Photo: The White House via YouTube
We come to this place … five years after literally everyone else. In a real head-scratcher moment of publicity from our nation’s capital, the White House released an AI-generated parody video of the famous Nicole Kidman AMC Theatres ad. The official Trump White House YouTube channel posted the video on August 3 under the title “Silence your cell phones. Sit back. Welcome to the Golden Age.” At only one minute and four seconds long, one wonders how long they’ve been working on this, or why they would choose to parody the “We come to this place for magic” spiel (replacing “magic” with “MAGA”) now, five years after the original debuted, four years after Saturday Night Live parodied it in 2021, and a few years after Gritty, Morgan Freeman, and countless drag queens put their own spins on it. My theory is that a staffer went to see The Odyssey and thought Kidman’s pre-roll was part of the movie? Sing, O Muse, of dazzling images on a huge silver screen.
The video begins with a clunky AI re-creation of Kidman’s stiletto heel cinematically stepping in a neon-lit puddle, only her glamorous heel has been replaced with all-white NPC sneakers. Instead of an Australian enchantress in an iconic pinstripe suit, we now have a bland, faceless avatar rocking a no-visitation-rights depressed-dad ’fit: a gray hoodie, tactical sweatshorts, and a red “Make America Great Again” cap that you can tell he bought cheap from Temu because the casing on the letters is wrong. Instead of a movie palace, it’s the People’s House. “We come to this place for MAGA. To fight, fight, fight and win, win, win. Because we need that, all of us,” he says, walking through an abandoned White House after dark.
“The indescribable feeling we get when we hear the national anthem and stand together stronger than ever before,” he says. He’s in what appears to be the overly gilded hallway of a cheap wedding-banquet hall in deep Queens. He walks by an AI-mangled painting of Trump in his famous raised-fist pose and enters an empty ballroom, where he watches some B-roll of Trump doing stuff. “We aren’t just watching history. We’re remaking it,” AI Trump he says. Eventually, after a line about how “we don’t do heartbreak,” Trump creeps up behind the faceless man in the darkened hall and a “MAGA” logo in AMC font appears with the tagline, “Welcome to the Golden Age.”
Ultimately, this video is bog-standard Democrat rage-bait. Reciting along to the Kidman AMC video in a congregation of moviegoers is the closest thing that secular liberals have to religious ritual, making this parody tantamount to sacrilege. Heartbreak feels exhausting in a place like this.
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