And so to a pricey Iran "deal” maybe (or not) ending an inept illegal war that fails on all fronts - military, political, economic, moral - and strengthens Iran’s hand as a regional power. Where are we, asks retired Major General Paul Eaton after "a war with no plan, no strategy, no achievable objective, no definition of what victory even looked like, and no plan for day 2." His response: "Thirteen dead. Years of lost readiness. Higher prices in every American home. All to arrive back at the starting line, weaker than when we left it." Meanwhile, the cost of his fucking ballroom that nobody asked for has soared 50% to $600 million, more than half to be paid by us, not imaginary "generous American patriots."
In another weekend fail, symbolic but gratifying, hundreds of real patriots gathered - and thousands watched a livestream - to see the vile name stripped from the Kennedy Center after US District Judge Christopher Cooper ruled it illegal. Alas, the crowd waited all day and night in humid heat - bearing flags, "You're No JFK" signs, hope to see "a horrible scar" vanquished - only for Friday's midnight deadline to come and go as workers built endless scaffolding and Center lackeys filed last-ditch appeals. Rumors flew, chants grew - "TAKE IT DOWN," "Rest in Shame," "Tear down that wall," "More Cow Bell" - as drag queen Tara Hoot blew bubbles and Rep. Joyce Beatty declared, to cheers, "We cannot be silenced."
The approach of midnight brought breathless countdowns - "30 minutes!“ "Five minutes!" "No pressure - you’re doing great!” - then angry charges of "a cover-up in real time" when it passed. People sang This Land is Your Land, thunderstorms halted work (and extended the deadline), and when a miraculous double rainbow emerged, people huddled under awnings to sing God Bless America and give thanks: "And the angels sang...Mother Nature Understands The Assignment...Just think what She'll do when he leaves the White House...Well-played, universe." One worker in a lift could have quickly done the job; instead, 13 hours later, the final scaffolding went up - to hang a tarp, met with boos, to hide a snowflake's shame.
Around 4 a.m, the Center later told the judge, the 18 odious letters of “The Donald J. Trump and" had been removed. For the public, it's hard to tell: The tarp's still up. To Andrew Flanagan, it confirms "how deeply insecure & pathetic" is the guy who's usually a "big redaction fan" - for the Epstein files, Mueller report, Jan. 6 transcripts, any form of accountability. "Nothing says 'stable genius' like illegally slapping your name on a cultural landmark, then hiding your name getting ripped off behind a bedsheet like a toddler who broke a vase," he wrote, adding, "Sheet was probably stolen from a hotel." Still, the action offered a modest "preview of Independence Day," what one resident called "this little splash of hope in the rain."
Not so his vaunted, likely illegal, American-flag-blue do-over of the Lincoln Reflecting Pool: Because everything he touches dies or stinks, it has joined the Resistance by swiftly reverting to its previous brackish green. After the "expert builder" removed a state-of-the-art filtration system installed by Barack Hussein Obama, used a darker paint that draws heat and algae, boasted its"CLEAN, BEAUTIFUL WATER” would "SPARKLE magnificently...for 100 years," and insisted the rogue algae was just a “residual part of the normal startup process," the $1.5 million job that became a no-bid $14.2 million has in mere days proved an algae-beset bust. Now National Park workers are frantically dumping gallons of hydrogen peroxide into it. Is it great yet?
There was also Paige, the four-ton elephant bedecked with a "Unity Drives Victory" banner the Texas GOP brought into its annual convention in Houston, a promised "larger-than-life surprise" who abundantly peed at the feet of the faithful just as Greg Abbott finished his keynote speech - what Dems called a "perfect metaphor for the Texas Republican Party." While it's unclear how much Dear Leader is to blame for that fiasco, he's totally, shamelessly, smirkingly responsible for the simultaneous atrocity unfolding on the White House Lawn: An impossibly base, blood-spattered cage fight, "crass display of toxic hyper machismo," and "bar fight making millions for the Epstein class" that "flaunted the absolute worst of America."
UFC Freedom 250, the besmirching of a staid White House lawn long reserved for dignified welcomes to foreign leaders, careful displays of statesmanship and the occasional Easter egg roll, began in May with the construction of a massive, hulking, $60 million cage called "the Claw." For weeks, up to 900 workers from seven federal agencies, including DHS and FAA, labored on our dime to build a gaudy monstrosity for 14 mixed martial arts fighters to beat and pummel each other bloody - at a "House that has hosted Churchill, Mandela, the Apollo astronauts...(that) sits at the center of the constitutional republic a generation of Americans bled for in places whose names their grandchildren cannot pronounce."
Trump "sees everything and everyone in terms of dominance or submission," notes Robert Reich. Choosing to mark his fucking big boy birthday by wrapping it in the pretext of the country's 250th anniversary and planning what's been likened to a "human cockfighting" spectacle on the White House Lawn, Reich adds, is "seeking to project an America like the winner of a cage match" - cheap, crude, violent, and so brazenly tasteless that even Republicans who once freaked out at Michelle Obama's vegetable garden there joined the vast 84% of Americans who denounced the event. Implausibly, impressively, the damning consensus reached Fox News viewers. "Tacky as hell," declared one. "Trump is a white trash president."
He is also history's most corrupt president, so no surprise his "gift to Americans" proved, per a failed lawsuit, "a volcano of corruption" and a “private, commercial, corrupt use of our most sacred national monuments," with Trump at its greedy core. He invested heavily in UFC owner TKO; his World Liberty Financial crypto business, earning billions on paper, was an “official sponsor"; so was Truth Social - "Download Truth Social today!"- and TrumpCoins.com - "Limited quantities available now!" Melding corporate and political grift, fighters were "paid" crypto bonuses, ads and logos were everywhere, fights in a Bud-Light-adorned ring had to be watched with a subscription to Paramount Plus, sponsorships cost up to $1.5 million per person.
The flagrant profiteering and Hunger Games optics were so "tone-deaf to the struggles of the American people” even some UFC fighters objected. "I don’t give a fuck to fight in front of some fucking billionaires and rich people," said one; added middleweight champion Sean Strickland, "To go hang out with people on the Epstein list? I'm good, dog.” (He was reportedly banned for criticizing Israel and the Epstein cover-up; he turned up anyway that night and was later escorted out by security for causing "disorder.") All in all, in a "celebration of American strength and exceptionalism" featuring guys clearly not quite princes among men, it was less than surprising things regularly descended into cruder, meaner, more vicious territory.
Bantamweight Sean O’Malley, "a nasty little shit" in all red, white and blue, the color scheme for everything in sight - has publicly defended cheating on his wife because rapist and human trafficker Andrew Tate said it was okay: "If I get a little puss on the side - I got status, so I can." After he beat Canada’s Aiemann Zahabi to raucous chants of "U-S-A!" he thanked his fans, offered a tribute to UFC's Dana White - "Dana’s a fucking gangster," and threw up several straight-armed "Sieg Heils" to Trump. The team of four accommodating announcers - who rapturously praised the event's "unbelievable" energy, spirit, patriotism that gave them "goosebumps...How special is it to be here?" - called them "salutes to the troops."
Like all the fighters, O'Malley had earlier walked through the lofty Lincoln Memorial to a scuffling weigh-in where thugs jousted - "Don't act like a fucking animal" - and a press conference. Like the others, he later dressed in an opulent White House "locker room," aka the historic Indian Treaty Room, and made his cinematic way to the Claw flanked by an honor guard - a veteran, first responder or Medal of Honor recipient - cleverly obliging every service member to salute as he walked past. Lincoln, Eisenhower, Paul Krugman weep at the "unspeakably vulgar" debasement. The ancient philosopher Seneca, on the rise and fall of a Roman Empire that also boasted extreme inequality and gladiatorial games: "The way to ruin is rapid."
Sean O'Malley walks from the White House to his fight with an Honor GuardPhoto by Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
Before the actual bloodshed, there were weeks of other grotesqueries: Screaming promos - "Are you ready?!" - with an AI, shirtless, oiled, ripped fantasy Trump next to other oiled guys grappling; a $1-million-a-plate fundraising "candlelight dinner," probs akin to this one, at Trump's D.C. golf club; a barbed, garbled panel of all 14 fighters, adding more insult to injury to the Lincoln Memorial. The big bellicose day started with Trump and White marching (or waddling) out to their own color guard, a flyover by the Blue Angels and Thunderbirds, and the incongruous sight of Nitro Circus motocross riders on dirt bikes flying through jumps and spins in front of the White House. Best comment: "OMG ffs we just want health care."
Despite a hilariously sinister weather forecast - lightning, downpours, wind gusts, possible swarms of mosquitoes in the heat - fights were only delayed an hour, with no rain. The waiting crowd, less than a predicted 4,000 ringside and 80,000 at the Ellipse watching on huge screens, were treated to a Department of War (sic) recruitment video touting "peace through strength," songs from American Pie to Sex on Fire, "ring girls" in sexy "patriotic motifs," UFC fights projected onto iconic buildings - including rapist Conor McGregor on the Washington Monument - and protesters chanting, “Whose house? Our house!" alongside a makeshift cage filled with puppets of regime lackeys "to show them behind bars where they belong."
Ultimately, all seven fights ended in knockouts or TKOs, many brutal. Former lightweight champion Ilia Topuria, in his first fight since he and his ex-wife reached a settlement after she accused him of domestic abuse, lost to Justin Gaethje in a TKO that left Topuria's face so bloodied a doctor nearly stopped the bout; the crowd chanted "U-S-A!" and “Let them fight!”, he did, and Topuria was later found to have suffered orbital fractures in both eyes. Lightweight Michael Chandler, 40, was "destroyed" by upstart Brazilian Mauricio Ruffy in Round 1. Fans urged Chandler to "Retire, please"; through a translator, Ruffy asked his girlfriend to marry him "since we're right here at the White House," and urged fans to, "Give your life to Jesus."
The fights, and the graphic accounts of their pummeling, were savage: "Ruffy stung Chandler with a spinning heel kick, hurt him with an uppercut and whipped a horrific body shot into his midsection, ripping a nasty liver punch...Chandler shoots for a takedown, but Ruffy sprawls. OH! Another spinning heel kick! Down goes Chandler!" Etc. Later, at a post-fight press conference with most of the fighters - except Topuria, in the hospital - Dana White celebrated an event with "no political agenda." “I believe that if you are an American, no matter where you sit politically, tonight was just a proud night,” he said. "Hopefully, we created some unity in the country and the world, and brought in some new fans."
Diego Lopes celebrates defeating Steve Garcia in their featherweight bout. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Still, all the disingenuous violence paled before the barbarism of heavyweight Josh Hokit, a self described “100% transphobic" who called a Black fighter "a human gorilla," tried to sic ICE on his Mexican mother, and theatrically staggered wasted into the weigh-in pretending to puke from a night of drinking because "a giant black man wants to knock me out." After taking down aforementioned black man Derrick Lewis, Hokit offered Trump ringside a gaudy pendant and a shout-out "for having the balls to put something like this on." Then he giddily proclaimed himself "the beast that's ready to feast," thanked "my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ,” and added, " Michelle Obama is a man. Am I right, America?"
The crowd gave a modest, sickening roar. The president said nothing in response, nor has he yet, because the "short-fingered vulgarian" is not celebrating a birthday or a nation's anniversary so much as he is "flipping off all of it, and all of us, by desecrating every American temple that presidential authority touches." "The bar has been on the ground for so long we have stopped noticing we are crawling," writes Tom Wellborn of "what the man in the cage chose to do with the microphone at the White House." Hokit spoke with "the full confidence of a man in a room that told him his worst instincts were welcome," and where "the culture of the room tells you cruelty is the entry fee."
Hokit "read the room," he goes on, "with attention to what the environment rewards and what it punishes, and what the environment rewarded was the ugliest thing a person could say. He knew the environment would punish nothing, because the man whose birthday it was has built his entire career on the same calculation...The president got another night of the only thing he has ever wanted - the performance of dominance in a room full of people who will never tell him no." But that night, people also gathered in another room on another planet, where Robert De Niro welcomed "all of you who couldn't get tickets to the White House cage fights," urged them to say not just no but "Shut the fuck up," the sane response to an insane historic moment, and they did.
Sean O'Malley walks from the White House to his fight with an Honor GuardPhoto by Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
Diego Lopes celebrates defeating Steve Garcia in their featherweight bout. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images