If Chris Pratt’s protagonist in the 2014 Lego Movie was destined to save the world from a tyrannical capitalist, Donald Trump has become the leading figure in dozens of unofficial short sequels.
The unavoidable sequels, produced by a series of Iran-aligned AI studios, have become the defining image of the Middle East conflict’s digital propaganda war.
The slickly produced videos take on a number of recurring and often antisemitic themes: the US president as an angry idiot, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the devil pulling the strings, an Epstein files cover-up, and more generally Iran’s purported ascendancy over the United States and Israel.
Set to US-accented rap music or electronic dance tracks, each video is regularly viewed millions of times on X, TikTok and Facebook, apps all banned or blocked in Iran. Recent lyrics in the videos, which are suffused with up-to-the-minute political references, include Sunday’s offering: “Strait of Hormuz still closed, open only when Imam Khamenei says so; Not by your tweets, some idiot’s post.”
Last week, another satirised Trump as “fake Jesus” following a well-publicised but now-deleted post from the president depicting himself as a holy figure, while FBI director Kash Patel was also the subject of videos after The Atlantic magazine reported his “bouts of excessive drinking” and unexplained absences. Patel is suing the publication over the story.
“Crazy eyes, Epstein files cover-up; Trump name redacted, Congress stonewalled,” the rapper sings over a depiction of the FBI director heavily intoxicated while wearing a US hockey jersey following his appearance during the team’s gold medal celebrations at the recent Winter Olympics. The Iranian regime’s corruption and repression of its own people is not mentioned.
All of these videos are part of an unofficial strategy to position the war as a confrontation of a truthful Iran against a duplicitous America and Israel, according to “Mr Explosive”, a representative for the leading producer of these videos, Explosive Media.
But during an interview with the BBC just over a week ago, Mr Explosive for the first time said the Iranian government was a “customer”. The studio began producing Lego Movie-style videos in June last year and ramped it up after the Iran war broke out in late February. It had previously claimed to be entirely “independent”.
Lego is a “world language”, Mr Explosive says, and using real imagery of war is a negative on audiences.
The videos are picked up and shared hundreds, if not thousands of times by anyone from non-affiliated news accounts and influencers to state-affiliated actors such as Russia Today or The Tehran Times.
The videos have piggybacked on the US government’s own online trolling strategy. “Iran’s probably being led a little bit by what the US is doing,” says digital investigator Benjamin Strick.
During the conflict, the Trump administration has posted real footage of missile strikes in a gamified or comedic context as it desensitises audiences and claims victory is close at hand in the war.
“It’s the shareability as well, because people like me or you, we might post and say, ‘hahaha, look at this kind of jokey stuff that Iran’s doing’, but it shows that we’re still engaging,” Strick says.
It’s a major departure from Iranian propaganda of the past, which would use national anthem-style music rather than tapping into tunes closely aligned with the Western zeitgeist.
Mr Explosive told Top Comment, the BBC’s social media-focused podcast, that his small team of about 10 people write the lyrics then use artificial intelligence to make it more relevant to US culture and audiences.
The videos also lean heavily into antisemitic tropes, portraying Netanyahu as bloodthirsty or pulling the strings behind the US foreign policy approach.
Tzvi Fleischer, of the Australia Israel & Jewish Affairs Council, says the videos use obviously antisemitic themes. Iran has been the world’s most important state sponsor of antisemitism for decades, he says.
“The current videos’ obsessions with the US Epstein paedophilia scandal, and portrayal of bloodthirsty Zionist puppetmasters controlling Trump and the US, must be seen in the context of that ugly record,” Fleischer says.
Mr Explosive “strongly rejects” the assertion that the videos are antisemitic, claiming they are only anti-Zionist. Portraying Netanyahu drinking blood is to “highlight the atrocities of the regime”, he says.
The Lego Group did not respond to a request for comment.
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Calum Jaspan is a media writer for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, based in Melbourne. Reach him securely on Signal @calumjaspan.10Connect via X or email.