The White House Just MAGA-fied Nicole Kidman’s Sacred AMC Commercial

The Trump administration has apparently decided that no beloved piece of cinephile culture is safe from becoming MAGA propaganda. On Monday, the official White House account released an elaborate spoof of Nicole Kidman’s iconic AMC commercial, replacing her breathless ode to moviegoing with a tacky recreation of Donald Trump’s so-called “Golden Age.”

I, like many pop-culture obsessed millennials, can recite Kidman’s iconic monologue by heart (it’s basically poetry) and have ruined countless movie nights by dragging friends to the theater early just to catch her basking in the projector light. With that in mind, you can imagine the sheer, visceral horror I felt watching this White House monstrosity.

The videos begin eerily similarly. But instead of Kidman’s dark stilettos stepping into a puddle glistening with the reflection of an AMC theater, we see a man’s white sneaker slosh upon a watery image of the White House—water likely borrowed from Trump’s ongoing war with the Reflecting Pool. 

  

 

“We come to this place for MAGA,” a male narrator announces, “To fight, fight, fight and win, win, win.”

Then, instead of Kidman pushing back the hood of her pinstriped coat, a man in a gray sweatshirt removes his hood to reveal a red MAGA hat. Let’s call him Hat Man.

 

Hat Man leads viewers on a walking tour of Trump’s gaudy White House additions, starting with a presidential Walk of Fame framed by random gold trim that looks freshly acquired from Home Depot.

“Because we need that, all of us,” the narrator continues. “The indescribable feeling we get when we hear the national anthem and stand together stronger than ever before.”

There’s no “indescribable feeling” like in Kidman’s version, when the theater lights dim and audiences are transported somewhere new. In the White House version, it’s replaced with an instruction to rise for the national anthem—an experience that is entirely describable, aggressively performative, and thoroughly un-magical.

Hat Man next admires a larger-than-life painting of Trump’s blood-stained, fist-pumping stance from the first assassination attempt—before entering an empty ballroom, where a montage of the president begins playing on a hilariously small screen, a far cry from Kidman’s towering silver screen playing La La Land.

 

“Under this administration, we’re going somewhere we’ve never been,” the narrator promises, which may be the most credible statement in the entire video, though perhaps not in the triumphant, constitutional-crisis-free way its creators intended. “We aren’t just watching history,” he continues. “We’re making it.” Again, true—but not in a good way.

The montage presents Trump’s presidency as a grand cinematic epic, rather than an administration currently spending federal communications resources producing Kidman parodies.

“Rebuilding our country better than ever,” the narrator says. “A country where we don’t do heartbreak, we do victory.” This is, of course, a desecration of the original commercial’s holiest text: “Somehow, heartbreak feels good in a place like this.”

Because, circa 2021, that line transformed a soulless corporate ad campaign into a communal prayer for the terminally online. Audiences have recited it in unison, dressed as Kidman’s pinstriped prophet for Halloween, and cheered as Kidman embraced the meme—even dreaming of performing the monologue alongside a drag queen. It’s a high-camp lineage Trump’s social media team has no right to butcher.

The White House rewrite continues with promises of “an America that is safer, more secure, more prosperous,” before assuring viewers that “any setbacks simply makes the comeback that much sweeter.” It concludes, naturally, with: “Welcome to the Golden Age,” with MAGA typed above it in recognizable AMC lettering.

The original commercial became iconic because Kidman delivered absurdly overwrought copy with the commitment of someone performing Shakespeare. Its sincerity made it what it is. The White House version borrows all that melodrama but strips away the vulnerability, the glamour, the Kidman, and, most unforgivably, the heartbreak. In their place, it offers Trump, a machismo definition of victory, and some random man in a MAGA hat

Somehow, propaganda feels worse in a place like this.