By Jim Bloch
Unbelievable.
That was the response of many Americans to the mixed martial arts cage fight that Donald Trump staged on the South Lawn of the White House ostensibly to mark his 80th birthday.
There is pale precedence for sports in the People’s Backyard. That’s where the annual children’s Easter egg roll is held and where William Howard Taft had a tennis court built in the early 1910s.
But a garish, tacky, claw-shaped cage, emblazoned with crypto ads, in which brawny men gored each other with martial arts kicks, elbows, knees and fists, spraying blood and spit and sweat all over billionaires who sat ringside, such as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and CBS’s David Ellison, who broadcast the event on his Paramount+, Patriot’s owner Robert Kraft, Knicks’ owner James Dolan, an assortment of cabinet members, congressional Republicans like Ted Cruz and John Thune, and Melania and the president himself?
How low could a President of the United States of America go, less than a month from the nation’s 250th birthday?
Since returning to office, it’s no secret that Trump has clung to the authoritarian playbook more tightly than a kid who is three merit badges short of Eagle clinging to his Boy Scout Handbook.
Trump has tried to undermine independent institutions, including universities, law firms, and banks. He has attempted to delegitimize elections by insisting without evidence that the 2020 election was stolen from him and claiming the 2026 midterms will be rigged. He has attacked freedom of speech and freedom of the press by demeaning and slandering journalists, newspapers and TV news outlets. He has deployed U.S. troops on American soil to crush protests and deport 600,000 legal and illegal immigrants. He has turned the Department of Justice into a weapon against his political enemies. He has used his office to enrich himself and his family.
Authoritarian leaders and dictators have long used violent sporting events to prop up their regimes, distract a potentially restive population and buff their world image.
In 1974, the dictator of Zaire in Africa, Mobutu Sese Seko, coughed up the $10 million purse for the “Rumble in the Jungle” between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, with each combatant guaranteed $5 million.
Philippines dictator Ferdinand Marcos funded the 1975 “Thrilla in Manila,” which pitted Ali against Joe Frazier, while the country was under martial law. Marcos paid Ali $4.5 million and Frazier $2.5 million.
The purpose of the boxing match, wrote Sports Illustrated, was “to show that Manila was no longer an outlaw city, that foreign investment was secure, that martial rule, for all its connotations, was a cleansing instrument: Martial law with a smile.”
The dictator of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, underwrites the Akhmat Fight Club, a combat sports complex that sponsors international boxers and MMA fighters.
Anti-democratic Saudi Arabia has paid to host mega-fights, substantially funded by Turki Alalshikh, Advisor to the Royal Court. Chechnya’s Kadyrov has attended blood-sport events in Saudi Arabia.
The Saudis have been especially active in the game of “sportswashing” their repressive regime, especially after torturing and strangling journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, by sponsoring lavish pro tennis tournaments and creating the pro golf league LIV.
South Africa under apartheid played the same cards decades earlier, offering big payouts to tennis stars like Bjorn Borg and top ranked boxers in the 1980s. Many athletes refused the racist regime’s blood money, including John McEnroe, Ali and Sugar Ray Leonard. Others, like boxer Mike Weaver, pocketed the money and ran.
Adolf Hitler took advantage of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin to polish the image of his regime and its increasingly harsh treatment of Jews and other minorities.
So, when Trump sponsors a cage fight on the lawn of the White House, it’s okay to be shocked at the downward drift of the country.
But you better believe it.
Jim Bloch is a freelance writer based in St. Clair, Michigan. Contact him at bloch.jim@gmail.com.
