” sequence repurposed by the Trump administration.

“They think war is a video game,” wrote Paul Rieckhoff, the founder of Independent Veterans of America and a staunch Trump critic. He called it “inappropriate, juvenile and unacceptable.”

“Left out of this ‘video game’ are the Iranian school girls blown to bits & American troops killed,” Harvard professor and former NAACP President Cornell William Brooks wrote.

The White House has not ruled out that the US military carried out a strike on a girls’ elementary school in Iran during the initial joint US-Israeli strikes, which killed at least 168 children, according to Iranian state media. Six US service members were killed by an Iranian strike in Kuwait.

White House communications director Steven Cheung seemed to welcome the attention last night. He responded to a reporter’s post about the video and wrote, “W’s in the chat, boys!”

The “W” is short for win; the phrase is popularly used by live streamers to celebrate a gaming victory.