Trump’s White House Website Published Some Video Games as a Low-Effort Provocation

Did you wake up today wanting to feel intentionally provoked by President Trump’s underlings? I’m sorry to say their latest deliberate provocation is so feeble, I’m not sure I can help. On Thursday, the White House website published five MAGA-themed video games, likely cobbled together in a matter of minutes with an LLM, likely by White House Head of Digital Strategy Kaelan Dorr, who has been hyping the games on X lately. SEND ME YOUR HIGH SCORES!!! https://t.co/wE0WWbwy4H — Kaelan Dorr (@Kaelan47) September 4, 2026 Gizmodo requested comment from the White House, specifically asking if Kaelan Dorr made the games, and if he used an LLM to do so. We also took the liberty of asking whether said LLM was Grok. The White House has not replied, and until it does, treat all that as pure speculation. The games are low-effort in the extreme. Here’s a breakdown: “Rio Run,” a version of dumbphone-era Snake where you catch migrants at the border. The migrants are largely dark-skinned, and even the light-skinned ones all have dark hair. You apparently play as border czar Tom Homan. The gameplay area is huge and your snake moves very slowly, meaning it takes ages to become challenging. Rating: borderline playable. “Build the Wall,” a version of Tetris involving a “Zombie border siege.” NPCs that look sort of like the enemies from “Space Invaders” crash pointlessly into the gameplay area. Rows don’t disappear, and your game ends when your stack reaches the top. Rating: unplayable. “Flappy Bill” an actually decent and uncontroversial “Flappy Bird” variant that speeds up as you go. You play as an eagle holding a bill and flying “through the monuments” according to the game instructions—really just the gaps between up- and down-oriented Roman plinths. Rating: playable. “Supply Line” a puzzling, MAHA-themed conveyor belt game, but one with a much simpler mechanic than 1984’s “Tapper.” You just click ostensibly bad foods like seed oil to swipe them away and prevent them from going into school lunches alongside the ostensibly good foods like beef tallow. If a bad food reaches the end, it flies toward a boxer NPC a-la “Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!” for some reason. There are a lot of different foods to try and remember, and none of them look like anything. Rating: borderline unplayable. “Trump Savings Tycoon” an intriguing “Missile Command” style game in which you catch items with a butterfly net—gold bricks, paper certificates of some sort, briefcases, and, uh, pink lumps of ham or something—and your score is a dollar amount corresponding to what you’ve saved. Lively and almost fun, but infuriating because it’s not clear where you’re supposed to click, let alone how the action of clicking even corresponds to the use of a net. Rating: unplayable. Weirdly, there’s no Strait of Hormuz game. Since Trump professes to believe that whole thing is going great, it’s a mystery why. If you were a non-Trump voter in early 2025, everything the new administration did sort of made you feel sick with dread, and these games, had they existed then, would have been shocking and outrageous. But here in 2026, Trump’s approval ratings are staggeringly poor, and he’s staring down the barrel of a midterm trouncing that even Fox News acknowledges is looking pretty likely. MAGA is living in plausible fear of a lame duck two years ahead. So with that in mind, the Trump Administration’s weird little collection of lib-triggering, probably vibe coded video games just kinda feels like what it is, a slightly trollish internet post. The “Flappy Bird” game works though. If you’re someone who plays casual in-browser games to fidget with your hands while you watch YouTube or listen to podcasts, you could do a lot worse.