President Trump’s 80th birthday Ultimate Fighting Championship stunt on the South Lawn of the White House on Sunday night was a mass-media spectacle unlike any in the history of the presidency.
Mr. Trump sat ringside beside his wife, Melania Trump, as fighters whaled on one another inches away inside an eight-sided cage wrapped in cryptocurrency advertisements. All five of his children and nearly all his grandchildren sat around him.
Thousands more were there on the lawn beneath a 600-ton steel-arch contraption called the Claw. The White House loomed dramatically over a fighting pit packed with billionaires, cabinet members and Republican lawmakers.
It was all such an astonishing sight for so many reasons: The use of the trappings of the White House for violent cage fighting. The corporate sponsorships. The eruptions of casual cruelty. At one point, a fighter took the mic and made a nasty joke about Michelle Obama while standing in front of the house she once lived in with her husband, daughters and mother.
Even for a president with a lifelong penchant for P.T. Barnum-esque gambits, this one was in a league of its own.
Much of the White House was given over to this production. Fighters were filmed walking out through various rooms inside the residence and warming up, barefoot, in the Indian Treaty Room of the Old Executive Office Building across the way.
The crowd included the tech and media billionaires Mark Zuckerberg and David Ellison. Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the majority leader, was there, as was Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. The secretaries of state, Treasury, defense, commerce and homeland security were there. So was the vice president, the F.B.I. director and Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, who is due back from maternity leave soon. Kid Rock showed up, and so did Roger Clemens and Robert Kraft. James Dolan, the owner of the New York Knicks, walked up to the president to pay his respects.
Klieg lights crawled across the Old Executive Office Building and the great mature magnolia and willow oak trees of the White House grounds. At times it was eerily still and silent inside the Claw as fighters circled one another, waiting to pounce. But once a guy took his shot and really started clobbering, the Claw would come alive.
In the first round, a fighter named Diego Lopes conquered, climbed up to straddle the stretch of cage right in the front of the president’s face and punched his fist in the air. Mr. Trump stared up at him, smiling.
Joe Rogan popped into the ring a moment later for a little post-match analysis: “You caught him in a beautiful left hook.”
Every so often the enormous screens hanging in each of the Claw’s four corners would play a video. In one clip, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Mr. Trump talked about American military might as footage of explosions and gunfire lit up the arena. All the while, storm clouds swirled cinematically over the White House.
In some sense, Mr. Trump’s 80th birthday brawl on the lawn was the apogee of a series of moves he has been making for half his life.
A seminal moment came in the late 1980s when he successfully wooed the boxer Mike Tyson to fight in Atlantic City. Mr. Tyson was then the heavyweight champion of the world. His bouts drew the biggest celebrities of the day to Mr. Trump’s properties. Sinatra. Beatty and Nicholson. Sean and Madonna. Money, ego, gore, vanity, hype and the flash of the camera all mixed together, ringside, and a fundamental chapter of the Trumpian playbook was written.
Mr. Trump learned in those years and the years to follow from two of the most famous fight promoters of all time, Don King (“Only in America!”) and Vince McMahon (his wife is our current secretary of education). WrestleMania came to Trump Plaza, and Mr. Trump made many kayfabe cameos. (Is it any wonder Hulk Hogan was given a speaking slot at the Republican National Convention?)
Mr. Trump eventually found a new Don King in Dana White, the chief executive of U.F.C. Together, the two are doing what Mr. Trump has pretty much always done. The stage is bigger than ever, the context more surreal, but the stunt itself and the instincts behind it are familiar. Money, ego, gore, vanity, hype and the flash of the camera, all mixing on the South Lawn of the White House. Mr. Trump at 80 has whipped up a spectacle the same way he learned to at 40. Americans elected a fight promoter as president, twice, and a fight promoter is what they got.
One thing that has changed over the years is the nature of the fighting itself. U.F.C. is a different kind of smash-em-up derby from the boxing matches Mr. Trump presided over in the 1980s. Next to it, professional wrestling is the New York City Ballet. The Octagon is a place of brutal entertainment, a raw pageant of pain. It’s cockfighting with men as birds.
Between bouts, women in skimpy Wonder Woman get-ups sauntered around the edge of the ring. At one point, a triumphant fighter named Josh Hokit — the one who made the remark about Mrs. Obama — approached the edge of the ring, leaned forward and draped a chain over Mr. Trump’s neck.
On and on it went. More men beat each other up. A video of Conor McGregor talking smack blared on the lawn. Pyrotechnics shot out from the appendages of the claw. Jet planes flew low overhead.
There were several fights over the course of the evening. In one of them, a man from Philly with bleach-blond hair was down on his back, trying to fend off a fighter named Bo Nickal. A gust of wind blew in and lifted up the president’s hair. He reached up to pat it back down around the sides of his head. Mr. Nickal was really pummeling the man from Philly now.
The round ended. Mr. Nickal climbed up and out of the ring, bent low and shook hands with the president and first lady. Mr. Rogan returned to the ring to narrate. “Bo,” he said, “I know how patriotic you are.” Bo thanked the president for hosting.
“It takes such a special person,” he said, “to be able to have the balls to do something like this.”
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