“Monumental damage was done to all Nuclear sites in Iran. Obliteration is an accurate term!” Trump’s words following the U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities last weekend (21 June 2025) were less a statement of fact than a performance. Independent analysts questioned the material impact of the strikes, and reports suggested that key elements of Iran’s programme had been moved. Yet facts are immaterial in the Trumpian register. What matters is the image: a simulated spectacle of strength, broadcast to the world like a blockbuster trailer. The real is no longer required. As Jean Baudrillard might put it, the map has replaced the territory.
Trump’s hyperreal war language (full of obliteration, annihilation, schoolyard metaphors) constructs a version of global politics in which outcomes are secondary to performance. When he describes the Iranians and Israelis as “like two kids fighting in the schoolyard,”1 and himself as the adult who must step in to sort it out, he is not simply simplifying geopolitics for a domestic audience. He is scripting himself as “Daddy”: the paternal sovereign who restores order through dominance and, crucially, through narrative. He makes sense of chaos by asserting ownership over it.
So it was perhaps inevitable that when NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte described Trump as “Daddy” who “sometimes has to use strong language,” the White House seized on the moment, producing a slick social media video ‘Daddy’s Home’ (see below) to celebrate Trump’s reassertion of American primacy. This is no longer diplomacy. It is myth-making. It is a Baudrillardian spiral of simulation, in which the image of power circulates, multiplies, and replaces power itself.
Rutte’s comment, presumably off-hand, becomes a branding tool. Just as Baudrillard warned that in the age of the simulacrum we lose the ability to distinguish between representation and reality, the NATO meeting becomes not a space for deliberation, but for staging deference. Rutte flatters; the White House amplifies; the base cheers. The content is irrelevant. The performance is the message.
Baudrillard described three orders of simulacra: first, where a sign represents a basic reality; second, where it masks the absence of reality; third, where it bears no relation to reality at all, but simulates it entirely. Trump’s Iran rhetoric, and the “Daddy” moment, fall into the third category. No need to evaluate strategic outcomes. No need to assess legality or civilian cost. Power has been performed.
Here is the danger. Because in the space once occupied by diplomacy and debate, we now have the image of strength, endlessly reproduced. When the next conflict emerges, the public won’t remember the classified briefings or the UN resolutions. They’ll remember “obliteration.” They’ll remember “Daddy.”
Baudrillard wrote that the Gulf War did not take place. Not because bombs weren’t dropped, but because the televisual framing hollowed out the event and replaced it with spectacle. The same logic now governs the Trump-era re-escalation with Iran. The war is not what happened on the ground. It is what was said, streamed, shared.
Trump’s return to power has not restored American authority in any material sense. What it has done is revive the theatre of imperialism, restaged for a world where meaning is no longer anchored in fact. There will be more speeches, more nicknames, more viral memes. But beneath them all, the drift continues. The empire simulates itself.
The missiles may have struck Fordow. But the real damage was done elsewhere, in language, in spectacle, in the obliteration of reality itself.
This is the same theatre that governs Trump’s immigration policy, where extraordinary rendition is no longer covert but domesticated, retooled for a domestic audience. The SUV outside the Home Depot performs the same function as the old CIA black site: it disappears the unwanted. The same logic underpins both—control through fear, and fear through performance. The theatre of imperialism abroad feeds the performance of sovereignty at home.
And NATO itself? Its declarations (of unity, of Article 5, of 5% GDP pledges) function as ritual. The ‘Daddy’ spectacle only revealed what has long been true: that NATO is not a security alliance but a stage, on which power is gestured at more than it is wielded. Rutte’s line (meant to flatter, privately?) ends up exposing the fragility beneath the pageantry.
In this, Trump’s language echoes not only Dugin’s apocalyptic certainty but also Giorgia Meloni’s maternal nationalism. When Meloni says Italy must “suffer, obey, reproduce,” she plays the same trick as Trump does with obliteration: transforming weakness into narrative. The strongman does not fix the world; he narrates its collapse. And the people, desperate for order, applaud.
Footnotes
- This isn’t the first time Trump has reached for this metaphor in relation to the Middle East. ↩︎
