Donald Trump Drives Epic at D.C. War Memorial on May 12
Epic showed up at the D.C. War Memorial on May 12, and it did not arrive as a poster or a speech. Operation Epic Furious: Strait to Hell landed there as a retro-style arcade cabinet and as a web browser game, with Donald Trump cast as the protagonist.
Built in just three weeks, the game turns the president into the player character, sending him to collect oil barrels in Iran and return to the United States in one piece. That is the core trick: a piece of protest art that uses arcade logic to mock the Trump administration while putting it in public view where troops have actually been seen playing it.
May 12 at the War Memorial
May 12 gave the project two entrances at once. It appeared in physical arcade cabinets at the D.C. War Memorial and also went live for web browsers, letting the same game move between a public monument and a screen that anyone could open.
The anonymous creators call themselves the Secret Handshake. Their release is less a novelty than a timed intervention, built quickly enough to meet the same date in both spaces and to land inside a political moment already defined by Washington, D.C.
Trump, Allies, and Bosses
Donald Trump is not a background figure here. He has to gather oil barrels in Iran, post on Truth Social, and fight bosses in JRPG-style turn-based combat, including Handsome Zohran and Looksmaxxer Terrorist.
The game also loads him up with kiss-ass allies like Kash Patel, RFK Jr., and Lil’ Marco Rubio. Pete Hegseth matters too: Trump has to backtrack to the dungeon entrance and say a prayer with him to unlock 2 Corinthians, the spell needed to beat the pope, who stays impervious until that happens.
Troops Playing the Cabinet
National Guard troops deployed by Trump in Washington, D.C., have been spotted playing on the arcade cabinets. That makes the release harder to dismiss as a closed-circuit joke; the game sits in a place tied to the deployment it is mocking, and the deployment is costing taxpayers about $1.6 million a day.
That is the sharpest friction point in the story. The game restarts after Trump reaches a golden toilet with TP and fires off incendiary Truth Social posts that temporarily open the Strait of Hormuz, only for the strait to close again and force another round of oil collecting. The loop is the point, and it is built to keep sending the player back to the start.
For anyone tracking the project now, the practical takeaway is simple: it is already out, both online and inside the D.C. War Memorial cabinets, and it was built fast enough to hit May 12. The Secret Handshake has made its statement in the most visible way available, and the game’s public life will now be measured by who plays it, where it appears next, and how long it keeps turning the administration into a reset button.
