Historic White House Destroyed
At 5:07 p.m. tonight, a video was posted on Donald Trump’s official Truth Social account. At just one minute and thirty seconds long, it played eerie and unsettling music as it jumped from scene to scene. Bombs falling on targets below. Soldiers storming beaches. Rockets launching into the sky. Military vehicles erupting into flames. Trump declared, “The Warrior Ethos is BACK.” All while promoting the message of “Peace Through Strength.”
The video even featured Trump saying, “We will lead the world to peace. Our friends will respect us. Our enemies will fear us, and the whole world will admire the unrivaled greatness of the United States military,” before ending with “God bless the United States of America.”
Trump’s most loyal supporters called it powerful, patriotic, and inspiring. But the majority saw something very different. Tacky. Performative. The kind of thing that feels more appropriate for a reality television finale than a message from the President of the United States.
And unfortunately, that’s exactly what we’ve come to expect. Because this is the same president who decided to celebrate his birthday by hosting a massive UFC cage fight on the White House lawn. Even writing that sentence feels absurd.
The same patch of grass where presidents have welcomed visiting heads of state, where children roll Easter eggs, and where the country has gathered to mark its hardest days and its proudest ones. Donald Trump has turned this sacred place into a pay-per-view venue.
This Sunday, on his eightieth birthday, the South Lawn will host UFC Freedom 250. According to court filings, the event will cost at least sixty million dollars. The UFC and its parent company are covering the production, the construction, the labor, and the promotion. The federal government is providing the security, the medical services, and the law enforcement, and no one will yet say how much of that bill is being handed to taxpayers. Crypto.com is a primary partner, putting up a bonus pool paid out in its own digital currency. Monster Energy and Bud Light will have their logos inside the cage. The most exclusive seats are going for between one million and one and a half million dollars a person. And if you want to watch this celebration of America from your own living room, you will first need to pay $8.99 for a subscription to a streaming service run by two of the president’s allies.
The president himself bought stock in the company putting on the fight, a purchase that appears in his own financial disclosures. His Secretary of State signed a formal agreement with the UFC. And as much as they have tried to sell this as a celebration of America, it never was. It is a business arrangement staged on public ground. A corporate spectacle wrapped in the language of patriotism. A pay-per-view event branded like a beer commercial, with the People’s House serving as the backdrop to celebrate one man: Donald Trump.
And look at what we’re being asked to celebrate. The president of the United States and his top advisors will be sitting ringside while two men beat each other bloody inside a cage, calling it the “warrior ethos.” This is not military service or sacrifice. It’s not courage in defense of others either. It’s a cage fight.
That distinction matters. Because this entire event is built around a very specific idea of strength. One rooted in domination, intimidation, and spectacle. The same idea woven throughout the video Trump shared tonight. The same idea behind the promises that our enemies will fear us. And the same idea behind turning the White House lawn into an arena.
And maybe that’s what feels so unsettling about all of this. They keep trying to convince us we’re looking at strength. But truly strong leaders don’t need constant displays of force to prove they are powerful. They don’t need military montages, chants about warriors, or cage fights on public grounds. The more this administration tries to perform strength, the more it reveals its desperation. That is what we see, and that is what our enemies see.
There were people who tried to stop it. A watchdog group called the Public Integrity Project sued to stop the fight on behalf of two Virginia residents. One of them is a Vietnam veteran and retired Air Force sergeant. He did not mince words. He called the use of these grounds, including the Lincoln Memorial, for a for-profit cage fight, so the president and his friends could make money, a desecration.
The lawsuit argued that sporting events are prohibited on the South Lawn. That the enormous steel structure being erected there never received the approvals required by law. That there was no environmental review and no authorization from Congress. It also argued that the entire arrangement created an improper relationship between the president and the people positioned to profit from him.
This afternoon, a federal judge declined to stop it. He ruled that the residents had waited too long and had not shown the kind of harm necessary to halt the event. So it moves forward. The cage stays up, and Trump’s event will go forward.
When it was first announced, this was supposed to be a temporary arrangement, the UFC buildout at the White House, but it seems the president would like it to stay up far longer than that. Earlier this month, sitting in the Oval Office, Trump compared the structure on his lawn to the Eiffel Tower. He explained that the tower in Paris was meant to be temporary, that the French decided to leave it up a little longer, and then longer, and then longer still, until they never took it down at all. He said the thing being built in front of the White House is, in his words, “quite attractive to a lot of people.” And then he said it plainly. “Maybe we’ll never ever take it down.”
A ninety-two-foot tower of steel, six hundred tons of it, looming over the South Lawn. And the president looks at it and sees a monument. He wants it to be permanent. He wants the claw to become part of the house.
There is a long history of men like this, men who mistake spectacle for strength and need the public to watch them perform it. Mussolini built his rule on exactly this kind of theater, on an obsession with masculinity and force and the staging of national greatness, on the belief that if the crowd could be made to cheer loudly enough, no one would ask what was rotting underneath the noise. Give them a show, and they will not count what they are losing.
And here is what the people staging this spectacle cannot spin away. The country is not asking for it.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll released this week found that only sixteen percent of Americans think it is appropriate to hold these fights on White House grounds. That matters because it means this is not some great patriotic event the country has rallied around. It is not a tradition. It is not a public demand. It is not a celebration Americans were asking for.
It is a spectacle being staged because Donald Trump wants it, the sponsors want it, and the people making money from it want it. But the American people, including many of his own supporters, never asked for a cage fight on the White House lawn.
History has seen this before. Authoritarian movements have long understood the power of spectacle. The rallies. The uniforms. The choreographed crowds. The carefully curated images of physical perfection. Nazi Germany elevated the ideal of the strong, disciplined, physically superior citizen into a political symbol. The goal was not simply to show strength. It was to create the appearance of a nation unified behind a leader, powerful, obedient, and marching in the same direction.
That is what makes this so unsettling. The troops are not being invited simply to watch. They are being used as part of the scenery, branding, and part of a production designed to sell a particular vision of strength to the American people, while the sponsors, promoters, executives, and politicians enjoy the spotlight.
That is the strength being sold to us. An advertisement about the unrivaled greatness of the American military, debuting at a party where that same military’s youngest and lowest-paid members are being asked to pay their own way to serve as set dressing.
They also had to meet height, weight, and fitness requirements to be considered. Not because those standards have anything to do with standing in the crowd and watching a fight. They were there because the organizers wanted a certain image for the cameras. Strong. Athletic. Disciplined. Uniform. Every face and every body contributing to a carefully constructed performance of strength.
And I keep coming back to the same thought tonight, the one I cannot shake. There are real problems in this world. There are people dying of cancer right now. There are people who cannot afford health insurance, who are rationing the very things that keep them alive. There are seniors who will work until the day they die because they cannot afford the rent. There are kids growing up in a country where owning a home has become a fantasy. Where gas is so expensive that people cancel the plans that used to bring them together. Where we see less of one another and share less of our lives because the simple act of gathering has gotten too costly. These are real. These are the things we could be putting our money, our energy, and our attention toward. We could be building a country where the next generations have a real chance at a full life, where our children, all of them, accepted and included, grow up with something better than what we are handing them.
Instead, we are stuck. Again. Inside another one of Trump’s petty indulgences. Because that is what this is. He is an evil, empty man who has surrounded himself with sycophants whose entire job is to feed his ego and assure him the show looks magnificent. And the rest of us are left watching a grown man build a cage on the lawn of the People’s House and call it greatness.
It is the oldest story there is. The emperor parading in front of his subjects, certain he is dressed in his finest, while everyone who is not paid to flatter him can see plainly that he is wearing nothing at all.
But we don’t have to accept all of this as normal. We don’t have to silently be led deeper into fascism.
And that matters because this Sunday, while the cameras are focused on the spectacle unfolding on the White House lawn, people across the country will be gathering once again to remind this administration that it does not speak for all of us.
Trump will dismiss those protests. He will mock them. The people around him will work hard to make sure the attention stays fixed on the cage, the crowd, and the performance. We know that already.
But the protest was never really for him. It is for the lawmakers who need to see, in numbers they cannot ignore, that the resistance is not shrinking. It is growing. It is for the person sitting at home who agrees with every word of this but has been too afraid to say it out loud, who needs to see that speaking is not only necessary, it is safe, because there is safety in numbers, and they cannot arrest all of us for peacefully protesting, even if they don’t like it. And it is for us. To stand beside one another and remember that we are not alone, and to remember exactly what it is we are fighting for.
So tonight, find a protest near you. Make a plan. Bring a friend if you can. Show up. That’s it. We do not have to match their spectacle. We just have to keep showing up, over and over again, and remind them that this country belongs to all of us, not just the people currently in power.
And if we need a reason to believe it is worth showing up, today handed us one. While the cage went up on one side of Washington, something else started to come down on the other. For months, Trump had his handpicked board renamed the Kennedy Center after himself, stamping his name onto a living memorial to a murdered president. It was illegal from the start. A law signed in 1964 made that building a memorial to John F. Kennedy and to no one else. A federal judge said so. And today, after the administration lost in that judge’s courtroom and then lost again on appeal, both on the same day, workers raised scaffolding in front of the Kennedy Center and began the process of taking his name down off the building.
It was streamed live. People gathered to watch, cheering “take it down” as workers began the process to remove his name. The court had ordered it gone by the end of the day and the deadline was missed. The Kennedy Center asked for more time, and construction crews appeared to be working through the night to get it done.
And this was not the only sign this week that this country is not as willing to be rewritten as he hoped. When his administration set up a tip line asking National Park visitors to report any sign or exhibit that said something “negative” about America, the effort collapsed under its own weight. Tens of thousands of people wrote in, and most of them did not report what this administration wanted. They instead told the government to leave the truth where it stood.
That is why Sunday matters. Trump can throw himself a birthday party. He can surround himself with military pageantry, cage fights, sponsors, and chants about the warrior ethos. The cameras can stay focused on the spectacle. But none of that changes what is happening underneath it. People are pushing back.
They pushed back when he tried to put his name on institutions that did not belong to him. They pushed back when his administration tried to sanitize history. And we all can push back again on Sunday.
Not for Donald Trump. But because showing up matters. Because every person who joins reminds someone else that they are not alone. Because every crowd makes it harder for those in power to sell the lie that what they are doing is good for our country. This is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.
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