Out here a man turns eighty and his kids buy him a recliner and a card that plays a song when you open it. He grumbles, he naps in the recliner, life goes on. He does not rent a cage.
Sunday the President turned eighty. To mark it, the White House put a UFC fight on the South Lawn. Fourteen fighters, a wire cage, the whole circus, and they called it Freedom 250. Freedom 250, they said, because the country is turning two hundred fifty. The country’s birthday. Held, by what they swear is a coincidence, on his.
A coincidence the size of a billboard.
I have waited a lot of tables, and I know this move. The fella who announces the party is for everybody, then quietly makes sure the cake says his name. The nation’s two hundred fiftieth is a real thing, worth a real celebration. Tying it to one man’s eightieth, on his lawn, with his guest list, is not a celebration of the country. It is a celebration of him wearing the country as a name tag.
The People’s House has a cage in it now.
That South Lawn belongs to all of us. Sunday it had a fighting cage on it and about forty three hundred guests, around twelve hundred of them active duty service members. The UFC picked up the whole tab, somewhere near sixty million dollars. So a private company paid sixty million to throw the President a birthday on public ground and dress it up as patriotism. Out here we call that a sponsor, not a gift.
Eighty candles, zero shame.
There is nothing wrong with cage fighting and nothing wrong with turning eighty. There is something off about needing the entire country’s birthday taped to yours to get through the day. A man sure of himself turns eighty quietly. This one needed a cage, a flag, a corporate check, and the number two fifty doing the heavy lifting.
The math does not hide. Eighty is his. Two hundred fifty is ours. He just keeps getting confused about which one the party is for.
Somewhere a man in a recliner watched the whole thing and thought, that could have been a nap.
The breakdown.
- Factual basis The event was on every wire, on camera, on the South Lawn, with a public guest count.24/25
- Self-awareness He branded his own birthday party as the nation 250th and saw nothing odd in it.5/20
- Staff containment Nobody contained it; the White House is the one that booked the cage.4/20
- Recovery attempt No walk-back, he stood in the middle of it.2/15
- Public spectacle A televised cage fight on the People lawn with about forty three hundred guests.20/20
Was this dumb enough?
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