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Steve Beschloss at America, America:

Elect a clown, expect a circus. The truth of this proverb was on painful display this weekend in Washington, D.C., courtesy of a deeply unwell man who spits on our history, glorifies violence and sows hatred. He turned our White House grounds into a gross commercial venue for violent cage fights, adding fresh evidence that his malignancy knows no bottom. It’s hard to overstate what a perverse irony it is—in this, the 250th anniversary of our nation’s founding—that such a man was returned to the presidency to accelerate America’s decline while enriching himself. But there on the South Lawn—with the White House bathed in blue in the background—cage fighters were beating each other up on a platform advertising Bud Light, online betting and Monster Energy drinks. These fighters were seen on camera doing their preparations from inside the White House, while nauseating sycophants like Meta’s Mark Zuckerburg and House Speaker Mike Johnson cheered from the audience.

This is the kind of demoralizing spectacle Donald Trump wanted for his 80th birthday—lying that it has anything to do with the 250th celebration of American independence. We can take some solace in knowing that just 16 percent of Americans find such an event appropriate at our White House. Still, the sight of the White House in the Paramount+ streaming was enough to make me cry. Yet I’d like to focus here not on this sickening show, but on what happened Friday night at our sacred Lincoln Memorial. The disgrace and dishonor that took place there should not be forgotten—and it should remind us why this memorial is such a meaningful part of our nation’s history.

First, what happened: The cage fighters, part of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), descended the steps of the Lincoln Memorial with our greatest president’s marble statue in the background. And they descended for a press conference—which included shoving and trading insults—between the two columns of the Armed Forces Full Honor Cordon. These are uniformed soldiers deployed to honor heads of state, other visiting dignitaries, top government officials or fallen military heroes. This respected corps is not meant to honor bloody cage fighters. But what made this display particularly vile was the choice of venue. The Lincoln Memorial was completed and dedicated in 1922 when Warren G. Harding was president, just 57 years after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination and the end of the Civil War. Those tragedies were not just distant memories. From today’s perspective, that would be equivalent to looking back to 1969. (I suspect many of older readers would say that they remember well that year when American astronauts landed on the moon.)

Steven Beschloss nailed it here on the UFC Freedom 250 farce: “Elect a clown, expect a circus.”

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Erin Reed at Erin In The Morning:

During one of the mid-card fights, UFC heavyweight Josh Hokit beat Derrick Lewis by TKO, exited the cage to drape a gold chain around President Trump's neck at ringside, then returned to the microphone and called Michelle Obama “a man,” a reference to anti-trans conspiracy theories in right-wing circles that Michelle Obama is transgender—she is not.

In the aftermath of the fight, Joe Rogan interviewed Hokit in the cage. "Congratulations, sir. I'm here with the winner, Josh Hokit. Josh, once again you proved the doubters wrong, moved to 10 and 0, and knocked out one of the biggest knockout artists in the history of the sport," Rogan said. Hokit responded: "I'm the man with the plan, the piece that's ready to feast. You know what, f—k this speech. Shoutout to Trump for having the balls to put something like this on. And if I'm going to say anything, there's only one person more incredible than the Incredible Hok, and that's my lord and savior Jesus Christ"—before pivoting from his supposedly deeply held religious beliefs to transphobia: "And lastly, Michelle Obama is a man. Am I right, America?" Rogan smiled, did not push back, and ended the interview: "Ladies and gentlemen, Josh Hokit."

It is not Hokit's first brush with transphobia—he has made it a centerpiece of his fighting career. The fighter, who is ranked highly, has repeatedly used his post-fight interviews as a platform for bigotry. After beating Eric Lunsford at in May 2025, before he was even in the UFC, Hokit ended his interview with the same line: "Michelle Obama is a man." In January 2026, after beating Denzel Freeman, he ended a post-fight speech by calling WNBA legend and 10-time All-Star Brittney Griner "a man"—during the same speech in which he also used the N-word. No consequences followed. Hokit has also posted an Instagram video in which he explicitly threatened violence against transgender women, stating: "If you're a man and you identify as a woman, you don't belong in women's sports, women's restrooms, or women's prisons. You belong in this Octagon with me, cause you need to get your ass whooped."

It is also not nearly UFC's first brush with transphobia and homophobia. UFC middleweight champion Sean Strickland has called being trans "a mental f—king illness" and said that society "should never accept" transgender people. He once claimed that having a gay son would mean he "failed as a man" for creating "such weakness." The sport has also long struggled with hostility toward Fallon Fox, the first openly transgender MMA fighter, who competed in the 2010s and whose treatment by the MMA community became a precursor to the broader anti-trans sports bans we see today. [...] It is worth noting that the conspiracy theory that Michelle Obama is transgender is completely unfounded. It is part of a broader pattern in which people opposed to transgender existence claim that prominent women—from Serena Williams to Lady Gaga to Brigitte Macron to Brittney Griner—are "secretly trans," treating the accusation itself as a degradation. The underlying logic is the same logic that drives bathroom bills and sports bans: that someone could be "secretly" transgender, and that this would be a deception, a danger, or a punchline

In the aftermath of his UFC Freedom 250 match, UFC fighter Josh Hokit pushed transphobic bigotry against former First Lady Michelle Obama by falsely asserting that he is a “man.” Hokit has repeatedly trafficked in anti-trans bigotry.

See Also:

LGBTQ Nation: UFC fighter says, “Michelle Obama is a man!” at White House Freedom 250 event

Uwa Ede-Osifo at The Guardian:

A US district court judge has ordered the Trump administration to reinstate any history or science materials it removed from the nation’s public monuments, finding that the White House’s actions “set a dangerous precedent of censorship and sanitization”. In March 2025, Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “restoring truth and sanity to American history”, calling upon the secretary of interior to examine monuments, memorials and statues to see if they had been altered after January 2020 to represent a “false construction of American history”.

2020 was a year marked by national protests for racial justice. The ensuing public reckoning about race and equity spurred the removal of statues commemorating Confederate leaders. The Trump directive came as the White House waged war on so-called liberal “wokeism,” rolling back Biden-era diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) practices and policies (in the past, the president has described DEI as divisive and particularly discriminatory against white people).

The Trump administration also sought to purge “corrosive” or “ideological indoctrination” from exhibitions at the nation’s historical and cultural institutions.

The 2025 executive order resulted in the deinstallation of signage and material at these sites, which referenced topics such as slavery, civil rights, Indigenous history and climate change, according to a February lawsuit that a group of conservation organizations filed against the Trump administration.

[...]

Massachusetts district judge Angel Kelley sided with their complaint.

David R. Lurie at Public Notice:

Until recently, it seemed Donald Trump would cement the GOP’s status as the political home of “faith”-driven voters that it took on decades ago. But since returning to power, Trump and his celebrations of corruption and debasement have begun tearing away at that foundation. It presents Democrats with an opportunity to seize the mantle of the party of faith-based morality, or at least share it with Republicans in a previously unanticipated way. To understand how the GOP became the political party for white Christians, we have to go back to the Reagan administration. The first evangelical Christian president was on the ballot during 1980 — Jimmy Carter. Yet it was Reagan who would cement the Republican Party’s hold over not only white evangelicals, but a large swath of white Catholic voters too. The alliance was both transactional and performative.

While Reagan was a Hollywood actor who rarely set foot in a church and signed legislation liberalizing California’s abortion restrictions, as a child of rural Illinois, he knew how to appear devout on TV. He managed to come across to many voters as the true embodiment of Midwest “Christian” values, despite running against a deeply committed born again Christian. Reagan’s appeal was politically calculated.

In the wake of the Roe v. Wade ruling less than a decade earlier, a growing cohort of anti-reproductive rights activists had become the fulcrum for a nascent conservative Christian movement. For the first time, suburban Midwestern Catholics became allies with right-wing Southern Evangelicals who, not so many years earlier, would have been deriding them as “Papists.” Reagan’s calls from the Oval Office to “March for Life” rallies in DC during the 1980s marked the beginning of the merger of the Republican Party with what not long before had seemed to be a marginal crew of religious extremists.

While women gaining control over their own bodies was the initial catalyst for the movement, it reflected the rise of a broader and deeply reactionary “cultural” political conservatism — one deeply opposed to growing diversity. The movement is grounded on the claim that the United States needs to reclaim its purportedly foundational “Christianity,” often serving as a code word for the “threat” posed by women and Black Americans receiving civil rights (just this week, the Southern Baptist Convention overwhelmingly voted to reiterate its opposition to women pastors). Republicans’ effectiveness over the ensuing years in convincing many observant evangelical and Catholic voters that the Democratic Party was a threat to their religious institutions and values goes a long way toward explaining how they could be so successful defining Democrats — even those who were devoted people of faith, like Barack Obama and Joe Biden — as avatars of moral decay.

A merger of convenience reaches its apotheosis

After the 2024 election, it was clear that Trump’s second presidency marked a new era in the GOP’s identification as the party of faith. Trump, despite his own ostentatious irreligiousness and amorality, was far better even than Reagan in tapping into the apocalyptic fear of moral decay that powers many right-wing Christian movements. For a time, Trump’s increasingly hyperbolic adoption of culture war tropes, particularly his portrayal of children under assault by “Democrats” intent on changing their genders, seemed remarkably effective. In 2024, he managed to add a material number of Hispanic and even Black voters to his base of white evangelical and Catholics despite a candidacy grounded in racism and xenophobia. But as soon as he retook office, Trump began gratuitously testing the limits of the tolerance of key parts of his “Christian” coalition. Trump’s full-bore assault on the nation’s immigrants, including targeting family members and neighbors of many Hispanic Americans who voted for him, almost instantaneously destroyed any hope that his presidency heralded the addition of substantial numbers of observant Hispanics to the GOP’s “faith” coalition, particularly from the growing cohort of Hispanic evangelicals. [...]

Can there be a new party of faith?

Paxton’s Democratic opponent is James Talarico, a state legislator and seminarian who has chosen to make faith a centerpiece of his campaign. This is a relatively unusual strategy for a Democratic candidate — but one that could well prove to be a harbinger of what’s to come for the party during the run up to 2028. While a raft of self-described progressives are presenting themselves as challengers to the “establishment” in primaries, there is actually remarkably little in the way of major policy disagreement within the Democratic Party. (In fact, there is a growing consensus on the need for structural change to increase economic fairness and reclaim and preserve democratic institutions.) Most every successful Democratic politician advocates taxing the rich, protecting the environment, expanding health care in the face of GOP assaults, and so forth. But some progressive politicians may distinguish themselves in other ways, including by bringing appeals to faith into Democratic politics.

Like Talarico, some prospective Democratic presidential candidates are signaling they intend to run campaigns based on messages of curing the moral rot that Trumpism has wrought upon the nation, albeit with different approaches — some more openly rooted in religion than others. Sen. Chris Murphy — a longtime progressive opponent of Trump — has released a pre-campaign book titled “Crisis of the Common Good: The Fight for Meaning and Connection in a Broken America.” Murphy argues the Trump era has left much of the nation not only materially weakened, but also spiritually broken. (Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky also has a book about his faith coming out later this year.)

Pete Buttigieg discusses his Christian faith in conjunction with his commitment to public life, stating that “God does not belong to an American political party. But moral frameworks are essential for fashioning a conscience that can stand up against injustice.” Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, an observant Jew, has long drawn a connection between his faith and his politics — to remarkable success, somewhat surprisingly, given that he does not belong to the religion of most Pennsylvanians. As he begins to formulate a nascent campaign message, Shapiro argues that Trump has failed a “morality test” by repeatedly seeking to divide Americans. While emphasizing pragmatism, Shapiro also contends there must be a moral repair of the nation in the post-Trump era, a cure Shapiro suggests could be inspired by the faith of believers of different religions.

As those examples demonstrate, while the next Democratic standard bearer may appeal to religious faith in a way Democratic leaders have often shied away from in the past, that appeal will almost certainly be quite different from that of Reagan — and certainly from that of Trump. For over 45 years, Republicans have effectively focused their appeals to “Christian” Americans on sectarianism, and melded them with messages designed to enhance fears of demographic and social change. In the process, as some emerging Democratic leaders contend, they have left Americans with a society that is morally, spiritually, and materially broken. It is just possible that Trump — whose appeals to a certain cohort of the religiously observant have morphed into an almost gleeful celebration of amorality — may have, entirely unintentionally, opened the door to a new kind of faith-inspired politics. Time will tell.

Molly Sprayregen (She/Her) at LGBTQ Nation:

House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is set to retire in 2027 and recently spoke about her decades-long career advocating for LGBTQ+ rights. “Anything that we accomplished, whether it was fighting HIV and AIDS, ending discrimination, passing hate crimes legislation, or ending ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,’ would never have happened without outside mobilization,” she humbly told the Washington Blade. “Our inside maneuvering was important, but we couldn’t do our best job without the community. Every chance I get, I thank them for their patriotism because they make democracy function.” The Blade called Pelosi “one of the most influential champions of LGBTQ rights in American politics,” recognizing, among other things, her HIV/AIDS advocacy, as well as the roles she played in passing the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act and in repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”

Pelosi said the Hate Crimes Act was a defining success for both her and LGBTQ+ people “because it forced people to confront the real consequences of hate.” She also said she refused to remove trans protections from the bill, no matter how much advisors pushed. “People told me, ‘You can pass this in a minute if you take out trans,’” Pelosi said. “I said, ‘I won’t pass it in 100 years because I’m not ever taking out trans.’ We passed it with trans protections included.” Pelosi also spoke about how combatting the HIV/AIDS crisis was a central reason she first ran for Congress in the late 1980s. “My first words on the House floor were that I had come here to fight HIV and AIDS,” she said. “People asked why I would make that my first statement. To me, that reaction showed just how much discrimination still existed and how much work remained to be done.” “When we were trying to bring the Democratic convention to San Francisco, people were saying they couldn’t come because of HIV/AIDS,” she added. “What emerged from that moment was community-based advocacy, community-based care, prevention, and research. Every success we had sprang from the community itself.” She also believes the epidemic, despite its atrocities, did ultimately bring greater LGBTQ+ acceptance.

Oliver Willis at Daily Kos:

Millions could see it coming from a mile away, but President Donald Trump went through with his visit to Madison Square Garden for the New York Knicks vs. San Antonio Spurs game—where he faced thunderous boos from a crowd that loathes him. While Trump and his suck-ups at Fox News tried to pretend that the crowd was divided, video evidence and common sense shows otherwise. And it’s not surprising. Former Vice President Kamala Harris underperformed other Democrats in New York City in the 2024 election, and she still easily defeated Trump by nearly 38 points. The city is Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s territory—not Trump’s.

Trump expects more receptive crowds—like the ones at UFC fights—but the NBA response was more in line with what traditionally happens to Trump, like when he was booed while attending the World Series at Nationals Park in 2019. Trump has a fundamental misunderstanding of the relationship between sports and its fans, which explains the wide gap between the reaction he expects and the one he actually gets. [...] Trump is a racist whose entire public persona has been wrapped in bigotry, which directly clashes with the diverse world of sports. [...] Trump has aligned himself with fellow millionaires and billionaires, walling himself off from regular Americans. The billionaire class, including Trump, can’t connect with sports because they exist in a closed-off, glass-encased world where their out-of-touch views aren’t called out—which is when a person like Trump starts to think that NBA fans actually want to see him.