While America Burns, Trump Builds Himself a Colosseum

The UFC spectacle is more than a cage fight: it's a monument to corruption, self-enrichment, and the imperial Roman politics of bread and circus…

If you’ve wandered anywhere near the White House this past week, you couldn’t have missed it, because there’s now a ninety-two-foot, six-hundred-ton tangle of steel and floodlights squatting on the South Lawn like a carnival ride that ate a cathedral. The UFC calls it “The Claw.”

It’s taller than the White House itself, tricked out like a Fourth of July beer can, and bolted down right over the patch of grass where Marine One usually lands, all so that on Trump’s birthday, June 14th, two grown men can punch and choke each other bloody in front of thousands of howling fans.

Trump liked it so much he floated leaving it up forever, then had his handlers walk it back when somebody gently reminded him the President still occasionally needs a helicopter. Replacing the torn-up lawn afterward will run about seven hundred thousand dollars, which is roughly seven hundred thousand dollars more than this spectacle is worth.

There’s an ancient phrase for governing this way, and it isn’t a compliment. The Roman poet Juvenal, watching his republic rot into empire, sneered that a people who once handed out commands and legions had shrunk their whole appetite down to two things, panem et circenses, bread and circuses.

Keep the mob fed and entertained with a little blood, and they’ll never notice the men in charge stripping the place down to the studs. Nero fiddled, so the story goes, while Rome burned, and Caligula reportedly wanted to make his horse a Consul, which honestly would’ve been a step up in competence from a few of Trump’s Cabinet picks.

The line from those emperors to a reality-show host who wants cage fighters walking to the Octagon from the Oval Office isn’t hard to trace, and I wrote about exactly this hunger, the narcissistic strongman who governs by spectacle, in The Last American President.

The men who built our republic studied Rome until their eyes bled, and the thing they feared most is sitting right where Trump sits now, a demagogue who keeps a restless public dazzled and furious while the actual work of self-government quietly dies of neglect.

And now a federal judge is being asked to pull the plug on this tacky display. A lawsuit filed this past weekend by the Public Integrity Project, on behalf of an activist and a Vietnam veteran, argues that:

— Staging a private, for-profit prizefight on federal parkland (which is what the White House lawn is) breaks National Park Service rules;
— That the giant cage went up without the congressional sign-off the law plainly requires, and that
— The administration is simply handing the South Lawn and the Lincoln Memorial, where they plan to hold the ceremonial weigh-ins, to a for-profit corporation so it can fatten its bottom line which will no-doubt recycle back to Trump’s personal money bin in some way.

And there’s nothing subtle about whose bottom line will get fattened. Trump’s own financial disclosures from last month show that back in March he bought stock in TKO, the company that owns the UFC.

So the President of the United States is throwing a for-profit cage match, on land that you and I own and pay for with our payroll deductions, promoting a company he’s personally invested in, on his own eightieth birthday, and slapping a “250th anniversary of America” sticker on it as though that fools a single soul.

The lead attorney challenging this money-making spectacle on our property, Brendan Ballou, a former federal prosecutor who spent two years putting January 6th rioters in prison, didn’t bother with euphemism, calling it flatly “a private, commercial, corrupt use of our most sacred national monuments for private gain.”

He went out of his way to say this isn’t a swipe at mixed martial arts, a sport he respects, but at the corruption greasing it, and he pointed to the roughly one-and-a-half-million-dollar sponsorship packages the UFC is hawking, the arrangement that makes fans cough up for a Paramount+ subscription to watch the main card, and the advertising they intend to drape over the Octagon and, I kid you not, the Lincoln Memorial.

Paramount+, of course, is owned by the same nepo-baby billionaire who’s now taking apart CBS News and is trying to get his hands on CNN, all to slobber over and curry favor with Orange Caligula.

The White House waved the whole thing off as “obstructionist, baseless, and dilatory,” which is precisely how self-dealing always sounds the moment somebody catches Trump or any other con artist with his hand in the till.

This is the same tasteless grifter, remember, who’s spent his second term treating the most sacred public building in the country like a distressed property he picked up at a foreclosure auction.

Last summer he paved over the Rose Garden, the one John Kennedy and Bunny Mellon designed in 1962, ripping out the lawn and pouring a stone patio with drainage grates stamped in the shape of little American flags, because nothing honors the republic quite like a Mar-a-Lago veranda with patriotic sewer covers.

Then he bulldozed the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden, the quiet, tree-shaded space dedicated to her in 1965, I.M. Pei pergola and all, to clear ground for a ninety-thousand-square-foot, four-hundred-million-dollar ballroom that a federal judge has already ordered halted, at least for now.

And when he was in Beijing last month gushing over President Xi’s roses, he justified the whole demolition by posting that “China has a Ballroom, and so should the U.S.A.!”

That ought to settle, once and for all, the argument about who he’s modeling himself after. Dictator Xi, ever the gracious host, gave him rose seeds for the very garden Trump had just entombed in concrete, a gift so exquisitely polite it doubled as a political and diplomatic knife to the gut.

Even worse, our country’s 250th birthday was always meant to be run by America250, the official, nonpartisan commission Congress created back in 2016, the one whose honorary co-chairs are George W. Bush and Barack Obama, a Republican and a Democrat lending their names to a shared national milestone, exactly the way the thing is supposed to work.

Trump, though, wasn’t interested in sharing anything with anybody. Within days of taking office he signed an executive order creating his own “Task Force 250,” chaired by himself with JD Vance riding shotgun, and stood up a MAGA-branded operation called Freedom 250, the very name now stamped on his birthday cage match.

His own administration then elbowed the official, bipartisan commemoration into the shadows and shoved Freedom 250 out front as if it were the real thing.

He didn’t just crash our nation’s birthday party. He threw out the hosts and slapped his own name on the invitations!

I take this one personally: back in 2009, when Louise and I were living in Washington and I was broadcasting my radio and television show from there, I was invited into the East Wing for a briefing with the economist Jared Bernstein, who was then working for Vice President Biden.

I still remember the quiet dignity of the place, the beautiful parquet floors, the sense that you were walking through rooms where First Ladies had shaped the country for the better part of a century.

That East Wing is a pile of rubble now. Trump knocked down a hundred and twenty-three years of American history, the offices where every modern First Lady did her work, so he could build himself a gold-plated Epstein Dance Hall, and now he’s going to cram a cage fight into the nation’s birthday celebration before the dust from those rooms has even finished settling.

And nobody, it seems, wants to have anything to do with it. The regime’s Freedom 250 concert series, meant to pack the National Mall in the run-up, came apart at the seams as act after act bolted for the exits. Martina McBride, Bret Michaels, Young MC, the Commodores, and Morris Day and the Time were among them, several of them saying they’d been promised a nonpartisan show and refused to be turned into set dressing for a tricked out MAGA rally.

Trump took the snub about as gracefully as you’d imagine, hopping on Truth Social to write the performers off as “highly paid, Third Rate ‘Artists’” whose music “nobody wants to hear,” announcing that he’d simply replace the lot of them with himself since he pulls bigger crowds “than Elvis in his prime,” and instructing his own people to “Cancel it.”

Nero, you’ll recall, also considered himself the finest performer of his age. He was famously good with the fiddle.

Now the cage match is getting the identical cold shoulder. Dana White mailed invitations to Dwayne Johnson, who literally sits on the board of the UFC’s own parent company, along with Adam Sandler, Jared Leto, and Mario Lopez, and one after another they’ve politely declined, with even Lopez, a self-described conservative, suddenly recalling he had somewhere else to be.

When the A-list names your own promoter is bragging about won’t come within an area code of the thing, and the biggest celebrity willing to show his face is Vanilla Ice, you’ve pretty well answered the question of whether this is a proud national celebration or a pathetic eighty-year-old man’s birthday party draped in a stolen flag.

Americans need to ask ourselves what all of this noise is engineered to keep us from looking at.

Gas, healthcare, and groceries are still gutting working families, which is why even Governor Gavin Newsom’s office cut straight through the racket with one dry line aimed at the White House, “Mr. President, we just want lower gas prices.”

We’re being marched toward a wider war with Iran, with 13 Americans dead, hundreds injured (who Trump refused to visit when he went to Walter Reed), and hundreds of billions in military hardware destroyed along with our reputation worldwide.

And the administration’s grand answer to all of it is a six-hundred-ton fighting cage and a fireworks budget.

When even Joe Rogan, the UFC’s own broadcaster and one of the loudest voices that helped haul Trump back into office, took one look and called the whole thing “odd” and admitted he didn’t like it, you know the carnival has gotten too garish even for the carnies running it.

The Founders didn’t put their necks in a noose fighting a king so that, two and a half centuries later, a grifter president could rent out the People’s House as a self-enriching pay-per-view backdrop for his own birthday.

But this republic still belongs to us and not to him, and the people pushing back are already in court.

Pick up the phone and call your representatives through the Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121, and tell them in plain words that public land and the People’s House are not props for a president’s birthday or his stock portfolio, and that Congress needs to take back its say over what gets bolted onto federal parkland.

Throw your weight behind the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which is fighting the ballroom demolition in court, and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which chases exactly this brand of self-dealing for a living.

Make sure you’re registered and ready to go at vote.org, and find out who represents you back home through openstates.org, because a great many of the people who will either rubber-stamp this circus or shut it down are sitting on your ballot this year.

And if this piece helped you see what’s really going on behind The Claw, share it, forward it, talk about it at the dinner table, and think about subscribing to the Hartmann Report so we can keep doing this work together.

Bread and circuses only work on a crowd that isn’t paying attention to the scheme behind them. Let’s go ahead and ruin the show.

Louise’s Daily Song: “They Built a Colosseum”

Comments on Monday’s Daily Take:

Are Today’s “Evil, Heartless Bastards” Rebuilding the Confederacy?

When we finally escape this madness, there will be a need for a Second Reconstruction. It will take decades, if not an entire generation, to repair and rebuild. In short order they have destroyed or dismantled every once trusted service & institution we held dear & necessary. God help us.
~ Michael Johnson

They’re right. The first European colonists to hit the shores of north America were indeed very racist in their ideology. It started with the Catholic pope in the late 15th century. For the English, it was more about being top dog around the world, at the expense of their European neighbors, mostly the French.

The beginning of the end was the American revolution/civil war against the English crown. The French took some solace when they helped the colonists defeat the mighty English red coats. But, they were all very racist.
~ Terrance Ó Domhnaill

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