The White House UFC fight is a grand pageant for an 80-year-old boy king

On the White House South Lawn, rising high above the Executive Mansion, a battlefield awaits. The temporary coliseum erected for Sunday night’s Ultimate Fighting Championship matches promises a spectacle unlike any ever held on a president’s doorstep. The Trump administration insists the event is part of the celebration of America’s 250^th anniversary, unironically linking the country’s founding with an evening of violence on an altar to hypermasculinity.

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But the timing of the event, taking place on President Donald Trump’s 80th birthday, is no mere coincidence. As with last year’s military parade, ostensibly in honor of the U.S. Army’s 200th birthday, the president has seized on the opportunity to disguise a taxpayer-funded gift to himself as a present to the nation. While the administration attempts to link these fights to the revolutionaries who rebelled against a monarch, Sunday’s event more closely resembles a king and his court attending a tournament in the late Middle Ages. The federal government has spent an embarrassingly large sum in the hopes of providing a diversion for America’s would-be king as the country’s greatest ills go untreated.

Presidents enjoying a bit of rough-and-tumble is nothing new. Abraham Lincoln was known for being a wrestler in his youth, while Theodore Roosevelt’s love of boxing followed him to the White House. Trump is neither. He is a man who has late in life gravitated towards mixed martial arts and in particular its blend of pro-wrestling’s dramatic characters and the bare-knuckled beatings its practitioners administer. It befits a man who once reportedly made his son fast-forward through all the boring plot exposition of a favorite action movie, “Bloodsport.”

Trump’s presence in the hastily constructed arena, known as “The Claw,” lends itself perfectly to the image of a feudal lord observing most modern conceptions of medieval tournaments. Unlike the recreations seen at Renaissance Faires and Medieval Times outposts around the country, the original tournaments focused on warriors clashing in a massive melee. Knights and other men-at-arms could display their battlefield skills in a more contained setting to win renown and ransom from their defeated opponents. Only over time did tournaments shift to emphasize the more scaled-down, but still dangerous, events like jousting.

By the 16^th century, tournaments had also become a way for their noble organizers to show off their vast wealth or herald auspicious moments in their lives. When King Henry VIII of England held a royal summit with King Francis I of France in 1520, it took place at the “Field of the Cloth of Gold,” so named for how much of the expensive fabric was used in crafting the tents and costumes assembled there. Both royals took part in the tournaments to show off their own athleticism as a stand-in for their military prowess. Prof. Glenn Robinson of St. Mary’s University estimated in 2020 that the whole shebang roughly cost the equivalent of £15 million pounds — roughly $25 million in 2026 dollars.