🚕 And I Ran, I Ran So Far Away... I Couldn't Get Away 🚌
The visuals are solid. The production is fine. And yet, I am somehow embarrassed on behalf of two countries simultaneously.
Iran has been making music videos about Donald Trump. AI-generated, gangster-rap-inflected, Lego-populated music videos with tombstones and dripping blood and the word LOSER in capital letters as if they discovered the caps lock key at the same time they discovered Ableton. And here is my honest reaction: I am embarrassed. Not for Iran. Not exactly for Trump. For the whole situation, the way you're embarrassed when two people you know get into an argument at a wedding and they are both wrong but you can't leave because the car keys are in one of their pockets.
The videos showed up in the American press mainly because Iran's embassy shared them on social media. Left to their own momentum, most would have dissolved quietly into the algorithm like a Jell-O salad at a church potluck.
Let's set the scene. Since joint U.S.-Israeli airstrikes began in late February, Iran has responded with a steady output of AI-generated propaganda clips. One features a Lego Trump at a casino. Another recycles an eighties French pop song — because nothing says, "we will outlast your empire," like a song your grandmother slow-danced to at a discothèque in Lyon. A third puts Trump as Captain Jack Sparrow, distributed by something called Pedoflix, which is the kind of insult that sounds devastating in Farsi and lands in English like a wet newspaper on a doorstep. The visuals, genuinely, are not bad. Somebody over there has a decent eye. But the lyrics though. The lyrics are doing their very best.
"Welcome to the graveyard of your vanity." "Sacrificed your own boys for a lie." "Make America Great Again? Nah." That last one is the lyrical equivalent of showing up to a roast with index cards. Writing a truly cutting line about Donald Trump in a second language, for an audience that has never once called into a morning zoo radio program, is probably harder than it looks. Comedy requires calibration. You have to know exactly how deep the knife goes before you twist it. Iran is holding a spoon.
Context Box
Iran's embassy in South Africa shared a Blockade video styled like an eighties pop track that reportedly racked up over eight million views. The Euronews headline asked whether Iran is, "out-trolling Trump." The answer, charitably, is: they are in the same trolling weight class and nobody wins the belt.
The problem, if I had to nickname it clinically, is that Iran is essentially heckling a heckler. Donald Trump has spent a decade proving that the most effective propaganda looks exactly like propaganda and doesn't care what you know. You cannot out-irony a man who is himself a living piece of performance art. You cannot call someone a loser in dripping blood font when that person once looked directly into a solar eclipse and later described it as beautiful. The target is insult-resistant by design. He has the spiritual consistency of a rubber duck.
What Iran does have, in fairness, is the moral clarity of someone who just had their nuclear sites bombed. That's a real grievance dressed up in what appears to be someone's first GarageBand project. The videos found an American audience almost entirely because the press covered them — not because anybody was going to find TRUMP IS ON FIRE: Iranian Rhapsody 2026 organically between their true crime podcast and a soap advertisement. They are propaganda for the Iranian public, which is a completely legitimate thing to make, but they were not designed to go viral in Akron, and it shows.
I feel, somehow, like a bystander at a rap beef between my landlord and my dentist. I have feelings about both parties. None of them are feelings I want to have.
So here we are. Iran is making music videos. Trump previously posted a Beach Boys parody about bombing Iran because he thought it was funny. A Macquarie University researcher has apparently coined the phrase, "memetic warfare," without a trace of self-consciousness. And I, personally, am watching all of this unfold while trying to figure out at what point international diplomacy became an extremely low-budget version of a YouTube beef channel. Something has clearly been lost in translation. I'm just not sure it was there anyway.
