The Gorilla Channel

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, March 25, 2026

 

My favorite satire of the president and the political culture he’s created is three paragraphs long, takes 15 seconds to read, and managed the neat trick of fooling thousands into believing it was real despite being preposterously over the top.

 

If you were Very Online in 2018, you remember “the gorilla channel.” If you weren’t, treat yourself now.

 

“The gorilla channel” was presented as an excerpt from Michael Wolff’s newly published Fire and Fury, a behind-the-scenes account of Donald Trump’s chaotic first year as president. Screenshots of buzzworthy passages from the book, each more embarrassing than the last, were circulating at the time on social media. So when a new “excerpt” emerged chronicling the president’s keen interest in watching gorillas fight and the lengths to which aides had gone to accommodate him, it seemed … not plausible, exactly, but plausible enough.

 

The brilliance of the satire lay in how efficiently it mocked the authoritarian pathologies of Trumpism: the lowbrow attraction to displays of violence and dominance, the construction of a false reality to suit the president’s desires, the cowardly sycophancy of toadies in humoring him rather than telling him an uncomfortable truth. Ridiculous as it may seem, you can draw a straight line from “the gorilla channel” to crazed MAGA goons smashing windows at the Capitol to overturn a supposedly rigged election.

 

On top of all that, the spoof shrewdly zeroed in on an aspect of Trump’s personality that’s well known yet still underestimated as an influence on his behavior, I think. Like the television-obsessed Chauncey Gardiner in Being There, he likes to watch.

 

Now and then, something in the news will bring me back to “the gorilla channel”—like this new NBC News report on how the president is getting his information about the Iran war.

 

Each day since the start of the war in Iran, U.S. military officials compile a video update for President Donald Trump that shows video of the biggest, most successful strikes on Iranian targets over the previous 48 hours, three current U.S. officials and a former U.S. official said.

 

The daily montage typically runs for about two minutes, sometimes longer, the officials said. One described each daily video as a series of clips of “stuff blowing up.”

 

He’s also doing the usual stuff like conferring with military advisers, intelligence deputies, and foreign diplomats, NBC’s sources insisted, “but the video briefing is fueling concerns among some of Trump’s allies that he may not be receiving—or absorbing—the complete picture of the war.”

 

One official claimed that the president’s briefings tend to emphasize U.S. successes and downplay Iranian actions, to the point where Trump supposedly wasn’t told at all when Iran struck American refueling planes stationed at a Saudi base. Another observed that feedback from White House aides was better following briefings that emphasized U.S. victories.

 

Sensational footage of violent displays of dominance, a misleading reality manufactured to please the president, and deputies reluctant to risk angering him by delivering the unvarnished truth: The morning sizzle reel of explosions sure sounds like a wartime version of “the gorilla channel” to me.

 

He likes to watch. Like it or not, we’re all watching with him.

 

Spectators or hostages?

 

There’s something unusually spectatorial about this conflict.

 

In America, every war is spectatorial for most of the population. We don’t have conscription, major attacks on the homeland are a once- or twice-in-a-lifetime thing, and news outlets stream 24/7. When the United States engages in combat, the only thing to do is turn on the TV and watch.

 

Even so, this war seems different.

 

One reason, surely, is the autocratic way in which it’s being run. “Even at the top levels of the Trump administration, very few people know what is actually going on in terms of the outreach to Iran,” Axios reported this morning. Israeli intelligence supposedly knows nothing more than that “something is brewing” diplomatically between the U.S. and the Iranians.

 

When one of the combatants is stuck refreshing Truth Social along with the rest of us to find out its ally’s next move, that’s a whole new dimension of war as a spectator sport.

 

Modern American civilians are always spectators to war, but in our current autocratic reality it would be truer to say we’re hostages to it. The president attacked without popular support in polling, without authorization from Congress, and without any serious attempt to persuade voters of the wisdom of starting a fight that might wreck the global economy and require U.S. infantry to unwreck it. He wanted to watch the gorilla channel so he turned it on, without warning. Now the whole American family is forced to watch.

 

The fact that Trump is completely untrustworthy and constantly contradicting himself compounds the hostage dynamic.

 

On some days he’ll say the war is nearly over, on others he’ll wonder if it’s just begun. We might be deep in peace talks with Iran or we might be about to seize their coastline around the Strait of Hormuz. Yesterday he told reporters cryptically that the Iranians had given the United States a “very big present worth a tremendous amount of money” related to the oil and gas industry—a claim that “baffled” multiple sources close to the White House, per Politico. Was he lying? Confused? Spilling a secret?

 

Who knows?

 

But one of the few ways in which Americans are treated as more than spectators in the typical conflict is when the White House updates them periodically about the state of battle. It’s a gesture of accountability, acknowledging that the war is nominally being fought in the people’s name. Because nothing Trump says is worth anything, that accountability is out the window in this case. His comments on the war always have some ulterior motive hiding in plain sight—happy talk to reassure his base or to manipulate markets, scary bluster to try to bluff Iran’s regime into surrendering.

 

We’re not being informed by our leadership in any meaningful way. We’re hostages, nervously watching and hoping for the best.

 

Reality television.

 

Still, that doesn’t account entirely for the sense I have of Americans passively rubbernecking at a conflict with tail risks more frightening than what we faced in Iraq or Afghanistan.

 

If this conflict seems unusually spectatorial that’s because, to an unusual degree, it is a spectacle. By design.

 

Trump’s daily sizzle-reel briefing is the least of it. Consider the embarrassing videos that the White House comms team has spent the past month posting on social media intercutting footage of things blowing up in Iran with snippets of video games, movies, sports highlights, and assorted internet detritus. Some military veterans are mortified at seeing death reduced to viral content, but Team Trump is undaunted. “We’re over here just grinding away on banger memes, dude,” one White House official crowed to Politico. A second proudly boasted that the clips had received 3 billion impressions in four days.

 

That’s true to the spirit of populism, at least. Not only are those banger memes proudly vicious and in poor taste, they’re egalitarian. If the president gets to watch “gorilla channel” hype footage of Iranians dying every morning, why shouldn’t the rest of us?

 

Trump’s facile intoxication with showmanship has also spilled over into war messaging, starting with making Truth Social his main channel of communication about the war. Sam Stein of The Bulwark described precisely how it feels to see a new presidential “truth” float across your social media feed in March 2026: “Every one of these posts is now a gut-wrenching journey, in which you read on to discover if some international alliance is teetering or some mass casualty event is being threatened or if our global energy market is about to come undone.”

 

To be led in a war by Trump is to remain in a state of constant dramatic suspense. Oh God, what did he say now? What will he post next?

 

The drama is deliberate, too, needless to say. When he announces a 48-hour deadline for the regime to reopen Hormuz or see its power plants blown to smithereens, that’s suspenseful. When he calls Iran’s leaders “deranged scumbags” and luxuriates in the “great honor” he enjoys of killing them en masse, that’s exciting. When he teases reporters about the “very big present” Iran supposedly gave the United States without offering details, that’s mysterious. When his scowling defense secretary proclaims, “We negotiate with bombs,” that’s—uh, well, that’s deeply cringe. But you’re supposed to leap to your feet and pump your fist like you’re watching a crowd-pleasing action thriller.

 

None of this is a coincidence, is it?

 

“It helps to remember he’s a creature of television and spectacle is everything to him,” journalist Michael Weiss said of NBC News’ report this morning on Trump’s video briefings. “War is TV and TV is war. Sweeps week alternates with occasional programming pivots and canceled midseason replacements.” We made a reality television star president. Of course his sense of reality would be filtered through television.

 

He likes to watch.

 

And so no wonder that our “strategy” in this war consists of nothing much more complicated than dominance. “What we’re seeing [in Iran] is a situation where targetry never makes up for a lack of strategy,” retired Gen. James Mattis—Trump’s former defense secretary—said this week of America’s predicament, arguing that hitting 15,000 targets hasn’t gained us the upper hand strategically. True—but to a nimrod who thinks war is first and foremost a spectacle, those targets mean everything.

 

Iran’s success in shutting down the Strait of Hormuz might be devastating, but it’s entirely invisible apart from the prices displayed at your local gas station. Trump’s success, though? There are 15,000 big booms testifying to it, enough to support a “gorilla channel” of morning viewing for the president. And, of course, some banger memes.

 

Gamification.

 

I’ve been trying to think of something thoughtful to say about the remarkable, and remarkably lucrative, luck some traders have had this year in anticipating major developments in Iran.

 

“On Monday, $580 million in oil futures flooded the market in a sudden spike—with no public news to explain it—roughly 16 minutes before Trump announced a pause in strikes on Iranian power plants,” Axios noted this morning. “On the Friday before the war began, an unusual surge of more than 150 Polymarket accounts placed hundreds of bets predicting a U.S. strike on Iran by the next day, according to a New York Times analysis.”

 

Coincidences do happen. But in an administration as filthy with corruption as this one, in which top aides reportedly brag about their legal impunity amid bribery allegations, the Occam’s razor explanation for those trades isn’t luck.

 

My interest in the matter has less to do with whether it will be properly investigated and punished (spoilers: no and no) than with the mentality of war-profiteering in such a shameless way. Surely it’s easier to rationalize cashing in on military conflict with insider trading when that conflict has been transformed from a horrifying real-world blood-and-guts fight into an online spectacle.

 

Into … content.

 

“Meme-ifying the war detaches the president’s supporters from the consequences of his viciousness,” I wrote earlier this month about the White House’s social media hype videos. The same could be said of the other ways in which Trump and his deputies have turned the conflict into a dramatic production. The manufactured will-he-or-won’t-he suspense, the Truth Social posts that blur military action and trolling—it’s all just dopamine hits for the average American spectator, not all that different from the randomized bite-sized thrills one gets from online gambling or matching on a dating app.

 

One veteran disgusted by the White House’s digital memes told the Washington Post that he feared Trump officials were creating “emotional distance between reality and actual suffering,” adding that, “If war is a game, then it’s pretty easy to press start.” Right. And if war is a game, it’s also less morally upsetting to cash in on it. It might terrify you if two gorillas tried to tear each other apart right in front of you, but if you got to watch it on television, at a safe emotional remove?

 

You’d be glued to the screen. You might even wager on one of them to win.

 

That’s Trump’s presidency in a nutshell: on the one hand the most recklessly dangerous leadership experiment America has ever conducted, on the other a ridiculous spectacle in which nothing is taken fully seriously and therefore everything on some level is a game. Maybe that will change once boots hit the ground on Kharg Island or gas reaches $9 a gallon. Until then, the memes will continue.