Trump’s Blood Lust Takes Center Stage at White House Cage Match
https://www.thedailybeast.com/donald-trumps-blood-lust-takes-center-stage-at-white-house-cage-match/
Trump’s Blood Lust Takes Center Stage at White House Cage Match
Only a man like Donald Trump would respond to the widespread criticism of his demolition of the East Wing by thinking to himself (inasmuch as Trump thinks these days) that “them’s fightin’ words,” and then taking it literally by defacing the White House grounds even further still.
Construction crews have now built a large-scale cage on the South Lawn of the White House, dwarfed in turn by a massive arched lighting grid called “The Claw.” But before you worry that this set-up is a new development in the White House’s deportation agenda, know that it’s all for the “UFC Freedom 250” extravaganza scheduled for June 14—Flag Day and, not coincidentally, Trump’s 80th birthday.
“UFC Freedom 250” is being promoted as part of our nation’s 250th anniversary celebrations. More than 4,000 guests will attend, thanks to efforts by Pentagon brass—read Pete Hegseth—to fill seats with strapping military types. By this, I mean that his offer of free tickets comes with a strict “no fatties” policy. There could be an additional 125,000 watching on massive screens at the adjacent Ellipse, and presumably there’s no BMI checks there. But anything is possible, given that Trump fudges crowd sizes the same way he touts Iran peace deals.
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Nothing says presidential decorum, or even “Happy Birthday, Mr. President,” quite like two men in silk shorts smashing each other’s faces until the canvas underneath them runs arterial crimson. But, somehow, only 16% of Americans think the White House UFC match is a good idea. For the vast majority, the prospect of the event is blood-boiling.
The last time this much blood was shed near the White House was 1864, when Confederate forces advanced within five miles of the residence during the Battle of Fort Stevens. Now, likely for the first time in American history, blood will be spilled on the lawn itself.
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Trump couldn’t be more pleased. In April, he was ringside at Kaseya Center in Miami, Florida, for a UFC fight, impassive as a Roman emperor, watching men bleed before him. Not troubled. At home. And now he’s bringing it home.
Every modern-day president has a governing metaphor. Reagan had morning. Bush had light. Obama had hope. Biden had soul.
Trump has blood.
It’s an obsession of dystopic science-fiction proportions, rhetoric and fantasy that bleeds into policy and biology. Trump’s relationship with blood has moved through distinct phases: the theatrical (the rallies, the social posts, the UFC fights), the ideological (with rhetoric that echoes the language of white-nationalist and racial-purity movements), and finally the physiological, a man so fixated on the purity of his own blood that he is literally thinning it against medical advice.
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Consider the past decade of his blood ethos: “Blood coming out of her wherever” (aimed at Megyn Kelly); “Poisoning the blood of our country” (aimed at foreigners with brown skin); “There will be a bloodbath” (if he wasn’t re-elected); COVID’s Clorox in the bloodstream (needs no explanation).
The point isn’t that the language escalated. It’s that it never changed. It only got bigger, more lethal, bleeding out further.
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The aspirin story is his sharpest cut. Trump told the Wall Street Journal in January that “aspirin is good for thinning out” his blood, and that he doesn’t want “thick blood pouring through his heart.” He takes 325 mg daily, more than triple the commonly recommended dose.
After his third medical checkup in 13 months, one doctor told NPR: “It’s actually interesting he is on aspirin. We don’t often routinely recommend it anymore unless you have risk factors for stroke or heart disease. And it definitely does cause bruising.”
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But why blood? Why, of all the obsessions available to a man of his appetites, does this one run so deep? Because blood, in Trump’s psychic vocabulary, is the ultimate signifier. It is strength: the warrior who bleeds and keeps fighting. It is threat: the opponent who will be made to bleed. It is health: the pure, thin, unclogged torrent of a man who will outlast them all.
And it is masculinity in its most primal register, the bull in the ring, and the fighter who walks out of the octagon bloodied but upright.
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To thin his own blood is, in his mind, not a medical decision. It is a dominance display. He is a man who wants to be immortal, so vital, so dangerous, that his very circulatory system must be managed like a weapon.
Of course, the man who demands immaculate blood in his own veins is now building an arena where blood will spray off a canvas fifty yards from the Oval Office.
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His blood must be pure. Everyone else’s is entertainment.
In this, Trump’s blood obsession isn’t just personal. It puts at risk the blood of peace and the blood of democracy, both of which, under his presidency, are slowly hemorrhaging.
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There is only so much blood before the veins run dry. Empires built on the promise of endless carnage always hit the same wall. The audience grows numb, the fighters run out, the emperor finds himself alone in the arena, still hungry, with nothing left to feed on.
Attila. Caesar. Stalin. Gaddafi. All bled out.
A leader consumed by blood, his own purity, everyone else’s expendability, always ends in lethality. And now he’s put the octagon on the South Lawn to prove it.
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