In case you haven’t been paying attention, there’s now a big sign over the White House proclaiming its “Monster Energy.”
In the images, the sign is visible, sandwiched between “UFC Freedom 250″ logos, with Donald Trump’s tacky UFC arena looming in the background.
It could not be more on the money.
This administration has more Monster Energy than all 38 Godzilla movies combined.
Take just this week alone: We have watched as the president has admitted that he actually loves the inflation that is making groceries and gas less affordable for average Americans everywhere.
We have listened as Trump’s secretary of homeland security, Markwayne “Kung Fu Plumber” Mullin, announced he supported the active pogroms that led to immigrants being dragged from their homes and set on fire in Northern Ireland.
We’ve supported with our tax dollars U.S. attacks on facilities that provide drinking water in Iran and continued Israeli assaults on Lebanon that have left thousands dead.
We read in the New York Times about the lengths Trump’s inner circle have gone to hide the truth about the Epstein files and the president’s close ties to the notorious sex trafficker.
We saw online how Trump threatened massive attacks against Iran only to then TACO out of them, marking another moment that he has used terror as a negotiating tool to try to find a way out of his illegal, immoral and fruitless war.
We’ve learned that Trump’s DOGE budget cuts may have contributed to the spread of the deadly screw worm parasite among cattle at ranches in the southern U.S… and that Trump’s war on science will likely lead to greater and greater vulnerability of coastal communities to climate disasters even as the likelihood of such disasters is being increased by administration policies to cut our green energy resources.
Deportations of more innocents to third-party countries are continuing and so are family separations and desperate conditions in the concentration camps ICE has erected across the country… and millions of Americans are having to give up healthcare because Obamacare subsidies were cut by the Republicans in order to make way for more tax cuts for the rich.
Rumblings of more attacks on democracy this fall kept coming. Cruel, lie-strewn attacks on the LGBTQ community and immigrant groups like Somalis were a regular feature of administration statements.
Monstrous behavior, monstrous words from monstrous people.
Given the White House’s proclivity for lying, of course, you might be surprised that at just this moment we would get truth in advertising about who they really are. But, sadly, there has been no revelation born of introspection, nor any new commitment to transparency nor the truth.
Rather, the big sign is just an advertisement over the massive, hideous steel coliseum that has been erected on the South Lawn of the White House to host this weekend the gladiatorial contests our mad emperor has decreed will take place to help celebrate the beginning of his ninth decade.
As ugly as the blood-spattered fight card will likely be, worse still are the murky business arrangements that will give the entire event the corrupt stench that has become the signature fragrance of the Trump administration.
In a nutshell, the White House has been rented out as a marketing prop to a private company in which the president has an interest and which is owned by his friends, and millions upon millions of taxpayer dollars will almost certainly be spent preparing for it and making it possible.
Members of the military will be encouraged to go and fill the audience (paying full price) while others come as part of juicy sponsorship deals which will benefit… well, I doubt we’ll ever fully know the real beneficiaries of this planned spectacle will be.
Suffice it to say the reputation of the White House or the presidency or the United States of America will not benefit. Neither will the ordinary citizens of the United States. (Unless they are inclined to watch the festivities on the Trump-friendly network owned by the Ellison family that has somehow won the rights to televise the cheeseball mayhem.)
Indeed, even as we are learning the Oval Office of the White House might be used as a locker room for the combatants this weekend, we have the Secretary of State of the United States suggesting this week that mixed martial arts battles like this one capture the same kind of great American spirit once exemplified by the space program. He even went so far as to suggest he will sign a deal with the fight’s organizers to create a new program of MMA diplomacy with the State Department. (Because, why? Doesn’t he realize the world understands all too well what a depraved violent country we have become.)
Sadly, Marco Rubio may be right. Celebrating our former reality television star, serial sex abuser, racist, most corrupt president in history’s birthday with a crude and transcendently vulgar display of violence at what once was thought of as “the People’s House” may actually be, like the “Monster Energy” sign displayed above it, an accurate depiction of the cultural and moral decay of the United States. Just like the gilded grift-financed billionaire ballroom rising beside the Octagon. Just like the monuments Trump seeks to build across Washington to himself.
We have given our nation’s leadership over to our worst people’s worst instincts. Where once we celebrated progress with the anniversaries of our founding, now we must use them to measure the reversals to that progress that have been engineered by Trump and MAGA and the Supreme Court and the oligarchs who will cheer alongside the president on Sunday night.
What better way to celebrate Monster Energy than at a monster’s ball?
Commemorating our nation’s birthday, or Trump’s, with Sousa marches and brass bands would be a lie anyway. Stirring words about history and values and aspirations would ring hollow at this moment. This dystopian tribute to greed and depravity captures far more accurately the true state of our nation right now.
It may even do some good if decent people are sufficiently disgusted by this brightly lit display of the depths to which we have sunk that they actually decide do something about it, say, in the upcoming midterm election campaign or afterwards, during the two-year effort to find someone to ultimately repair the damage our monster-in-chief has done to our White House, our capital, and our country.
