Trump's video games are no laughing matter

If you’re looking for a laugh, the official White House video game portal is definitely not the place to find it.

While the Trump administration managed to lose its headline "Build the Wall" game to a swift copyright slap from The Tetris Company, the digital platform is still up and running. And for civil rights advocates, the remaining lineup isn't just bad policy—it’s a deeply disturbing look at how this administration views vulnerable human beings.

The Tetris Company made it clear that the gaming corporation it was not involved in the creation of and was opposed to the politics behind the White House game.

“At Tetris, we believe in the power of connection and bringing people together, not dividing them,” the company wrote in a social media statement on Friday.

“P.P.S. We take copyright infringement very seriously,” it added for good measure.

If you thought "Build the Wall" was out of line, the most toxic piece of digital media, "Rio Run," remains on Arcade.gov. This one takes the dehumanization of immigrants to an entirely new level.

Gamifying human misery

For communities of color who are tired of being used as political punchlines, "Rio Run" is a slap in the face. It’s a cynical rip-off of the classic game Snake, but instead of eating apples, the player controls a pixelated character meant to look like Donald Trump patrolling the Rio Grande.

The goal? Chase down black and brown 8-bit sprites representing migrants. Every time you catch one, they are transformed into orange prison jumpsuits to rack up your "deportation high score."

The rest of the site isn't much better, serving up a bizarre cocktail of policy trolling and vanity projects:

• "Supply Line:" A knockoff of the 1980s classic arcade game Tapper, where players aggressively trash school lunch food that doesn't meet "Make America Healthy Again" rules.

• "Trump Savings Tycoon:":  A basic cash-grab simulator where players literally catch falling diamonds and money bags to fill up a "Trump Account."

• "Flappy Bill:" A Flappy Bird clone featuring an eagle trying to dodge obstacles to fly legislation down the National Mall.

"Stop playing games with Llves"

Civil rights leaders, immigration advocates, and community organizers aren't letting this digital theater slide. They are calling out the portal for what it really is: a psychological tool designed to strip away empathy and desensitize the public to state-sanctioned violence.

Border defense activists have been quick to point out the dark irony. Leaders from groups like the Frontera Federation released scathing statements, noting that the administration has been playing games with real human lives for years, and now they’ve quite literally turned that cruelty into a smartphone app.

The gamification of immigration enforcement erases the complex, painful realities that AAPI immigrants navigate every day:

• Thousands of Cambodian, Vietnamese, and Laotian Americans originally arrived in the US as refugees escaping war and violence. Decades later, many face mandatory deportation due to old legal convictions, returning them to trauma they spent lifetimes trying to survive.

• Being deported often means exiled flight to countries individuals left as infants or young children—places where they may not speak the language, have zero family connections, and lack basic support structures.

View from the edge: Tech giants need to find a spine

The big question now is whether other massive gaming companies will follow the lead of Tetris.

Because Arcade.gov openly steals the visual aesthetics, logos, and mechanics of legendary gaming systems, activists are turning up the heat on corporate giants like Microsoft, Sega, Sony, and Nintendo. The message from the community is clear: if Tetris can stand up for its intellectual property and refuse to let its brand be weaponized for hate, these multi-billion-dollar conglomerates can do the exact same thing.

Meanwhile, community leaders and lawmakers are reminding the public not to lose sight of the bigger picture. While the White House wastes taxpayer time and digital real estate building arcades to troll its critics, real families are still dealing with the crushing weight of inflation and real-world global crises.

Turning enforcement into points-based entertainment dangerousely desensitizes the public—especially younger audiences—to human suffering, further stoking hostility against immigrant communities.

Turning mass deportation into an 8-bit playground might win applause at a rally and give some chuckles to white supremacists, but out here in the real world, the human cost is no game.

To the CEOs of Microsoft, Sega, Sony, and Nintendo: We're watching.

EDITOR'S NOTE: For additional commentary, news, views and chismis from an AANHPI perspective, follow me on Threads, on X, BlueSky or at the blog Views From the Edge. If you find this perspective interesting, please repost.

9/11 anniversary: The towers came down and hate spilled forth

Twenty-five years ago, terrorists attacked America. 

9/11 united us ... and divided us. The comfort of "polite society" is often just a thin veneer for communities of color—a temporary ceasefire that lasts only until the next national crisis. When you compare the aftermath of September 11, 2001, to the COVID-19 pandemic, a clear pattern emerges: public fear is quickly turned into permission to hate.

Post-9/11 backlash

When the towers fell on 9/11, national trauma quickly morphed into open hostility toward anyone who didn't fit a traditional American image. Overnight, visible markers of faith and culture became targets. Muslim women wearing the hijab faced widespread harassment, but the anger didn't stop there. It targeted anyone perceived to be Middle Eastern or South Asian: Sikhs wearing turbans, any male with a dark beard, or people speaking Arabic.

Because of widespread public ignorance, the Sikh American community faced a severe brunt of this misplaced rage. Attacks against Sikh men were the immediate results.

• Explosion in Violence: FBI data showed that anti-Muslim hate crimes jumped over 1,600% in 2001 compared to the previous year.
  
  
• Impact on the Sikh Community: The Sikh Coalition documented over 300 acts of violence and discrimination in the first month alone, driven by attackers who didn't know — or care to know — the difference between a Sikh turban and the images on the news.
  
  
• The Ultimate Cost: Just four days after the attacks, Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh gas station owner in Arizona, was murdered simply because of how he looked.
  
  

This hostility soon reached institutions. Discrimination lawsuits filed by the Trump regime's U.S. Department of Justice had to challenge employers like the New York Transit Authority, which tried to force Muslim and Sikh workers to remove their headwear or move out of public view. The message was simple: hide who you are, or stay out of sight.

COVID-19 and the return of old hostilities

Nearly two decades later, COVID-19 brought another massive crisis—this time a public health emergency. Once again, social norms collapsed almost immediately.

The underlying reaction was identical: take a common fear, find an easily identifiable group, and blame them. For Asian Americans, the pandemic revived old, harmful stereotypes of being "outsiders" or carrying disease. When public rhetoric labeled the health crisis the "Chinese Virus," it gave people an excuse to voice prejudice that had previously been kept quiet.

The data captured this sharp rise in hostility:

• Hate Crimes Doubled: Official FBI statistics showed anti-Asian hate incidents rising from 158 in 2019 to 746 in 2021.
  
  
• Widespread Incidents: Community tracking by Stop AAPI Hate logged over 6,600 self-reported cases of verbal abuse, shunning, and violence in the first year alone.
  
  
• Constant Fear: A Pew Research Center survey found that 81% of Asian Americans felt violence against their community was rising. In fact, 36% worried that wearing a protective face mask would draw unwanted suspicion, forcing people to choose between protecting their health and avoiding harassment on the street.
  
  

Pent-up hate broke down civil society.

Breaking the pattern

The Pandora's Box opened by 9/11 is still with us, allmost normalized and seeping into the institutions that were orignally supposed to protect us. 

We see it in the attacks against affirmative action and DEI policies, which weret attempts to open opportunities for people who don't have the economic means

 or have historically been denied thos opportunities;

We see it in the regime's immigration policies which have fallen mainly on people coming from countries other than Europe.

We see it in bureaucratic attempts to make it harder to vote, again falling on communities of color.

We see it in the political gerrymandering whose purpose is to deny ethnic enclaves from having more say on representation and policy making.

We see it in southern states resurrecting the statues extolling Confederate traitors.

We see it in the banning of books that tell the true history of the US or books that question the power structure and continues to perpetuate the myths of a white America

We see it in the threat to drastically reduce federal funding for programs designed to provide health care or services to people who normally can't afford it.

The hate incidents against Asian Americans, especially against South Asians, are continuing. Anti-South Asian slurs and violent threats in extremist online forums doubled between 2023 and 2024, remaining at high levels through 2025, according to data from Stop AAPI Hate.

The 9/11-fueled hate was still fa festering wound when the pandemic hit the US. It was like ripping off the scab and it was simple to expand hate attacks and feed the xenophobic fears against other Asians and Asian Americans. 

The 25th anniversary of attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon reminds us of how fragile social progress is when it relies on superficial politeness rather than real structural change. True safety won't come from waiting for mainstream attitudes to soften; it requires actively dismantling the underlying biases that make minority communities easy targets whenever a crisis strikes.

EDITOR'S NOTE: For additional commentary, news, views and chismis from an AANHPI perspective, follow me on Threads, on X, BlueSky or at the blog Views From the Edge. If you find this perspective interesting, please repost.