The Atlantic
Trump’s Gladiator Delusion
The president’s South Lawn fight lacks the ambition of ancient Rome.
Center Left
Alternet.org
Trump stages the perfect 'bread and circuses' event for a dying republic
Left
President Donald Trump is acting like a Roman emperor, not an American president, by hosting UFC fighters to wrestle in front of the White House on his 80th birthday.“The weekend’s UFC fight in honor of the Emperor Donald’s birthday is about more than his obsessive love for big, powerful men, men with tears in their eyes saying, ‘Mr. President, sir, would you like to touch my rock-solid abs?’” wrote Rick Wilson, who co-founded the anti-Trump Republican group The Lincoln Project. “It’s about the fall of Rome, and that of America.”Wilson added, “The decline of Rome didn’t begin when the Goths crossed the frontier or rival nations nibbled the edges of the Empire. It began when the Republic died, and Emperors with boundless self-regard and poor impulse control adopted theatrical personas and were told they were gods, not men.”In this sense, Wilson characterized Trump’s actions as president as involving spectacle and corruption.“When governing a far-flung empire became difficult, performance became easier,” Wilson said. “When problems became unsolvable, distractions became the irresistible tool to settle the restive plebs. If everyone was corrupt, from the Emperor on down, money set the terms of power. And when citizens grew anxious about the future, emperors offered them the now-cliched narcotic known throughout in political history: bread and circuses.”Describing Trump’s UFC match as a version of the ancient gladiatorial spectacles, “this week, America gets its own glimpse of the Colosseum, with less blood but with the requisite mad emperor, his gravid belly straining this corset, slathered in makeup, struggling with his arousal at the edge of the arena, leering at oily, well-hewn men engaged in a pantomime he conflates with manhood and virility.”Overall Trump argued that the UFC match is “a spectacle better suited to ancient Rome than a modern constitutional republic.”On the other side ideologically, an ex-official for President Bill Clinton also denounced the UFC matches, claiming that they expose Trump and his officials as fixated on a primitive idea about masculinity.“Trump sees everything and everyone in terms of dominance or submission, and he’s hellbent on dominance,” former Labor Secretary Robert Reich wrote on Sunday. “‘You’ll never take back our country with weakness, you have to show strength and you have to be strong,’ he told his supporters on January 6, 2021, before urging them to go the Capitol.”He added, “He views America as locked in a zero-sum match with the rest of the world, and there’s no limit to our violence. Unless Iran opened the Strait of Hormuz, he memorably said, ‘a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.’”Reich went on to denounce the entire “manosphere” that has helped catapult Trump to power.“His secretary of ‘war,’ Pete Hegseth, threatens ‘no quarter, no mercy for our enemies’ and ‘maximum violence to the enemy,’” Reich wrote. “When told some fishermen survived the American bombing of their boat, Hegseth reportedly ordered his commander to ‘kill them all.’”Reich also described Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. working out shirtless and lifting weights next to actor Arnold Schwarzenegger and musician Kid Rock, as well as insisting Trump has “the highest testosterone level” he ever witnessed in an individual over 70 years old.“Trump’s whole circle — including Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and JD Vance — glorify male prowess and power,” Reich added. “(In a Twitter exchange a few years ago, Musk said he was ‘up for a cage fight’ with Zuckerberg, who replied: ‘Send me location,’ eliciting from Musk: ‘Vegas Octagon,’ and the suggestion that podcaster Joe Rogan referee.) Musk and Vance champion pronatalism — the belief that the single greatest threat to Western civilization is collapsing birth rates — and argue that Western women must have more children.”
