Donald Trump Put America In a Cage Match With Itself. We Lost.

On Sunday night, President Trump celebrated his birthday—and ostensibly the nation’s—in fitting Trumpian fashion: a garish, barbarous cage match on the White House grounds. In front of the people’s house, grown men punched and kicked each other in the body and head. At the end of the signature bout, a victorious Josh Hokit grabbed the microphone from Joe Rogan and exclaimed, “Michelle Obama is a man! Am I right, America?”

In December, I wrote that the planned UFC fight at the White House was the perfect culmination of MAGA fascism—a violent, misogynitic, and boorish display of contemptuous politics. Here’s how I put it then: 

This is what male supremacist and fascist politics offer: a violent, cutthroat society where the loser is scorned and victor takes the spoils. And it’s precisely the kind of order Trump wants to put on display with a White House UFC match.

Using the White House to promote such an event is both an assertion of fascist politics and a tacit acknowledgment of how far we have already fallen. It promises to be a spectacle of toxic male supremacy, put on by an administration that touts the male “war fighter” as the peak of physical fitness. It’s an obsession, as I’ve noted before, with both male power and male bodies. 

I have to say that I think the event was worse than I imagined it would be. The whole thing was a base celebration of the worst qualities humans have to offer. 

In the pre-fight weigh-in, Hokit put on a WWE-style act, pretending to be drunk and feigning anxiety about the fight. The physical performance was exaggerated and a bit pathetic, with Hokit even seeming to spit up on himself at one point. Most notably, he framed his upcoming fight in luridly racial terms, saying to the press, “So what, maybe I was drinking last night. Who wouldn’t be? I have a giant Black man who wants to knock me out. He has the most knockouts in UFC history.”

Sure this was a bit of promotional theater, but the politics of UFC—and especially of UFC within the framework of MAGA—has always been obsessed by fantasies of race, rape, and male dominance. The image conjured by Hokit of Derrick Lewis as some menacing Black brute is certainly part of that. 

And Hokit’s transphobic and racist attack on Michelle Obama after his fight was the perfect meeting place of the hatreds that run through right-wing male supremacy. As Rachael Fugardi noted in a 2024 article for the Southern Poverty Law Center on the dynamics of misogynoir, “Black women face hostility and abuse for their gender and race, yet all too often they are left out of conversations about both, cast as the perpetual other.”

Hokit singled out a prominent Black woman for humiliation, espousing a grotesque conspiracy theory that has festered for years on the online right, and in doing so reiterated the MAGA belief that there is really only one right way to be an American. That is, to be male, white, heterosexual, and willing to do violence to anyone who isn’t these things. 

This is one of the reasons I balked at the populist presentation of Trump’s White House gladiator battle. It was not, and never could be, for everyone. It was always for him and for the most vicious and barbarous among us. 

To put a commercial point on it, the event was paywalled behind Paramount+, a streaming Platform owned by the Trump-aligned Ellison family. Aaron Rupar observed that “it's notable to me that the administration tried to frame tonight's UFC event as a ‘gift to Americans’ but you can't watch it unless you have a paid subscription to Paramount+” So we were treated to a libidinous display of fascist violence and body obsession, wrapped inside an Orbánist media ecosystem. 

I have written many times now that liberal democracy is more than a system of laws and institutions. It’s a thing that lives and dies in the hearts and minds of the people—made up of a commitment to mutual toleration, basic fairness, and the fundamental dignity of our fellow citizens.  At its very best, liberal democratic government edifies its citizens and elicits the best of their humanity. 

To quote one of my favorite presidents, John Quincy Adams,

The great object of civil government is the improvement of the condition of those who are parties to the social compact. Roads and canals are among the most important means of improvement, but moral, political, and intellectual improvement are duties assigned by the author of existence.

Donald Trump has not merely thrown immigrants, minorities, and the most vulnerable among us to the lions. He has ravaged the very soul of the American people. Sunday night, the president put the nation itself in a cage match with its own worst vices. It was a total knockout. 

Featured image is Dying Gladiator, by Fedor Bronnikov