Welcome to ‘the Claw’: the White House fighting cage captures Trump era rot | Sidney Blumenthal

“If the government decides, very quickly, to bulldoze the Statue of Liberty – the people whose ancestors that was the first thing they saw coming to this country, but the government moved too fast – nothing can be done?” asked Judge Patricia Millet of the District of Columbia court of appeals on 5 June to the principal deputy assistant attorney general, Yaakov Roth. “I think that’s right, yes,” he replied.

In the case brought by the National Trust for Historic Preservation against Donald Trump’s “sudden, unilateral, and unlawful decision” to demolish the East Wing of the White House and to construct a 90,000 sq ft ballroom, “without seeking approval from Congress; without requesting review and approval from the federal commissions charged with oversight of development in the nation’s capital; without conducting the required environmental studies; and without allowing the public any opportunity for input”, Trump’s Department of Justice has countered that he can simply do whatever he wishes, whenever he wishes, however he wishes.

“When did it become a fait accompli?” Judge Millett asked. “If this were complete lawlessness by the government … it couldn’t be stopped?” “On these theories, I think that’s right,” said Roth.

“If you move fast enough, nobody has standing to challenge it?” asked Millet. “I do think that that is correct,” Roth said. “The injury, it becomes non-redressable.”

The supreme court’s 2024 campaign ruling granting “absolute” presidential immunity for “official acts” is Trump’s Magna Carta for absolute rule. But if the president can do anything, anytime, anywhere, why even bother now with the irrelevance of the judicial system except as a residual bow to empty formal courtesy? Why dress up the “non-redressable”?

At the same time that the justice department insisted that Trump could demolish the Statue of Liberty at will, a monstrous and gaudy 600-tonne, 154ft-tall skeletal structure called “the Claw”, painted red, white and blue, was rising on the South Lawn of the White House, above the building itself and next to the rubble where the ballroom is planned.

Within “the Claw” there will be a cage, where the Ultimate Fighting Championship company will stage martial arts matches, an exhibition called “UFC Freedom 250”, to celebrate Trump’s 80th birthday on 14 June.

The cage fighter weigh-ins and face-offs will take place at the Lincoln Memorial, where the solemn marble Daniel Chester French statue is flanked by the engraved words of the Gettysburg Address (“a new birth of freedom”) and the Second Inaugural (“malice toward none”).

On the Ellipse, in the shadow of the Washington Monument, jumbotron TV screens will show the fight to tens of thousands of fans who have not been invited to join the select few designated by Trump to sit ringside with him at “the Claw”.

The event is billed as “free”, but in reality it appears to be an occasion for many complex transactions for Trump to further his economic and political control, reward members of his inner network and deepen his influence over them. While the fighters are the ostensible draw, they are not the true main event.

They are a pretext for Trump’s kleptocratic spectacle. The gladiatorial grappling has given Trump a chance to extract tribute for his favor, to put the federal government out to the highest bidder, to bind his big money allies closer to him, to make them more dependent. Not least, on his birthday, the circus revolves around him as the center of attention.

“This plan is deeply corrupt,” states the lawsuit brought by the non-profit Public Integrity Project in an effort to stop the “unlawful” event from taking place. “UFC Freedom 250 is a private, for-profit sporting event being ‘planned, organized, and executed’ by the UFC, its broadcast partners, and its advertisers, not by the federal government. And it is not in any material sense a ‘celebration of the 250th anniversary of American Independence’ – it is, instead, a celebration of the UFC’s brand and the 80th anniversary of Donald Trump’s birth.

“For these reasons, UFC Freedom 250 does not satisfy the strict conditions that must be satisfied for special semiquincentennial events to occur on the South Lawn or at the Lincoln Memorial.”

The UFC is offering special access VIP packages, “Partnership Investment”, for $1.5m. Two weeks after the match was announced, Trump’s “wealth advisers” purchased up to $50,000 of stock in TKO Holding Group, the UFC’s parent company. One TKO executive touted the upcoming event as “the greatest earned-marketing tool of all time”.

Marketing is everything to the UFC. Dana White, impresario of the UFC, owes Donald Trump for his first promotional break. The UFC was essentially a shell company in 2001 when White became its president after arranging its sale to a group of casino investors. Senator John McCain called it “human cockfighting”. The company’s activity was prohibited in 36 states and on pay-per-view cable TV. At that moment, Trump himself was also floundering. His Atlantic City hotel and casino, the Taj Mahal, had already been subjected to a bankruptcy. He hired the UFC for its first public matches to attract a crowd, which did not prevent the Taj eventually from collapsing into its final bankruptcy.

But Trump gave the UFC visibility. White also hired a knock-about comedian and actor, Joe Rogan, as a color commentator. Then 15 years later, in 2016, White sold the UFC to WME, the entertainment agency, for $4bn. White has been elevated into a cultural icon of the Trump age. He spoke on the podium of the 2024 Republican convention for Trump, contributes mightily to Trump’s political action committee and hosts Trump at UFC events where he enters like a conquering Caesar.

The Public Integrity Project lawsuit notes that White “admitted that the event was ‘Trump’s idea’”. Trump is staging a version of his past, when he brought the fledgling and proscribed UFC to his dying casino, but is now re-enacting the tawdry scene as a grand success using all the resources at his command in a celebration of his web of influence and himself.

Plebes may also pay a streaming service to see it, but not just any one. For an $8.99 plus tax subscription fee, viewers at home can see the event on Paramount+, owned by Larry Ellison and his son David Ellison, who are seeking Department of Justice approval of the takeover of Warner Brothers Discovery, and who put CBS News under the unerring mismanagement of Bari Weiss.

The cage match is expected to leverage millions of subscription sign-ups, sell expensive commercials to corporate sponsors that want to curry Trump’s favor, and establish Paramount+ as a live sports competitor with Netflix and Amazon Prime.

In fact, Paramount+ has emerged as the home for all UFC events under a seven-year contract with the TKO Group. The deal has a projected annual value of $1.1bn. That agreement came almost immediately after the Trump justice department granted approval for the Ellison-owned Skydance company to purchase Paramount for $8bn.

In what appears to be an attempt to clear the way for the Federal Communication Commission’s blessing, Paramount paid a $16m personal settlement to Trump to resolve his lawsuit in which he accused CBS News’s 60 Minutes of deceptively editing an interview with Kamala Harris.

David Ellison declared that “the addition of UFC’s year-round must-watch events to our platforms is a major win”.

A Republican lobbyist told NBC News about the Trump political operation’s frenetic activity surrounding the UFC event: “They are raising a shit-ton of money and have used it as another unofficial vehicle for corporate donors to give and gain favor with Trump.”

The night before the match, Trump is holding a $1m-a-person dinner at the Trump National Golf Club at Potomac, Virginia, for Super Pac Maga Inc.

Since the 2024 election, Maga Inc has raised more than $342m from “the GOP’s legacy donor class and its newer crop of tech and finance billionaires,” [CHECK QUOTE] any number of them recipients of federal contracts or reliant on federal regulation, according to Forbes Magazine. [LINK]

The corporate operator of Crypto.com, for example, has donated $20m, and as part of Crypto.com’s deal with the UFC, giving Crypto branding rights on all fighters’ uniforms, it is offering “a first of its kind, $1 million $CRO bonus pool for the Fight of the Night”.

“Maybe we’ll never, ever take it down,” Trump mused in a video on his TikTok account about “the Claw”. He compared it to the Eiffel Tower, built as a temporary structure for the 1889 Paris World’s Fair.

And “maybe”, following the doctrine promulgated by his justice department, he will keep “the Claw” and “bulldoze” the Statue of Liberty, “maybe” just to prove the point that he can.

The two structures are opposing symbols of the Trump era. The Statue of Liberty was built as the project of French liberals as a gift of the people of France to commemorate the Union victory in the civil war. In Liberty’s left hand, she holds a tablet on which is written “JULY IV MDCCLXXVI”– 4 July 1776 – and at her feet lie broken shackles representing emancipation from slavery, redemption of the revolutionary promise in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal.”

Liberty faces Europe holding in her right hand an upraised beacon to shine for liberalism and freedom, in Lincoln’s words, the United States as “the last best hope of earth”. The funds for the statue were provided by the American public in a subscription drive launched by Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World.

For that drive, the poet Emma Lazarus wrote The New Colossus, whose lines expressing the American promise to immigrants are inscribed at the statue: “Give me your tired, your poor / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

“The Claw” overarching the cage for brutal combat is the physical representation of Trump’s Hobbesian vision for the rest of us while he presides in the owner’s box. That cage also signifies the many cages Trump has built for immigrants, a kind of sculptural Salvadorian Cecot of his own on the South Lawn.

But, more, Trump’s cage, his regime, has been lowered on the whole country to entrap it. Bombs away again, but then not for now. “I love inflation.”

After Trump attended the third game of the NBA Finals at Madison Square Garden on 9 June, where he was heartily booed during the national anthem by the New York fans who are all too familiar with him and might not take well to the bulldozing of the Statue of Liberty, Joe Rogan, the original color commentator, sagely remarked: “He should stick to the UFC, they’re going to boo him everywhere else.”

• Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth. He is a Guardian US columnist