What the White House fight club says about American decline

Are you not entertained?

None of this is normal. The longer we are stuck in this place, the longer it will take to escape.

Last Sunday night, Flag Day, on the White House South Lawn, in a ring under a 600-ton, 92-foot-high steel structure called “the Claw” — so bright it reportedly distracted pilots landing at Reagan National — an estimated 4,300 people (including 1,200 military servicemembers) watched mixed martial artists battle on a hot and humid night to commemorate America’s 250th anniversary. More than 80,000 people had tickets to watch the event from the Ellipse.

UFC Freedom 250 was a $60 million gift to President Donald Trump for his 80th birthday — or even more troubling still, a gift that Trump practically engineered for himself. In his mind, he is a king or a dictator. He is the State. His pleasures should be ours. Trump was enthralled. He now has his White House, his military parade, his ballroom, his great arch, his face and name on money and buildings, and his great gladiator battle.

In the main event, Ilia Topuria and Justin Gaethje had one of the most thrilling fights in recent memory. It was stopped after the fourth round when Topuria could no longer continue — his face beaten nearly beyond recognition.

British heavyweight boxer Tyson “the Gypsy King” Fury — a grand showman like the president — made a surprise appearance, wearing a black suit studded with fake gemstones and a red and white “Trump for Prime Minister” hat.

I came of age with UFC and MMA. I remember tipping the clerk at the local video store to “reserve” the tapes — they were always stolen or otherwise “lost” and never returned. My friends and I would rush home to find out if a sumo wrestler could beat a judo or kung fu master.

Today’s UFC bears little resemblance to what the late Senator John McCain once dismissed as “human cockfighting.” For the average person, MMA and UFC are now synonymous — the brand has achieved that kind of total market capture.

UFC Freedom 250 was a gloriously entertaining and bloody spectacle. One can be in awe of a thing and still be deeply troubled by it. As I watched Sunday’s fights, I kept asking myself: how did we go from stolen VHS videotapes in the 1990s to all this?

America is a profoundly violent country. There are more guns than people. The nation leads the world in mass shootings. As historian and cultural critic Richard Slotkin has argued, America’s founding myths reflect what he has called “regeneration through violence.”

As I watched Trump, Dana White, and the UFC fighters and other guests make their entrances through the White House, I kept texting a friend that “we are all in hell.” Then, moments later, I would find myself yelling at the TV, cheering on the fighters. I am an American. I am a product of this culture and its worst excesses. If you are not careful, it will swallow you whole. That seduction is one of the main ways that the Age of Trump and American fascism came into being.

Donald Trump is a professional wrestling “heel” — the villain. From professional wrestling, Trump learned to refine the character and persona, the promo and the showmanship, and how to manipulate the public’s suspension of disbelief.

“Is this real or not?”

“I know that is fake for sure. But that other thing? It absolutely happened!”

At its best, professional wrestling is a simulated fight that must look real.

But it is the real violence of MMA and boxing that most purely distills Trump’s strongman politics and authoritarian appeal. It is real violence and real domination with little to no room for weakness or empathy. Trump loves killers and ruthless aggression. Violence governs his theory of politics, society and human relationships. Violence is also the animating spirit of the larger MAGA and right-wing authoritarian project.

In that way, Trump’s White House MMA birthday celebration was a spectacle: an event where political and social meaning and values are created, reinforced and circulated across a society.

The special guests included crypto, media and tech billionaires — among them Mark Zuckerberg, whose company Meta has partnered with UFC, and David Ellison, whose company Paramount holds the exclusive broadcast rights.

And of course, there was corruption. As Salon’s Sophia Tesfaye extensively mapped out in a previous essay, the Trump family is selling “commemorative” coins bearing the president’s face, priced from $250 to $12,000. The fighters were partially paid in cryptocurrency from Trump’s World Liberty Financial company. Corporations paid $1 million to sponsor the event.

There was militant nationalism: flyovers by military jets, recruitment ads that showed Trump as a God-King and force of destiny and the military framed as America’s most important institution and enforcer of national greatness.

Coexisting with the amazing athletic skill, physical intelligence and grit, there was a type of insecure performative patriotic hypermasculinity. As Robert Reich has written, many Americans find Trump’s neofascist “strongman” attractive because they feel powerless and the cage match and other public displays of aggression help them to feel vicariously powerful.

On Sunday, Trump turned the White House into his personal coliseum. The president is not (yet) Nero or Caligula. America is not Rome. But the spectacle of UFC Freedom 250 and an empire collapsing into bread and circuses (without the bread for the majority of Americans who are struggling to pay their bills) and a security state turning inward against its own people still echoed loudly — even if the ambition was not as grand as Rome’s.

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As historian Heather Cox Richardson recently observed, one of Trump’s darkest powers is his ability to “[pervert] those things that Americans hold dear…. It was almost as if he was saying I don’t care what you hold sacred. I’m going to use all of it for myself.”

Trump has debased and gutted the presidency and torn down the American people’s expectations of their leaders. Once these norms are broken, it will take decades — if not generations — to repair them.

I have lost count of how many times during the long Age of Trump I have said aloud that if someone wrote down this story and tried to sell it, no publisher or studio would buy it. Too unbelievable. Hackwork. Grossly overwritten. Obvious.

On Tuesday, the FBI announced it had stopped an alleged plot to use drones armed with explosives to attack buildings near the UFC Freedom 250 event. Snipers would then shoot the panicked crowd. A second group of attackers would breach the White House gates. Five people have been arrested. The investigation is ongoing.

If the terrorist plot had succeeded, the tragedy would likely be used as a justification to invoke the Insurrection Act or declare a national emergency to restrict voting and other civil rights. To that point, the New York Times is reporting that the administration considered suspending the constitutional right of habeas corpus for undocumented immigrants to accelerate Trump’s mass deportation campaign.

Whoever is writing this story in real time, please make it stop. The American people — and the world — have had enough. Our expectations of normalcy were pummeled into submission long ago.