The Trump admin is so toxic, brands now have crisis responses for being used in propaganda
One of toy company Hasbro’s marquee pieces of intellectual property went through a different transformation than usual last week.
Thanks to a series of social media posts by the Department of Homeland Security, Transformers, the venerable robots-disguised-as-trucks franchise, got a full-on MAGA makeover.
In one entry, the series’ most recognizable character, Optimus Prime, is covered in DHS logos for an AI poster promoting the nonexistent blockbuster, Transformers: Age of Deportation. Hasbro quickly responded with an Instagram message disavowing the brazen copyright infringement, but it didn’t stop there. The company also listed the values Optimus Prime stands for—suggesting these are in conflict with the ideas expressed by the DHS slopaganda.
It’s not every day a toy company has to announce that the fictional robot truck it created—unlike the U.S. government, apparently—believes in things like leadership and justice.
If the statement seems familiar, it’s because a near-identical one emerged just a week earlier. After the White House launched a jingoist retro online arcade featuring a Tetris knockoff called “Build the Wall,” the company behind the classic moving puzzle game issued a dispatch nearly identical to Hasbro’s. This one similarly distanced the IP in question from the White House’s unlicensed abomination, and also reiterated the values Tetris stands for—but with the added bonus of promising legal action. (The White House has since taken down “Build the Wall.”)
As the U.S. government’s internet presence has morphed throughout the Trump 2 era into a sneering, copyright-agnostic meme-factory, brands have had to establish a new style of corporate communications for dealing with it.
There’s more to this situation, however, than meets the eye.
The Department of Edgelord Lulz
Trump has a long history of using artists’ music in his campaign rallies and ads without permission, so it wasn’t a surprise he continued doing so as president. In his second term, however, Trump and his cohort are no longer just featuring artists’ unlicensed work as peppy background noise for the MAGA message; they’ve started making it part of the message.
The band Semisonic’s alt-rock hit, “Closing Time,” for instance, popped up in a March 2025 video from Customs and Border Protection depicting immigrants in shackles being led onto an airplane. (In typical subtle-as-a-tack-hammer fashion, a caption onscreen repurposes a memorable line from the song: “You don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here.”) Semisonic put the White House on blast for “missing the point” of the lyrics, and eventually the video featuring the song was quietly removed.
This little dance would happen again many other times with many other musicians.
The DHS quickly expanded its purview beyond music, into other kinds of art. In July 2025, they posted classic Americana paintings from artists Thomas Kinkade and Morgan Weistling, accompanied by xenophobic slogans like “Protect the Homeland.” (Months later, DHS would similarly borrow work by another quintessentially American painter: Norman Rockwell.) Unlike the situation with Semisonic, these paintings remained in the DHS’s posts despite Weistling and the deceased Kinkaid and Rockwell estates denouncing the unauthorized usage. The government’s response to such complaints is essentially a pugnacious, implicit “So, sue us.”
Trump’s gravitational pull eventually started bringing in beloved brands, which have a lot more moving parts than individual musicians and artists. In September 2025, a DHS video blatantly used Pokémon imagery, the brand’s theme song, and its slogan, “Gotta Catch ‘Em All,” in reference to rounding up immigrants. The contrast between a beloved, child-friendly brand and the video’s nationalist agitprop lent it a more transgressive vibe than even the previous iterations. It was 4chan-style edgelord humor from the federal government, unapologetic and seemingly invulnerable to repercussions.
Though the Pokémon company objected to the DHS’s unauthorized usage, their message was a standard-issue disavowal. It wasn’t until the next brand beloved by children involuntarily starred in a bit of government propaganda that the disavowal statements began to codify into what is now becoming the new house style.
We’re not with them
Coming up with the best corporate response for this particular flavor of copyright infringement can be a bit of a high-wire act. If a company says nothing after its IP is used to advance the MAGA mission, hordes of fans opposed to that mission might view the company as complicit, and boycott accordingly. Opposing the copyright-trespass too strongly, though, could not only inspire a MAGA boycott but the wrath of Trump, who has demonstrated a willingness to use untold levers of government power for retaliating against perceived corporate enemies.
The vast potential for blowback might explain why, when the White House posted an AI image of Trump as Master Chief from the video game Halo last October, Microsoft, which owns Halo maker Xbox, had “nothing to share” about the unauthorized usage. After all, Microsoft is well incentivized to stay on Trump’s good side as the company aggressively expands its AI footprint.
One company that refused to stay silent after the Trump administration used its IP for flagrant propaganda is Canadian children’s book publisher Kids Can Press. Last November, Secretary of Defense and sentient can of Axe Body Spray Pete Hegseth tweeted an AI image of children’s book icon Franklin the Turtle firing a rocket launcher at drug boats. It was a reference to the U.S. military campaign of extrajudicial violence against boats that may or may not be carrying drugs through the Caribbean, which has killed at least 230 people in the past year.
The response from Kids Can Press was anything but neutral. In a post on X featuring the company logo, the publisher stated that Franklin the Turtle “stands for kindness, empathy, and inclusivity,” and that the company “strongly condemn[s] any denigrating, violent, or unauthorized use of Franklin’s name or image, which directly contradicts these values.”
This message was a significant escalation from Pokémon earlier that autumn, which only emphasized in its statement that the company “was not involved in the creation or distribution of this content, and permission was not granted for the use of our intellectual property.” Kids Can Press appears to have set the template for both the visual language and wording of the bolder responses we’re now seeing from Tetris and Hasbro.
Driven by desperation
If media companies are now showing a greater need to distance their characters from the government’s depiction of them, it might be due to those depictions getting more egregious.
Beyond the fake movie poster featuring Optimus Prime, another Transformers image from the DHS’s X account sparked an immediate backlash over its perceived racism. In this second faux-movie poster, Optimus Prime is staring down a brown-skinned man in a blue bandana, both figures hovering amid a series of captions including, “America for Americans,” and “Get off our roads. You don’t know how to drive, Mr. Singh.”
Unlike the other Transformers-based faux poster, it was quickly deleted with no explanation. The damage may have already been done, however. Just three days after those posts appeared, a Sikh truck driver named Gurvinder Singh was stabbed 17 times by a white man in a Wyoming rest stop. (According to the New York Times, the DHS post and the stabbing have “deeply shaken the 750,000-strong Sikh community, already reeling from a spike in online hate speech and threats.”)
The DHS defended its social media strategy, claiming it weren’t attacking everyone who happens to be named “Singh,” but a specific man with that name who’s allegedly responsible for a deadly traffic accident and is not a legal resident. DHS included that man’s image, blue bandana and all, in a series of tweets featuring similar alleged offenders, rendered as trading cards, a Transformers logo splashed across them. Why? Because they are, according to DHS, the “worst of the worst,” and Homeland Security is getting them off America’s streets.
But a government agency doesn’t associate itself with pop-culture Good Guys because it’s winning—it does so out of desperation.
The reason DHS is leaning so hard on beloved IP to push anti-immigration messaging at this moment might have something to do with the rising unpopularity of that message. Despite all of Team Trump’s promises to go after “the worst of the worst,” reportedly only 3% of individuals detained by ICE in the first 14 months of Trump 2 had violent felony convictions. No wonder a Harvard study earlier this year had approval of Trump’s immigration policies at 37%—and no wonder companies like Hasbro and Tetris don’t want to be seen as supporting it.
Of course, one recent piece of presidential pop culture appropriation ultimately provoked more amusement than pushback from its creator. Earlier this month, Trump posted to Truth Social the designs for new Space Force uniforms, inspired by Starship Troopers—a cinematic satire in which the “heroes” are meant to be fascists. (The film’s director, Paul Verhoeven, has since told The Hollywood Reporter, “I don’t know if this president is aware that the movie says these [characters] are fascists without knowing that they’re fascists. That’s the point.”)
Much like the lyrics to that Semisonic song, Team Trump apparently missed the point.