On Sunday, the South Lawn of the White House hosted a spectacle unprecedented in the history of the American republic: UFC Freedom 250, a mixed martial arts cage match produced by Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), staged as a centerpiece of the Trump administration’s commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The event was timed to coincide with Trump’s 80th birthday.

Construction crews erected a massive arched lighting grid—dubbed “The Claw” by the UFC—that dwarfs the White House itself. Some 4,000 invited people attended the event in person, while tens of thousands more stood in the Ellipse and watched on giant screens as fighters pummeled one another inside a steel cage. The blood sport, recalling the gladiatorial contests of antiquity, with the White House substituting for the Roman Colosseum, was livestreamed by Paramount+, now owned by Trump’s allies in the multi-billionaire Ellison family. The president mimicked the role of Roman emperor, looking on from a seat of honor.

The Marine Band played, amidst a military flyover and a fireworks display.

It would be difficult to conjure up a more grotesque expression of the collapse of American democracy and the depravity of American capitalism in its death agony. Thirty years ago, the late senator from Arizona, John McCain, a Republican, condemned mixed martial arts as “human cockfighting” and sought to ban UFC. Last Thursday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio compared the White House UFC spectacle to the first moon landing. Hailing UFC, he stated, “The American spirit is reflected in this American company.”

That this cage match was presented under the banner of “Freedom 250”—as part of the semiquincentennial of the Declaration of Independence—is a historical obscenity of the first order. The Declaration invoked the highest and most humane Enlightenment ideals, asserting that “all men are created equal” and endowed with “certain unalienable rights,” including “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” It was a revolutionary document, the product of a democratic revolution that swept away feudal and colonial forms of rule.

Trump’s administration is dedicated to the proposition that all men are not created equal—that a handful of billionaires should possess everything, that the president stands above the law, that immigrants are not people and that political opponents are “the enemy within,” to be crushed by the machinery of the state. The substitution of a cage match for a commemoration of democratic principles is not an accident. It is a blunt expression of what the Trump administration represents.

At its democratic highpoint, American society produced a Lincoln, who drew the final phrase of his First Inaugural address—“the better angels of our nature”—from Shakespeare and Dickens. Now, in its decay and putrefaction, US capitalism dredges up a Trump, who surrounds himself with podcaster Joe Rogan, billionaire Elon Musk and the purveyors of cage fighting.

There was a “bread and circuses” element to the White House UFC event—an attempt to divert public attention from war, inflation, mass deportations and the accelerating turn toward dictatorship. It took place amidst a rising tide of working class struggle, including a rebellion of auto parts workers across the Midwest. These are portents of a social eruption of revolutionary proportions.

This makes all the more sinister the White House event. In lauding mixed martial arts and its mindless aggression, Trump and his associates are working to inure the population to the far greater scenes of savage violence they have in mind: the arrest and deportation of millions of immigrant workers, the bloody war with China for which the ruling class is preparing and the violent repression of political opposition at home.

The event was the culmination of a relationship between Donald Trump and UFC President Dana White that stretches back to the early 2000s, when Trump, then a casino operator, allowed White to host UFC events at his now-defunct Taj Mahal Resort in Atlantic City. White repaid the favor by speaking at the 2016 and 2024 Republican National Conventions and by cultivating a base of support for Trump among UFC’s audience.

Media critics, Democratic politicians and their pseudo-left allies portray Trump’s fascistic ideology merely as a matter of his individual personality. This covers up the real significance of his domination of American politics. In fact, Trump is the product and representative of a financial oligarchy that concentrates in its hands more wealth than any previous ruling elite in history. It dominates every facet of American—and world—society: government power, the economy, the media, art and culture, academia.

Just two days before Trump’s cage fighting event, Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire. The initial public offering of his SpaceX company—which has never made a profit and lost $4.9 billion in 2025—increased his wealth by some $300 billion. His, and the vast fortunes of his fellow multi-billionaires, bear no relationship to any actual process of production. They are based on parasitic speculation, through the vastly inflated financial markets, on previously existing wealth.

These galactic fortunes drive the ever more brutal impoverishment and immiseration of the working class—the destruction of jobs, wage-cutting, the gutting of Medicaid, food stamps, Medicare, Social Security and education. American labor’s share of the nation’s gross domestic product has fallen to its lowest level since records began in 1947. Globally, 60,000 multimillionaires own three times more wealth than the bottom half of humanity—some 4 billion people.

Democratic forms of rule are incompatible with such levels of social inequality. To maintain their system, under conditions of rising working class resistance, the ruling elites turn to dictatorship, war and fascism. Musk, a fascist who backs far-right and fascist movements across Europe, embodies the American oligarchy and its abandonment of democracy.

The Democratic Party’s response to the White House cage match was entirely characteristic. The Democrats and their allied organizations—No Kings and the Committee for the First Amendment—staged a counter-programming event: “Rise Up, Sing Out: A Concert for the First Amendment” at Town Hall in New York City, featuring Jane Fonda, Julia Roberts, Bette Midler and former MSNBC host Joy Reid. Tickets retailed for over $330.

The No Kings concert invoked an “inclusive” patriotism and framed the struggle against Trump in racial and identitarian terms—“white supremacy” rather than capitalism. There was virtually no mention of the war in Iran, the police state operations of ICE or the reality of oligarchic rule. The purpose was to channel popular outrage safely back into the Democratic Party and toward the 2026 midterm elections.

This is a strategy of containment, not opposition. The Democrats fear a genuine movement from below—a movement of the working class, independently organized and armed with a socialist and internationalist program—far more than they fear Trump. The Democratic Party is a party of Wall Street, war and police repression. It cannot and will not fight fascism, because it represents the same ruling class whose crisis has produced fascism.

The cage match is a warning. The ruling class is signaling, with ever-greater openness, that it is prepared to resolve social contradictions through violence. The steel cage on the South Lawn is a metaphor made literal: the American political system has become an arena in which the working class is to be beaten into submission for the amusement of the oligarchy.

Dictators and fascists are not defeated by benefit concerts, and they are not stopped by the Democratic Party. The American Revolution was not carried out through celebrity appearances and appeals to the British Parliament. The revolutionaries of 1776 formed committees, organized militias and built the Continental Army to overthrow the old order. What was historically progressive in their struggle was the assertion of universal democratic principles—principles that cannot be realized today through either party of American capitalism.

The defense of democratic rights requires the independent mobilization of the working class in the United States and internationally. It requires a socialist program aimed at expropriating the billionaires and reorganizing society to meet human need, not private profit. Only the working class, armed with an internationalist and socialist perspective, can put an end to the conditions that have produced Trump, fascism and the cage on the White House lawn.

The alternative that confronts humanity is either the conquest of power by the working class and the establishment of socialism, or the descent into fascist barbarism and world war. The UFC cage match is a small but telling signpost on the road to the latter. The building of the Socialist Equality Party and the International Committee of the Fourth International is the only road to the former.