On Saturday at Mar-a-Lago, as he was supposed to be speaking to the White House press corps about the overnight military raid in Venezuela, Donald Trump was busy doing what he loves most: posting on social media. While the reporters waited for him, he published a 84-second video on Truth Social featuring footage of the attack set to Creedence Clearwater Revival’s 1969 hit “Fortunate Son”—the opening guitar lick of which has been a Vietnam War movie cliche for decades.
But “Fortunate Son” is also, as many pointed out on Saturday, an anti-war song that rips on privileged draft dodgers—something Mr. Bone Spurs knows more than a bit about himself. This song choice thus baffled people online, me included. Did Trump even know what the song was about? Was it because he’s a boomer who came of age during the song’s heyday? Was he trolling? Did he even care?
These are the wrong questions—but they’re exactly the questions the Trump administration wants us to be asking. The choice of “Fortunate Son” was no mistake, and it’s just the latest example of how the far right understands and exploits the aesthetics of contradiction, senselessness, and absurdity to shock and numb us.
So it’s safe to say that the aesthetic choice to set war footage to a known anti-war song is a deliberate decision. But the goal is not to communicate some kind of coherent political message; it doesn’t need to make sense, and in fact it’s better that it not make sense. This is blunt-force aesthetics. You are not meant to think about the lyrics of “Fortunate Son”; you are meant to feel that this is a really cool movie, not unlike ones you’ve seen before. You might even forget for a moment that this isn’t Forrest Gump or Born on the Fourth of July, but real life.