Minutes after President Donald Trump introduced that he wouldn’t wipe out “an entire civilization” on Tuesday night, a group of self-described younger Iranian activists jumped into motion.
Members of the group referred to as Explosive Media have been placing the ending touches on their newest AI-generated, Lego-inspired Trump video. The video includes a Trump minifigure colluding with leaders from Gulf states, Iranian officers urgent a giant pink button labeled “again to the stone age,” and Trump throwing a chair at US generals.
This was the newest of greater than a dozen movies the pro-Iran group has launched because the starting of the struggle in February, lots of which have racked up tens of millions of views on mainstream platforms. Whereas Iranian authorities accounts have posted Lego-style movies previously, Explosive Media’s content material is extra subtle, scripted, and produced by a group of younger pro-Iranian creators who seem deeply educated concerning the web and American tradition. Already, some critics have alleged the group has ties to the Iranian authorities.
“We have been nearly sure Trump would again down, it was clear to us,” a member of the Explosive Media group, who didn’t wish to publicly determine themselves, tells WIRED. “We have been ready for this situation and had content material prepared prematurely. We simply made a number of changes and launched it.”
The group even added point out of the 10-point plan Iran proposed as a part of its latest ceasefire settlement. Because the video concludes, a Lego Trump sits subsequent to the doc, sobbing whereas holding a white flag and consuming a taco—a understanding reference to the acronym for “Trump always chickens out.”
Inside hours of Trump’s announcement, the video was revealed on Explosive Media’s X account and Telegram channel, the place it had the caption: “IRAN WON! The best way to crush imperialism has been proven to the world. Trump Surrendered. TACO will at all times stay TACO.”
Whereas the Trump administration has been posting memes that intercut war footage with movie clips that attraction to a slim viewers of loyal followers, Explosive Media’s Lego movies have reached a much wider viewers within the US—a few of whom clearly appreciated what they noticed.
“We’ve dedicated ourselves to studying extra on daily basis about American folks and tradition,” the Explosive Media group member tells WIRED. “On this course of, People themselves have been serving to us—and that help and steerage continues. They share impactful ideas and concepts with us.”
Explosive Media began in 2025 as a YouTube channel that includes political commentary delivered by a younger Iranian man. The content material by no means gained traction, with most movies racking up solely a pair hundred views.
However all that modified in February, when the group started posting Lego-inspired movies, with the group scripting, producing, and enhancing every video utilizing AI instruments. (The group wouldn’t reveal which AI instruments it was utilizing.)
The movies shortly took maintain on platforms like TikTok, X, and Instagram.
“Persons are disengaging from among the actual battle content material and in search of one thing that may distill what’s occurring shortly and in a language and tone that they perceive and that is what these Lego movies are doing,” Moustafa Ayad, a researcher with the Institute of Strategic Dialogue who has intently monitoring the web content material being shared by Iranian teams in the course of the struggle, tells WIRED. “They’re making it simply accessible to grasp the battle from Iran’s perspective, and it is hitting on factors of disaffection in the USA on the similar time. It is engaged on two fronts.”
Iran has beforehand used Lego-style movies in struggle propaganda. Again in 2024, in line with Ayad, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps shared hyperlinks to a Lego video, and in the course of the Twelve-Day Battle in 2025, Iranian state media proclaimed victory over Israel in another Lego video.
