American carnage, American carnival

After winning the Truth Social-sponsored cage match on the White House South Lawn last Sunday, UFC fighter Josh Hokut extolled President Donald Trump for “having the balls to put some shit like this on.”

He stood under the cover of the Claw, a 92-foot-tall, 600-ton steel arch, and over the octagon floor festooned with the logos for the event’s sponsors: Monster Energy, Meta, Starlink, Polymarket, the Saudi entertainment festival Riyadh Season. Much of the signage for Anduril Industries, the munitions startup, was caked in blood.

The assemblage of 4,300 people close to the action included the first family, Trump donors who had given at least $1 million; David Ellison, whose Paramount+ streamed the event exclusively; and technocrats like Mark Zuckerberg and Marc Andreessen. Military servicemembers helped fill the stands, but only those who met TV-ready waist-to-height ratio requirements — the message being you must be this jacked to ride UFC Freedom 250, a $60 million production celebrating America’s 250th anniversary and Donald Trump’s 80th birthday on June 14, Flag Day.

Since the event had been rescheduled from the nation’s actual birthday on July 4 to Trump’s, the White House had been touting UFC Freedom 250 as “one of the greatest and most historic sporting events in history.” It was a semiotician’s fever dream, a branded, cartoonishly chest-thumping spectacle of American carnage, carnivalism, and capitalism. For some fighters, paid in stablecoins from Trump family-backed World Liberty Financial, and for fans, paid in jumbotron bloodshed and Bud Light-backed brotherhood, there was also an American berserk form of catharsis.

“There’s only one person more incredible than the Incredible Hok, and that’s my lord and savior Jesus Christ,” Hokut continued in his victory speech. Then he said he was going to have sex with another fighter’s mom. “Lastly, Michelle Obama is a man.”

Standing a few hundred yards away on the Ellipse, along with 85,000 gathered for the Fan Fest watch party, I couldn’t hear Hokut’s last line (“Am I right, America?”) over the cheers.

By then, the crowd had been reveling in the humidity and the José Cuervo for more than seven hours.

They paraded in at 3:00 p.m., wearing Uncle Sam hats, rhinestoned minidresses, and t-shirts sporting their favorite fighters and slogans like “I’m Voting for a Convicted Criminal,” “I’m Just Here for the Wieners,” and “I ❤️ Hot Moms.”

Men — many of whom were shirtless, as if they were ready to spinkick anyone who cut them in the merch line — outnumbered women at least five to one. One standing by the Boy Scouts Memorial fountain bit into a dumpling and smiled as pork juice squirted onto his chest. “Freedom!” he said. Some did pushups on the lawn to get a pump before posing for a picture at the Total Wireless Weigh-In fan experience. (At the actual weigh-in on Saturday, Hokut appeared to vomit on himself.)

Among those going pecs out for the president was Gaige Dengler, from Maryland, who has taken up mixed martial arts in his spare time. “Gaige Norris is my fighter name, because I look like Chuck Norris with my chest hair,” he told me, pointing to his voluminous red mane. The 22-year-old Chipotle employee (he’d recently wrapped and eaten a 2.7-pound burrito, he said, “and I had a great workout after”) discovered MMA a few years ago as a way to work through his feelings. “I was unemployed. I was really angry at the time. Therapy wasn’t really working,” he said. “And I’m punching these dudes super hard in the face. I’m getting punched hard in the face. And afterward, they hug me, and they’re like, ‘Dude, good job.’ It’s the most supported and respected I’ve ever felt.”

He was at the watch party with his uncle, he said, to find the same camaraderie. “It’s a great opportunity for America to kind of unify again. It’s kind of like a renewal for America.”

Nearby, a US Navy mechanic from Kentucky told me he was there for “beer, girls, and the White House.”

There were plenty of all three and much more to find sprawled across the Ellipse’s 50 acres. For much of the afternoon, Fan Fest was a testament to Americans’ insatiable capacity to stand in line — to ride the Nothing Stops Ram mechanical bull, to listen to a Ram Truck rev its engine really loudly, to let AI create virtual fighter versions of themselves at the Meta booth, to relieve themselves in the Crypto.com Ram Trucks porta-potty village, to take selfies with models dressed in Monster Energy sports bras or the Budweiser Clydesdales, to test their fighting strength at the Bud Light Power Punch, or the Exodus UFC Striking Challenge, or Nitro Circus Power Slap.

Midway through the day, I took a few minutes to cool off at the one attraction I managed to find with no line — the Budweiser History Museum. I was dizzy and dehydrated by the strange mix of tech conference, NASCAR tailgate, Trump rally, West Village pop-up shop, prayer circle, and backyard barbecue. Thousands of others seemed to feel the same, lying on the grass, napping, or checking their phones as they waited for night to fall.

On the main stage directly behind the White House, with the Claw looming in view, there were plenty of distractions from the lines. The jumbotrons played several AI-generated ads reminding us that “America is winning” and that we were pioneering patriots at a world-historic event. One compared the night’s fighters to the soldiers who’d stormed Normandy, the men and women who’d marched on Selma, and the firefighters who entered the Twin Towers on 9/11. (Earlier in the week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio compared the cage match to the moon landing.) The Army’s Down Range band performed covers of “Welcome to the Jungle” and “Man, I Feel Like a Woman.” There was a live taping of Logan Paul’s podcast. At one point, Paul’s cohost Mike Majlak announced, “If you got a small dick, you’re smart. We’ve got some smart motherfuckers out there in the crowd.”

Midway through the day, I took a few minutes to cool off at the one attraction I managed to find with no line — the Budweiser History Museum. I was dizzy and dehydrated by the strange mix of tech conference, NASCAR tailgate, Trump rally, West Village pop-up shop, prayer circle, and backyard barbecue. Thousands of others seemed to feel the same, lying on the grass, napping, or checking their phones as they waited for night to fall.

Over at the Topps trading card booth, I talked with two men who had just met and bonded over their forays into sports betting.

Benjamin Tran, 27, had recently sworn off betting apps. “I want to have a family soon,” he said.

Tommy Bui, a 28-year-old who works in hospitality, said he’d lost $200,000 to “predatory” sportsbetting apps and casino games over the last few years. He was betting $1,000 on the White House fights.

Night fell, people took their seats on the lawn, and the broadcast began. Trump and UFC CEO Dana White walked out of the Oval Office and down the aisle to their seats, a fitting start to the culmination of the president and the league’s yearslong courtship. Then fighters delivered knockout after knockout, giving each other blackeyes and concussions and taking questions from Joe Rogan in the Monster Strawberry Lemonade Unleash the Beast post-bout Q&As. The crowd hooted at hooks and screamed for more every time someone was thrown onto the floor. When the night was still young, and the gnats weren’t yet dancing in the klieg lights, a young man, wearing American flag shorteralls and clutching a beer snake as long as George Washington’s scabbard as he crossed the Delaware, took in the scene and offered his friends a benediction. “I ain’t no snitch,’ he said, “but Blake just shat his pants.”

“It’s a wonderful, silly reminder that America is the land of the free and we can do big things,” Bui said of UFC Freedom 250. “I don’t want to compare it to a nuclear bomb, but it’s like a nuclear big bang party.”

Tran had a more succinct benediction: “I want to see war — bloodshed, baby.”

Zak Jason is the executive editor of Business Insider’s Discourse team.