President Donald Trump and conservatives have scapegoated video games at various times in the past decade for all manner of public woes, including mass shootings and a purported epidemic of laziness among welfare recipients. So it’s certainly interesting to see the administration turning to gamers (or at least those politically aligned with the administration) to refill the ranks of federal agencies as they struggle to meet the president’s expectations or make good on his campaign promises.

CNN reported on Friday that the Federal Aviation Administration has launched a new campaign to recruit gamers to become air traffic controllers. CNN noted that the ranks of air traffic controllers have declined over the past decade, and that the Biden administration initiated a similar recruiting effort back in 2021. Trump, with his administration’s mass firings of federal employees last year, further exacerbated the crisis when he gutted the FAA.

Trump, who rebuked “troubled youth” gamers in 2019 for fueling what he called a “glorification of violence” in American society, now apparently wants them to help his government run effectively. The Trump administration has similarly leaned into video game imagery in its efforts to recruit for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as the president has pursued his racist anti-immigrant crackdown. 

That the federal government is looking to gamers isn’t necessarily a bad thing. That this hiring push comes from an administration that’s sought to fill federal agencies with partisan loyalists while also crusading against diverse hiring, however, is notable.

It’s also worth noting that people in Trump’s orbit seem to think there is political benefit to recruiting gamers. Trump adviser Steve Bannon has long seen a benefit to luring gamers to the MAGA cause, as writer Alyssa Mercante explained in The Guardian in October. After the right-wing “Gamergate” hysteria back in 2014, Bannon spoke of gamers as a potential “army” of “rootless white males” whom Trump and his allies could “activate” for political gain.

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