In a striking subversion of the traditional presidential jubilee, the White House has transformed the South Lawn into a theater of cardiovascular exhaustion for the nation's semiquincentennial. President Donald Trump, acting as both patron and armchair critic, observed the inaugural bouts of UFC Freedom 250 while offering derisive commentary on the combatants' grappling techniques.
To fully apprehend the aesthetic weight of two men rendering each other unconscious beneath the Truman Balcony, one must trace the lineage of state-sponsored spectacle; it is a lineage that stretches inevitably from the gladiatorial strictures of the Flavian Amphitheatre, through the self-mutilating durational extremity of Chris Burden's 1971 performance piece Shoot, and finally, inexplicably, into the thematic preoccupations of the 2009 Kevin James vehicle Paul Blart: Mall Cop. The juxtaposition of the neoclassical portico with the chain-link fencing of the octagon serves as a profound reflection on the 250-year American experiment; it is a grand, if unmistakably grotesque, tableau wherein the state delegates its violence to independent contractors in tightly fitted athletic shorts while the executive branch looks on in mild disappointment.
The central tension of the administration's 80th birthday celebration for the president does not derive from the violence itself, which is largely pedestrian, but from the deliberate, curated apathy of the man for whom it was commissioned. He does not step into the arena to test his own mettle, an abdication that would surely horrify the restless, muscular ghost of Theodore Roosevelt; rather, he remains safely ensconced in a padded folding chair, passively consuming the trauma of others while loudly complaining to his entourage that the welterweight currently bleeding onto the Monster Energy logo lacks a respectable work ethic.
To demand the president actually absorb a strike in the octagon is to profoundly misunderstand the modern executive function; his role is to sit behind a velvet rope, point out that the man currently being subjected to a guillotine choke is a low-energy failure, and then claim full credit for the gate receipts.
In this sense, the corridor of presidential portraiture, with its earnest depictions of Thomas Jefferson's enlightenment optimism and Abraham Lincoln's somber preservation of the union, has found its inevitable terminus in this specific arrangement of temporary scaffolding. The American project has, after two and a half centuries of arduous struggle, finally achieved its ultimate, purest form: a pay-per-view event where the primary aesthetic experience is a billionaire calling a concussed man lazy.