Project1461
December 26, 2025 - Day #341
This Is What Dictators Do
To celebrate the 250th anniversary of our nations founding, next year President Trump is hosting a UFC cage match on the south lawn of the White House. Below are two renderings of the venue setup.
In the top illustration, notice the jumbotron screens sandwiching the backdropped view of the White House. And for the spectators seated with their backs toward the White House, between the punches and kicks-to-the-face as the gladiators maul each other in the octagon, they will simultaneously have a grand view of the Washington Monument off in the distance.
And where will the “weigh in” of the fighters happen?
In front of the Lincoln Memorial.
As happens at fight weigh-ins, the combatants can exchange glaring stares and insults while the marble likeness of President Abraham Lincoln looks on.
About the entire debacle, in celebrating our nation’s semiquincentennial, it’s hard to imagine anything more disrespectful and garishly trivializing of our nation’s past and the great leaders who brought us through America’s founding. An agonizing civil war, two horrific world wars, the crippling Great Depression and other calamities overcome along our nation’s 250 yearlong fits and starts efforts to make a more perfect union; all of that is disparaged by Trump’s narcissistic ignorance of what really makes America America.
But this is Donald Trump’s view of America. All spectacle and no substance. No sense of honor nor deference for those who went before. No reverence for the struggle, the impossibly heavy lifting undertaken by those before him, the doing what was right despite the cost. These are not elements nor character touchpoints within the world in which Trump exists. No, he is nothing but cheap spectacle and show, because that’s what dictators are and that’s who he is. And he insults most of the American citizenry by thinking that we are like him.
Trump is the personification of the very type of leader our founders labored so hard to never allow, and yet, here we are. And even though seemingly impossible to do so, he is doubling down on the utter grotesqueness by staging all of this on June 14, his own birthday.
Because that’s what dictators do.