Every town has the house. You know the one. The man put something up in the yard for one occasion, an above-ground pool, a stage, a mechanical bull for a party in 2019, and it is still out there. Weather has gotten to it. The neighbors stopped asking. He calls it a feature now.
The President is about to become that house. The difference is the yard is the White House lawn, and the thing in it is a cage.
The cage.
They are building a UFC arena on the South Lawn. A real one, for a real fight night, on June 14. It will hold four thousand people. There will be a cage, and inside the cage men will hit each other, on the grass behind the house where they sign treaties.
That, on its own, is a choice. But it was sold as temporary. A one-night thing, part of the big anniversary. Put it up, have the fight, take it down.
The part where it stays.
This week the President looked at the plan and had a second thought. He said, and I am quoting him, “maybe we’ll never ever take it down.” Never ever. A fighting cage on the South Lawn, permanent, indefinite, there for good.
Then he reached for a comparison, and the comparison is the whole story. He compared it to the Eiffel Tower. He noted, correctly, that the Eiffel Tower was supposed to come down twenty years after they built it, and it never did, and now it is the Eiffel Tower.
So in his telling the octagon on the lawn is in the early, misunderstood phase of becoming a beloved landmark. Give it a century and the French will be jealous.
The flaw in that.
Here is the thing about the Eiffel Tower. It is a tower. It does one job, which is stand there and let you look at Paris. It does not host a cage fight every so often forty feet from the room where the President takes the morning briefing.
I have watched a lot of men talk themselves out of returning the rented bull. It always starts the same way. Well, it’s already up. And it always ends with the same yard, a few years on, the same thing rusting in it, slowly turning into a story the neighbors tell.
The cage went up for one night. We will see about the rest.
maybe we'll never ever take it down
The breakdown.
- Factual basis The Hill, US News, ABC, and local D.C. outlets all carried the remark and the Eiffel Tower comparison.23/25
- Self-awareness He likened a cage-fighting structure on the South Lawn to one of the most beloved landmarks on earth.6/20
- Staff containment No one walked it back. Reporters were left to guess whether he was serious or joking.7/20
- Recovery attempt None. He doubled down by reaching for the landmark comparison.6/15
- Public spectacle A 4,000-seat arena on the South Lawn covered across national and local press.16/20
Was this dumb enough?
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