President Trump’s 80th birthday Ultimate Fighting Championship stunt on the South Lawn of the White House on Sunday night was a mass-media spectacle unlike any in the history of the presidency.
Mr. Trump sat ringside beside his wife, Melania Trump, as fighters whaled on one another inches away inside an eight-sided cage wrapped in cryptocurrency advertisements. All five of his children and nearly all his grandchildren sat around him.
Thousands more were there on the lawn beneath a 600-ton steel-arch contraption called the Claw. The White House loomed dramatically over a fighting pit packed with billionaires, cabinet members and Republican lawmakers.
It was all such an astonishing sight for so many reasons: The use of the trappings of the White House for violent cage fighting. The corporate sponsorships. The eruptions of casual cruelty. At one point, a fighter took the mic and made a nasty joke about Michelle Obama while standing in front of the house she once lived in with her husband, daughters and mother.
Even for a president with a lifelong penchant for P.T. Barnum-esque gambits, this one was in a league of its own.
Much of the White House was given over to this production. Fighters were filmed walking out through various rooms inside the residence and warming up, barefoot, in the Indian Treaty Room of the Old Executive Office Building across the way.