The people around Donald Trump are dangerous. For them, he is a useful idiot. In him, they have found a vehicle to establish their vision of a grand, civilization redefining project. You’ve got your white nationalists engineering a country purged of those they deem racially inferior. You’ve got your Christian nationalists who imagine a future theocracy in which women are subservient to their menfolk, diversity is a dirty word, and there’s a gun not just in every house but in every hand. And you got your techno-billionaires devoid of any real moral or political compass other than the worship of profit who will gladly fund the first two groups so long as they enable and ensure their mergers and monopolies.
Trump, on the other hand, while he may sympathize with some of their baser motivations – like racism, misogyny and bigotry, and big paydays – has a much smaller objective. Satisfying his own, infantile ego. He wants praise. He wants to see his name on everything like a child screaming “mine, mine, mine.” He wants to see those he feels have wronged him punished and cowering with regret like the kid who stole his lunch money getting detention. He wants to indulge in his own lowbrow and vulgar taste, gaudy displays of gold coupled with the long-surpassed cultural moment of the 70s and the 80s: who else do you know that combines love for the musicals of Andrew Lloyd Webber, the “long-haired pretty-boys” rock of Bon Jovi, the Village People (has anyone told him Y.M.C.A. is about gay sex?), and tv ratings?
And he revels in the clownish symbols of masculinity that appeal to very small, prepubescent boys: big trucks, big boobs (on women), and demonstrations of physical strength or prowess. Instead of taking inspiration from the likes of FDR or Martin Luther King Jr. in defining truly American leadership (I’ll throw in Eisenhower and William F. Buckley Jr. for balance), he takes his cue from He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, one of the most popular animated television shows of the 1980s.
And so it follows that for the 80th birthday of one very special boy, at an event supposedly meant to celebrate the 250th birthday of the nation he leads through some inexplicable twist of fate, the White House hosted a “cage fight” for the Ultimate Fighting Championship, at untold taxpayer expense.
I’ll admit, happily, I am unfamiliar with the Ultimate Fighting Championship and had to do a bit of research that left me feeling like I needed to bathe afterward – I definitely cleared my browser’s history and cache lest I die tomorrow and those cleaning out my things were to come across them and think I harbored some secret interest in what I can only describe as barbaric… and disgusting. The UFC, as it is known, is a competitive league for something called “mixed martial arts” – a pseudo sports-like endeavor that combines elements of kickboxing, wrestling, and traditional boxing, designed to feed an audience’s appetite for maximum violence. Mixed martial arts has none of the redeeming grace of strategy found in boxing or wrestling – the primary qualifications seem to be physical size and a willingness to hurt someone.
Women with fake tans (no wonder Trump likes this) in sequined, American-flag themed skimpy outfits smiled vacantly and pranced around the “cage” holding up placards with the round number written on them – these are the “Octagon Girls,” and regular consumers of this drivel will recognize them from UFC fights where they serve a purely puerile and prurient function (you half expect an excited announcer to say something like “look at the knockers on that one!”). Their exit from the cage, which looks like a fenced-in playpen, signals the start of the so-called competition.
Then, shirtless men wearing nothing but skintight, homoerotic spandex shorts (not even shoes or booties or some other kind of footwear) face off trading high kicks worthy of a ballerina before locking bodies and falling to the floor. Once they are laying down together, one hits the other repeatedly in the face. The object seems to be to inflict head injuries. And draw blood. It is a primitive orgy of violence and brute strength, reminiscent of the Roman Coliseum in its heyday when all-powerful emperors presided over deathmatches between gladiators.
In a strange way, that was probably the appeal, not just for the little boy trapped inside a president, but for the sycophants who hover around him like pilot fish. This hideous, tasteless spectacle included a video montage in which an assortment of these semi-naked fighters’ faces were projected onto DC landmarks synonymous with America – the Capitol building, the reflecting pool, the Washington Monument, the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials (because the desecration of the White House’s south lawn wasn’t enough) – while Ron Perlman narrated what is arguably this administration’s goal: “dominance so overwhelming it became permanent.”
Instead of scoring a victory for the American people, Trumpism’s hope is that Republicans, through brute force, have themselves won a victory for themselves: they’ve defeated any notion of pluralism, individual dignity, and the idea of self-government on which this nation was founded, slain any possibility of meaningful dialog or cultural engagement, and delivered their opponents a painful and humiliating blow… a TKO (it means “technical knockout,” I looked it up).
But they would do well to remember the Coliseum today: no domination, however pervasive and seemingly ascendant, is ever permanent.
