A President Who is Never Too Busy to Celebrate Himself — at Our Expense
What does it mean to be an American in 2026? Two distinctly and significantly different visions showed themselves in recent days.
On the South Side of Chicago, there was the long-awaited opening of the Obama Presidential Center. In the presence of three past presidents and an assembly of dignitaries and music stars, former President Barack Obama saluted “American values we can all share,” and he expressed his faith that Americans “are looking for fairness and common sense and mutual respect, that deep in our gut we want to find a way to turn towards each other again, not further away.”
A few days earlier, on the White House lawn in Washington, a very different celebration took place. Its centerpiece was a less permanent yet still pretty expensive structure, a 600-ton steel and star-spangled “Claw,” which to Gal Beckerman of The Atlantic “looked like it was about to pick up the White House like a stuffed animal in an arcade game.”
This was the setting of UFC Freedom 250, an evening of mixed martial arts matches staged to celebrate President Donald Trump’s 80th birthday and, apparently, our nation’s semiquincentennial.
Among other crowd-pleasers, it included an Air Force flyover, a Marine Corps band with singers, military honor guards and “Octagon Girls” in sequined red-white-and-blue costumes to parade around the big cage between rounds for a spectacle that, perhaps intentionally, reminded many of ancient Roman gladiator matches.
Trump Fight Club, as some wags called it, drew 17 million viewers on Paramount+, in addition to a few thousand lucky spectators on White House grounds. Machismo was the theme of the evening, and it inspired at least one brawl to break out at the watch party held at the Ellipse nearby.
To say it was tacky would be to give quiet satisfaction to all involved in the planning and production of the event. That was certainly the intent. To bring cage fighting into the inner sanctum of American political power was the ultimate hat tip from Trump to his base.
Yet in typical MAGA fashion, they took it too far. After Josh Hokit defeated Derrick Lewis in a heavyweight bout, he failed to show some class when he needed it most. While speaking to UFC analyst and podcast star Joe Rogan, he decided to be cute by taking a verbal shot at former First Lady Michelle Obama.
After praising “my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ,” he loudly repeated a long-running conspiracy theory from the foggy-brain corners of the paranoid right: “Lastly,” he announced, “Michelle Obama is a man! Am I right, America?”
Wrong, according to her two daughters, among others. While the crowd’s rowdiest members cheered and others grimaced, even Trump appeared to register how wrong this was, as TMZ’s camera captured him quickly removing from around his neck the necklace that Hokit had given to him earlier.
Was this a rare display of shame on Trump’s part, evidence of a shred of human decency? Don’t bet on it. Earlier in the month, after all, he posted to Truth Social an AI-generated image of a decrepit Obama Center as an overflowing garbage can, sitting amid a bombed-out hellscape that was supposed to be the South Side.
It’s hardly the first time Trump has gone viral with a depiction of Chicago created by or for people who have never been to Chicago.
At this point, it should surprise nobody that Trump was not invited to the opening of the Obama Center. The two men have fundamentally different visions of America. Without plumbing too deeply into Trump’s pathologies, suffice it to say he and his supporters have a deep psychological need to tear down Obama and all he stood for and accomplished. It’s a complex that’s producing more and more serious problems for America (c.f. Iran).
There’s a tendency to accept that Red vs. Blue America is a natural consequence of an intractable difference in culture. And Trump has willingly exploited that. Unfortunately, too many of us accept the idea. A lot of people are upset by the notion of bringing cage fights to the White House, shuddering at the bad taste of it all. This is a mistake.
President Theodore Roosevelt engaged in regular sparring on the premises, which left him with a detached retina in his left eye — which he kept secret for more than a decade.
Manliness is a touchy subject these days, but there was a time when honorable combat was respected above the mere running of one’s mouth.
Ernest Hemingway famously declared, “My writing is nothing, my boxing is everything.”
To him, the ring was a profound philosophical stage on which the virtues of discipline, resilience, and raw honesty were tested, reflecting much the same demands he placed on his writing.
Trump, a fan of rough-ridin’ TR, no doubt covets the imputed manliness of enjoying a good fight, although you’ll never catch him in the ring.
Still, I say let him indulge in his UFC fandom if it distracts him enough to go quietly after his term is up.
Let’s leave him and his manosphere fanatics to their lame trolling and hijinks, while remembering that plenty of ordinary Americans seek more than entertainment.
For his entire life, Trump has been driven by grandiosity, solipsism, impulsiveness, lack of empathy, obsession with power and dominance and a bottomless need for praise and adulation, and an obsession with avenging the littlest perceived slights.
He’s done a lot of damage to the American body politic, and to American interests at home and abroad, but he has not snuffed out Americans’ conviction that, together, we can form a more perfect union. As America approaches its 250th birthday, that’s worth celebrating.
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(E-mail Clarence Page at clarence47page@gmail.com.)
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