Trump’s Roman Games/Obama’s Shrine to Himself

How did the 250th anniversary of America become a celebration so devoid of ideas? Thanks to Trump, who believes the whole of history is the prelude to him, the America semiquincentennial has been turned into an amalgam of the scavenged symbols and totems of American trash culture. The worship of aggression, dominance, and force, not the triumph of core principles, is the only ethos we are currently celebrating. The American Revolution was a genuine 18th-century movement for honorable, measured precepts. It’s just not possible to be a monarchical American. All that has been vacated. Trump’s bludgeoning “Fight, fight, fight” battle cry has replaced “United we stand, divided we fall.”

Ringmaster: Trump at the “UFC Freedom 250” on the White House South Lawn

It’s not that I feel particularly prissy about the UFC. In fact, I was quite interested to see the likes of corn-rowed Sean “Suga” O’Malley roaring like a berserk day-glo Viking after his second-round knockout of the leg-flailing Aiemann “The Ice Man” Zahabi. I was diverted by the sight of UFC commentator Joe Rogan, who stands surprisingly short out of his podcast chair, prancing around the Octagon with his gleaming cannonball head. What freaked out my old-fashioned sense of probity were the bare-chested UFC gladiators, their tattoos shining in the Washington swelter, strutting out of the hallowed environs of familiar White House backdrops like the Green Room, where President James Madison signed the first declaration of war in 1812, or the inner sanctum of the Oval Office, where the overheated hulk Justin “The Highlight” Gaethje - who had something of a resemblance to Maine candidate Graham Platner in a sexting post - appeared to take a passing interest in a copy of the Declaration of Independence. One by one, the fighters flexed dramatically at the 4,000-strong audience on the South Lawn, as if to say, “We who are about to desecrate the White House salute you.”

Let the Games Begin: Sean O’Malley whaling on Aiemann Zahabi.

Trump, accompanied by his long-term wingman UFC impresario Dana White as he did his televised long walk of fame past his predecessors’ portraits, wore the menacing scowl he seems to think makes him look presidential. It’s the same scowl he’s donned for all those banners recently unfurled on Washington’s otherwise august civic buildings, and on his proposed $250 bill. Even Roman emperors, our baseline megalomaniacal leaders, declined to put their faces on currency until the tyrant Julius Caesar stuck his head on the republic’s coinage and met a sticky end a few months later. The British historian Mary Beard reminded me that statues of Roman emperors were sometimes rechiseled and converted into others, a monument-flipping technique Trump tried but failed to mimic at the Kennedy Center. Over centuries of imperial history, the contest for dominance has been expressed, as Beard put it to me, by “My arch is bigger than your arch. My column is bigger than your column.” Trump’s proposed Independence Arch (over 342 million served), which will block views of the Lincoln Memorial, would dwarf the Arc de Triomphe by 86 feet.

Hi, Hieroglyphics: The Museum Tower at the Obama Presidential Center

So now, after the Trump colosseum’s UFC concussion fest, comes the opening of Barack Tutankhamun Obama’s presidential pyramid, that rises from Chicago’s South Side like a forbidding, sightless shrine to his mighty aloof self. I am not sure which is more unsettling: Trump’s brutal pastiche of Marvel history, fake patriotism, crass commerce, and ab-blasted cage fighters kicking each other in the head blended like some uncut version of Fellini Satyricon or the forthcoming festival of liberal virtue in Chicago at the Obama Presidential Center opening, where no one wants to talk about what a bust the political pharaoh’s White House afterlife has been.

Obama has never quite recovered his moral luster since his notorious 60th birthday party at his $12 million Martha’s Vineyard estate, when the pandemic meant the number of guests had to be reduced. He redlined most of the guests who had been responsible for his election as president, such as David Axelrod, Rahm Emanuel, and other former staffers, but kept such glitterati as Jay-Z and Beyonce, George Clooney, Tom Hanks, and Steven Spielberg. Anyone looking for the telling thread running through the chosen few can be answered with two words: private plane.

Compared to that of the Carter Center or even Bill Clinton’s much maligned CGI, the Obama Foundation’s mission is an opaque word salad that sounds as if it were wordsmithed by Meghan Markle’s As Ever brand director: the foundation’s goal is “to inspire, empower, and connect people to change their world. We seek to build an active democratic culture where people are equipped and motivated to make change in the communities where they live, work, and play.” Would the president, considered one of our greatest orators, have ever uttered such blathering bromides?

Even as Obama has endorsed and campaigned for multiple state and federal candidates and led efforts against gerrymandering, he can not shake the perception that he has checked out. The problem is that times are so dire, more is expected from the Democrats’ erstwhile Superman. As Cornell Belcher, a longtime Obama pollster, said to the New Yorker, “This moment calls for him to take a better and bigger position. We need a return of the Jedi.”

Man in the Arena

Meanwhile, the towering $850 million granite obelisk of his presidential center is as opaque as his foundation’s mission, seemingly conceived as a multi-story democracy WeWork, with a $30 entrance fee in a low-income, low-rise neighborhood – a “yes, we can -- whether you like it or not.” Obama fans suspect that his increasing unexpressed anger at Trump for dismantling his key legacy achievements, including the Iran nuclear accord and the Paris Climate Agreement, has fueled his presidential center’s grandiosity, unconsciously or consciously. A cerebral version of the Trump ballroom, you might say.

Maybe it’s a law of history: as empires begin to die of misrule, their rulers build monuments, a hopeful lie to fool future historians. All the swagger stems from a fear of losing power, of becoming yesterday’s news, and being swallowed into the slipstream of history. We may be losing the self-imposed war with Iran, the battle for economic supremacy with China, the pedestal we once stood on in the eyes of Europe, but look at all that brawn glistening under the Claw on the South Lawn. As Trump turns 80 years of age, his MO will always be the gaudy showman shaman. Like Russell Crowe’s dauntless Maximus in Gladiator, he stands on the sand of the blood-stained colosseum bellowing at the crowd, “Are we not men? Are we not entertained?”

P.S. Fresh Heaven: If you haven’t heard ancient Rome historian Mary Beard’s fabulous new podcast Instant Classics, you can find it on Apple or anywhere you get your podcasts.