Last Sunday, US President Donald Trump celebrated his 80th birthday with an astonishing cage fighting spectacle on the southern lawn of the White House.
Thousands of fans cheered on underneath “The Claw” – the purpose-built arena housing the Octagon, where the fighters met. Millions more watched at home.
A few days later, podcaster Joe Rogan, a long-time UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) commentator, described the state of the fighter who lost the main bout – Ilia Topuria.
“He couldn’t see out of either eye,” Rogan recounted on his podcast. “He’d gotten kneed to the body real bad when he was on the ground. Justin [Gaethje, his opponent] had him down with his two hands and just smashed a knee into his ribcage and then … he had to retire on his stool.”
Excitedly, Rogan went on.
“Both of his eyes were swollen shut. His nose was f—ed up. He’d taken so many punches to the face it looked like … he had a fractured orbital … he was unrecognisable.”
It was, Rogan said, “one of the most epic things I’ve ever seen in my life”.
As a sport, UFC is as polarising as the man who commissioned this enormous, orgiastic display, which was dubbed UFC Freedom 250, as it doubled as a birthday celebration for the United States itself, which turns 250 on July 4. To its detractors, UFC is a horrifying, barbaric celebration of violence that has no place in a civilised society.
But for fans of the sport, it is a death-defying, awe-inspiring, physical parable of Darwinian struggle.
Many of the fighters have hard-scrabble back-stories. Professional fist-fighting was their way out of poverty. It might have kept them out of jail.
Once a pariah sport that cable networks refused to broadcast, UFC breaks with hundreds (even thousands) of years of boxing and wrestling convention by not placing artificial rules or impediments on the men who are there to bash each other into submission. You can use a mix of fight styles. You can kick, punch and elbow. Only some acts are prohibited, including eye-gouging, biting and “balling” (you can guess what that is).
It is very exciting to watch, precisely because the men are putting their bodies on the line. It is a certainty that someone is going to get very, very hurt.
UFC fans explain that its authenticity is key to its appeal – no one is putting a gentlemanly veneer over their base instinct. Sometimes men want to beat the s— out of each other. UFC accepts that, and elevates it to an Olympian level.
An important UFC ritual is the walk-out, when each fighter is filmed stalking through tunnels and corridors to meet his opponent, and his fate. The fighter’s own inspirational song plays. He might be wrapped in a flag. For Sunday’s event, the walk-outs were cat-walks winding through the West Wing. Gaethje even paused briefly to peruse the framed Declaration of Independence in the Oval Office.
This being Trump’s White House, Trump and his family financially benefited from the event, which was widely viewed as a convention-breaking misuse of the seat of American democracy.
Trump is a long-time supporter of the UFC and has a stake in its parent company. The Trump organisation also sold commemorative medallions off the back of the event, and he held a political fundraiser alongside it. Trump’s corruption has become a key feature of how he wields the presidency.
But probably nothing defines the MAGA movement more than its masculinism, and this was on full display at Sunday’s cage fight.
Men beat their chests and shouted patriotic chants. Men dominated the fighting and the crowd. Male members of the military and service forces flanked the fighters as they did their walk-out. One of the fighters used the stage to shout brutish insults about former first lady Michelle Obama.
One of the central assertions of the MAGA movement is that feminist liberalism has sidelined the masculine from public life. This extravaganza was a statement that nothing of the sort will happen under Trump’s watch.
It’s impossible to think of a female equivalent of this event (a Taylor Swift concert?) and even if it were possible, it would have never been staged in this way, using taxpayer resources (to pay for security) right in the bosom of American life.
UFC 250 Freedom was performative masculinity at its zenith, a modern Colosseum clash that Trump, who attended the event, could use to burnish his credentials as a strong man.
Meanwhile, negotiators, chiefly his Vice President JD Vance, were mopping up the strategic mess Trump created when he engaged in what is supposed to be the ultimate masculine pursuit – a real war, involving real loss of life, with no backing soundtrack.
The US-Iran Memorandum of Understanding, details of which were clear by the end of the week, was a resounding strategic loss for Trump, the United States and the rest of the world, which has been detrimentally affected by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
On Wednesday, Trump turned up late to the G7 summit at Evian-les-Bains, and walked into the room declaring “I’m the boss”. He then joked about how, if the peace agreement was successful, “I’m going to take the credit. If it doesn’t work out, I’m blaming JD.”
Later, he said that if Iran didn’t “behave”, “we’ll go right back to dropping bombs right smack in the middle of their head”. Never has a president sounded so much like a seven-year-old playing a game of Fortnite.
On Wednesday night, Trump turned up at the Palace of Versailles – the original Mar-a-Lago – to sign the memorandum of understanding, under the watchful eye of French President Emmanuel Macron.
In a hot-mic moment with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, Trump played the babyish victim.
“I was abandoned,” he told her, apparently referring to the failure of European allies to join the pointless conflict.
As some commentators pointed out, the original 1919 Treaty of Versailles has become a byword for national capitulation. But Trump didn’t see the historic resonance – perhaps he was too dazzled by all the gilt.
The deal is widely regarded as a backwards step, “hardly a ripper for the United States”, as Age/Herald North America Correspondent Michael Koziol put it.
“It makes numerous concessions to Iran without eliciting much in return – apart from reinstating Iran’s existing position that it does not seek to develop nuclear weapons,” Koziol wrote.
The Strait of Hormuz will reopen, but after 60 days, Iran and Oman have the option to impose tolls on ships running through it. Former US ambassador to Israel and former deputy assistant defence secretary Dan Shapiro called it a “shockingly weak deal”.
But the US had little leverage – Iran had the global economy in a UFC-style headlock. And now we see why the projection of masculinity is so necessary.
The toughest guys in the world were needed to lend macho credibility to some of the smallest men ever to do a walk-out onto the world stage.
Jacqueline Maley is an author and columnist.
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