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Guardian opinion columnist Moira Donegan provided a detailed account of the Ultimate Fighting Championship event staged on the South Lawn of the White House on June 14, an event that marked President Donald Trump’s 80th birthday and was nominally tied to the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding.
According to Donegan, the event required a diversion of Secret Service resources, the use of military musicians, and the construction of a large octagonal cage on the White House grounds. She wrote that the cost was “untold taxpayer expense” and that the use of government property likely violated numerous ethics rules.
The night before the fights, on June 13, the combatants posed shirtless, nose to nose, at a ceremonial weigh-in held in front of the Lincoln Memorial, which Donegan described as a press event “designed to pique the interest of online gambling markets.”
On the evening of the event, Donegan wrote, a bad weather forecast threatened to postpone the fights, but the storm passed. Trump, whom she described as “visibly stooped,” hobbled in and sat in the front row while the Marine band performed a “tepid rendition” of the song “The Boys are Back in Town.”
The fights themselves, Donegan wrote, were “frantic and unbeautiful” spectacles with “none of the redeeming grace of boxing.” She noted that the primary assets required for mixed martial arts appeared to be “physical size and a willingness to hurt someone.” Before each bout, she reported, “artificially tanned women in sequined, American-flag themed miniature outfits” served as Octagon Girls, holding up placards with the round number. The floor of the cage was emblazoned with an image of a Monster Energy can.
Most fights lasted only a few minutes, Donegan wrote, and involved shirtless men in spandex shorts trading high kicks before locking bodies and falling to the mat, where one competitor would hit the other in the face repeatedly. “The object seems to be to inflict repeated head injuries,” she wrote.
After his victory, Donegan reported, fighter Bo Nickal, identified as a redhead with pronounced cauliflower ear, thanked President Trump first and then thanked God.
Donegan wrote that the event reflected Trump’s “own most base and childlike fantasies of narcissistic gratification.” She argued that the use of government property and national landmarks for a birthday celebration that also served as a profit-making enterprise for Trump’s friends in the private sector furthered his effort to “symbolically fuse the federal government with his person, to insist that he is America and is the state.”
The column noted that at the start of the broadcast, television commentators remarked repeatedly on the improbability of being at the White House. A montage played in which fighters’ faces were projected onto D.C. landmarks including the Capitol building, the Reflecting Pool, and the Washington Monument, while a voiceover celebrated the virtues of violence. “A dominance so undeniable that it becomes permanent,” the voiceover said, according to Donegan.
Donegan wrote that this was Trumpism’s fantasy, but concluded that “no domination is permanent.”
Donegan’s column was published in The Guardian on June 15. The event has drawn criticism from ethics watchdogs and prompted a lawsuit seeking to block it, as MSI has previously reported.