Trump Desecrated America’s 250th Anniversary for Fun and Profit

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How appropriate in the Donald Trump Era that the 250th anniversary of our nation’s founding was conflated with the 80th birthday of our narcissistic leader and that the birthday seemed to obscure the anniversary. 

And, even more, how appropriate that the “celebration” was a series of mixed martial arts (MMA) matches, with two galoots trying to beat each other senseless. So disgraceful and inhumane is MMA that the late Sen. John McCain compared it to cockfighting and tried to get it outlawed.

One might have thought that this would have been an occasion for dignity, decorum, stateliness, and grandeur suffused with an almost holy spirit — commingled with enthusiasm and joy and pride at America being the most powerful nation in the world and the leading light of democracy. 

But not for Trump, who has spent his presidency degrading the nation’s power and democracy simultaneously. Instead, he ginned up an awful spectacle of human degradation and debasement, and a trashing of American greatness. 

“It’s The Onion made flesh,” as Laura Jedeed wrote on Slate, recognizing the joke of turning the White House South Lawn into a Thunderdome nicknamed “The Claw.” William Kristol was also on point in The Bulwark, calling it an “embarrassment.” 

But it wasn’t just Trump who was the butt of the joke, and it wasn’t just Trump and his howling horde who were being embarrassed. It was America.

This has all been widely noted by now, but what has been less noted is that Trump clearly intended this to be a desecration rather than a celebration — or, more accurately, a celebration of a desecration. After all, he had already desecrated nearly everything in American life, from our institutions to our laws to our media to our universities to our military and finally to our values. 

This was, he seemed to feel, the mission for which he was elected: Tear down and sow chaos. As he apparently saw it, Americans were tired of seriousness and solemnity, which they seemed to equate with elitism. So Trump promised to ridicule the seriousness and solemnity and replace them with garbage.

What better day to do so than on America’s (almost) 250th anniversary! What better day to show his own country and the world that America had, indeed, become a joke — the embodiment of what our detractors had always insinuated: a nation of buffoons, ignoramuses, poseurs, and blusterers. 

How could anyone have possibly arranged a worse way to celebrate ourselves than this celebration of our worst aspects?

Some have compared the event to the Roman gladiatorial ring, but that does a disservice to the Romans. There was an ugly splendor to that combat, in a time when soldiers at war were obliged to kill each other personally. There was only ugliness to ours, a modeling of pure, now purposeless violence. 

How could anyone have possibly arranged a worse way to celebrate ourselves than this celebration of our worst aspects?

Some have derided those of us who still value our country’s better angels for the contempt we have for the cruel, mindless bloodlust of MMA. They see it as yet another sign of elitism. This kind of blood-spattered machismo, they say, is as American as apple pie: the stuff of real America, which is a distinction that conservatives have long drawn between liberals and themselves — that is, the distinction between the genuine (them) and the phony (us), as if to be a real American one must be a loud, coarse imbecile.

Occasionally, liberals have tried to disarm the charge by slumming and demonstrating that they, too, are attracted to the loathsome. They make, I suspect, a kind of doomed attempt to depoliticize the kind of low-life enterprises Trump advocates, and thereby to put themselves on the side of working-class whites. (Jedeed did that in her Slate piece, praising MMA for being diverse and democratic before acknowledging its homophobia and fascist bent.) 

But there is no depoliticizing what Trump did on Sunday. The loathsomeness of it is political, and the loathsomeness is the point. 

The weigh-ins for the fights were conducted at the Lincoln Memorial — again with the full intention of desecrating this chapel of American democracy and of despoiling Abraham Lincoln. At least one of the combatants pretended to vomit on the Memorial, an act that was as salient an illustration of what Trump wanted as one could get — namely, that Trump is greater than Lincoln. Trump once used AI to depict himself spewing feces on blue America. That crude, revolting gesture opened the Overton window for more of the same: feces, vomit, our new political language. 

And lest one have any doubt of the political nature of a celebration that should have been an opportunity for uniting the country rather than dividing it, one of the fighters, Josh Hokit, announced after winning his bout, “Michelle Obama is a man. Am I right, America?” (The impresarios of this disaster must have known that Hokit had made this racist comment many times before.) Interviewer Joe Rogan smiled; the crowd cheered, and, rather than denounce the statement, Trump’s communications director, Steven Cheung, said of the fighter: “He showed toughness and the ability to pressure his opponent both on his feet and on the ground. He’ll definitely move up in the heavyweight rankings.”

There is no apology commensurate with the deep, deep ugliness of Hokit’s comment or of this event. There is no repentance that could cleanse the perpetrators of the stink. And there is no way America could distance itself from the way its 250th anniversary was commemorated — by brain-damaged, roided-up “cocks” knocking the crap out of one another. 

And lest one need yet another sign of the corruption of the spectacle: The fighters were paid in cryptocurrency through Trump’s own company in a tortuous scheme in which the Trump family profits; corporate sponsors, many of them with ties to the government, financed the event; Paramount Plus, headed by Trump ally David Ellison, provided the pay-per-view (because Americans, after all, should have to pay for an event held on their property); and Trump just recently invested in UFC head Dana White’s parent company, meaning he stands to profit from that as well. 

So in addition to all the other horrors, there is the filth of corruption. Again, the event was pure Trump. And of course it is by no means a one-off; it is just one part of a year-long partisan, Trumpian grifter’s pay-to-play bash, well accounted here by Robert Reich.

That may be the real desecration — not the circus Trump staged, nor the vaingloriousness of it, nor the corruption of it, but the numbness with which it was received.

But here is what you won’t find in the legacy press. Aside from some mild, sniffing disapproval, you won’t find the sort of full-throated condemnation of what this event did to sap what should have been a jubilant national festival. You won’t find the outrage that this should naturally have elicited, especially since only 16 percent of Americans, according to a Reuters poll, approved of the MMA matches. 

You won’t find the media rousing themselves from their lethargy to condemn what Trump had done to us.

And that may be the real desecration — not the circus Trump staged, nor the vaingloriousness of it, nor the corruption of it, but the numbness with which it was received. The country yawned. The media, unable even to castigate Hokit — who, having secured membership in the throng of assholes into whom Trump has breathed life, should by all rights be a pariah — reacted as if this were a normal celebration. Republicans rejoiced, one representative even remarking that the Michelle Obama diss was “hilarious.” 

Forget for a moment the utter disgrace of this wholly disgraceful event, and just remember this: how accustomed we are to settling for this idiocy, how accustomed we are to seeing the media calmly accept one man defecating on our nation’s anniversary, while failing to register the disapproval of the vast majority of Americans, much less their own disapproval.

Trump shat on us. We barely noticed. Happy 250th.

Neal Gabler is the recipient of two LA Times Book Prizes, USA Today’s biography of the year, Time Magazine’s book of the year, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Shorenstein Fellowship from Harvard. His substack is Farewell, America.