Here is a headline I never expected to read in The New York Times: “U.F.C. Fight Venue Takes Shape on the White House Lawn.”
Yes, this is what the President of the United States considers an appropriate, even dignified, way to honor America on her 250th birthday: cage matches that transform the South Lawn of the People’s House into a trailer-trash paradise. Donald Trump is mentally locked into a mindset that considers violent spectacle the highest form of human endeavor.
For the rest of us, it’s not just humiliating; it’s a vulgar abomination from a man whose level of taste peaked at age 6 and never evolved. And so, he’s desecrated the nation’s most famous piece of real estate, perpetrated by a chief executive who considers spray-on gold to be the most cosmetically appealing touch of décor.
It’s an act of historical vandalism by a president turned on by desecration. Holding an Ultimate Fighting Championship event demonstrates contempt for everything we stand for. He’s like a dog marking its territory with a million gallons of urine.
The star-spangled arch depicted over the cage on the lawn is designed to honor both the nation’s and his own birthdays. He’s turning 80 on June 14, the day it’s planned for, with a 5,000-seat arena surrounding the area. And I can’t make this part up: official weigh-ins for the bouts are being hosted at the Lincoln Memorial – introducing a vicious exhibition in front of a monument honoring a president assassinated in cold blood.
What can we compare it to?
It’s like a Cabinet meeting being replaced by a Bass Pro Shop sponsorship.
It’s like the fall of Rome sponsored by DraftKings.
It’s like a nation confusing brute strength with performance art.
It’s like if the Situation Room were programmed by adolescent boys with unlimited caffeine.
It’s like a presidential library being built entirely out of Monster Energy cans.
It’s like Mount Rushmore being redone as a fight poster.
It’s like the executive branch discovering it can get louder applause for chokeholds than legislation.
It’s like Caligula discovering brand synergy.
It’s like a campaign rally peddled as a pay-per-view extravaganza.
It’s like your grandparents scheduling the entertainment at your 21st birthday party.
It marks the full-on transformation of persuasion into intimidation, institutions into insincerity, leadership into performance, civic life into content creation. It’s hyper-masculine theater getting hyped as our national pastime. The Roman Colosseum lives in 2026.
Of course, the matches will be broadcast live on CBS and streamed via Paramount+, because the new owners Larry and David Ellison are so far in the tank for Trump that they can barely see out of it. They have rendered CBS News and, by extension, 60 Minutes utterly obsolete as balanced news organizations. They are instead Fox News Lite and getting heavier all the time.
In tandem with the Great American State Fair music abomination featuring musical artists with no drawing power even in MAGA strongholds, the entire putrid production symbolizes an America that is hopelessly degrading and, in fact, long dead. It has no soul, no feeling, no esteem. It’s patriotism as merchandising. History as branding. Freedom as nostalgia. All of it hollow to the core.
How did this come to be? It’s happened because Trump has no respect for anything he doesn’t somehow have his personal stamp on. Now he wants a $250 bill with his glaring mug stamped in the middle, because devastating our economy isn’t quite enough. He needs to wreck our currency, too.
All of this will one day merely be a traumatic memory. Actually being forced to live through it is its own special hell. Rising up and recording our disgust at all of this doesn’t feel like nearly enough, and in fact, a louder and more sustained voice needs to take hold to counter the creeping normalization.
The indifference is what’s deafening and dangerous. The shrugs and the exhaustion. The “Oh yeah, that’s just Trump being Trump.” That can’t be our collective reaction because it enables him, encouraging the next outrage on our institutions, the next assault on our senses of decency, morality, judgment, principles.
On Trump’s watch, the grotesque has become commonplace. He’s taken the American flag and symbolically wiped his backside with it. He’s seized our dignity as a country and bent it to his phantasmagorical sense of who and what we should be.
One of the most devastating ways he’s done this is to transform our politics into his own personal reality show and his presidency itself into a cash register. Not enough has been made of his making more than 3,700 stock trades during the first quarter of 2026 alone, hyping the companies he’s invested heavily in on his running Truth Social propaganda machine. He has used his powerful pulpit to pull in hundreds of millions of dollars, possibly as much as $1 billion on those trades alone. That’s to say nothing of his crypto windfall.
So we’ve long since established that the law doesn’t apply to Trump – at all. To pretend otherwise is to mock the very idea that genuine ethics matter in the slightest.
Yes, he’s sold out the presidency itself in every way imaginable. And less tangibly but equally alarmingly, he’s peddled our propriety, decorum and self-respect to satisfy his inner tactless oaf. His lizard brain is greatly limited in what satisfies its host, and he’s foisted that degradation on all the nation’s citizens. MAGA really stands for Make America Garish Again.
And so we have a semiquincentennial celebration more befitting the main event at a monster truck rally, orchestrated by a man who makes the clan on The Beverly Hillbillies look like the Rockefellers. He believes the White House belongs to him, so he’s (temporarily ruined it like he does everything else he touches.
Just know that most of us share the revulsion you’re feeling.
Ray Richmond is a longtime journalist/author and an adjunct professor at Chapman University in Orange, CA.