Peter Wehner: “Donald Trump’s eightieth birthday was in some ways the apotheosis of the Trump administration—the Final Combating Championship held a seven-fight card on the South Garden of the White Home, with the president and members of his household in attendance.”
“The occasion was garish, lurid, and crass—completely calibrated to enchantment to the president. A large army flyover. The usage of honor guards to usher UFC fighters into the cage. ‘Octagon Ladies’ in sequined red-white-and-blue costumes parading across the cage between rounds… The principle occasion, a light-weight championship bout between Justin Gaethje and Ilia Topuria, left Topuria bloodied and battered, his face mangled, his imaginative and prescient so impaired that he was hospitalized after the battle…”
“It was Trump’s model of the Roman imperial video games—state-sponsored brutality as public leisure, staged to please the emperor and his courtiers, desecrating a public house. He clearly relished each second of it. However the MAGA motion—and the 80-year-old man who leads it—is breaking up.”
