The Apotheosis of Donald Trump
· The Atlantic
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It took 250 years and 45 presidents, but cage fighting has finally come to the White House.
Donald Trump’s 80th birthday was in many ways the apotheosis of the Trump administration—the Ultimate Fighting Championship held a seven-fight card on the South Lawn of the White House, with the president and members of his family in attendance.
The event was garish, lurid, and crass—perfectly calibrated to appeal to the president. A massive military flyover. The use of honor guards to usher UFC fighters into the cage. “Octagon Girls” in sequined red-white-and-blue costumes parading around the cage between rounds. A UFC fighter, during a post-fight interview with Joe Rogan, praising “my Lord and savior Jesus Christ” before repeating a long-running conspiracy theory: “Michelle Obama is a man!” This smear seemed to bring a half smile to Trump’s face. The main event, a lightweight championship bout between Justin Gaethje and Ilia Topuria, left Topuria bloodied and battered, his face mangled, his vision so impaired that he was hospitalized after the fight. As my colleague Gal Beckerman put it, “Not a single one of these seven fights was even won on points. They all resulted in one man’s rage and another man’s pain and humiliation.”
[Gal Beckerman: The theory that explains Trump’s UFC fight]
It was Trump’s version of the Roman imperial games—state-sponsored brutality as public entertainment, staged to please the emperor and his courtiers, desecrating a public space. He clearly relished every second of it. But the MAGA movement—and the 80-year-old man who leads it—is breaking apart.
THE UFC EVENT captured an essential truth of Trump’s second term. He believes that he made a mistake the first time around by hiring too many subordinates who did not allow Trump to be Trump. He wanted full fealty. By discarding institutional restraints, he was convinced he could deliver what he had promised. Trump has always been a man of epic indiscipline, but in Trump 2.0 there would be no brakes. It would be all improv.
Jonathan Rauch and I have argued that, as a result, the world now faces something new and frightening: a psychotic state. The administration is consistently detached from reality; the normal policy process we have seen in past administrations is nonexistent in this one. No one around the president even hints that anything he does is inappropriate, unpopular, or unwise. His Cabinet meetings have become exercises in self-abasement, with one member after another obsequiously groveling, each trying to outdo the next in their adoration. Trump, left on his own without adult supervision, has lurched from blunder to catastrophe.
He started a war with Iran and then, within a matter of months, managed to lose it. He is in the process of breaking NATO, one of the greatest military alliances in history. Inflation is rising. The economy is slowing. And his tariff policies have been a disaster.
The Trump administration has gutted medical research, cut research funding to universities because of political disputes, and triggered a “brain drain” that is dismantling in two years what took 80 to build. It shut down USAID and gutted PEPFAR, the George W. Bush program targeting AIDS that is credited with saving more than 25 million lives. This is producing what public-health researchers project will be hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths—the largest reversal of American humanitarian commitment in modern history.
Trump put an anti-vaccine activist, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in charge of public health and a fool, Pete Hegseth, in charge of the world’s most powerful military. He has weaponized the Department of Justice against his political enemies and pardoned January 6 defendants who attacked the Capitol and wanted to hang his vice president. He has transformed ICE from an immigration-enforcement agency into a domestic paramilitary force. Migrants were shipped to foreign prisons without due process. Trump has also converted the presidency into an instrument of self-enrichment on a scale no predecessor came close to matching.
As a result, Trump’s approval ratings have cratered. Consumer confidence has fallen to historic lows. Public sentiment is in “complete collapse” on key issues. The mood of ordinary Americans has soured, with many more dissatisfied than satisfied. For the first time, we’re seeing signs that Republicans in Congress may resist the will of the president. And Trump’s MAGA coalition, which until now has been cultlike in its loyalty, is fracturing and turning on itself. And then there is the matter of age.
FOR HIS ENTIRE ADULT LIFE, Donald Trump has displayed patterns of behavior—grandiosity, lack of empathy, impulsivity, an obsession with power and dominance, a continuous need for adulation, hypersensitivity to perceived slights, a habit of demonizing those who disagree with him, exploitive interpersonal relationships, a chronic distortion of reality to preserve self-image, and an indifference to truth—that reflect his disordered personality.
What’s newer to the mix are the clear signs of his advancing age. His need for adulation is more desperate than in the past; the vanity projects are more grandiose. He’s more disinhibited and impulsive. His rage is more easily triggered, and his displays of temper less intentional and less strategic. He’s more detached than ever from reality. His cruelty and the delight he takes in it, including celebrating the death of people he considered his enemies, is more pronounced now than before. And his environment is populated almost solely by sycophants.
[Cullen Murphy: Trump’s gladiator delusion]
The signs of Trump’s decline are everywhere: meandering soliloquies during Cabinet meetings, unplanned strolls on the White House roof, getting up and wandering to the windows in the East Room during meetings with oil executives. His obsessive fixation on the White House ballroom. The increasing number of deranged, middle-of-the-night Truth Social posts. The fury and indignation at routine questions from the press. And the steady narrowing of his vocabulary, his simplified syntax and reliance on a small number of stock phrases and superlatives. There’s no effort by Trump’s advisers to hide any of this. He won’t allow it.
What must be especially hard on Trump, a man of renowned vanity, are the signs of physical decay—his bruised hands that makeup cannot wholly conceal, his swollen ankles, his stooped posture and slowed gait, his weight, and his face turning the color of a Halloween pumpkin. It is as if these are the outward signs of inward ruin.
The day after Trump was inaugurated in 2017, I wrote, “A man with illiberal tendencies, a volatile personality and no internal checks is now president. This isn’t going to end well.” How it will end is beginning to come more clearly into focus. Trump is seeing the world he has wounded turn against him. He’s discovering that the whirligig of time brings in his revenges. And like another old ruler, vain and volatile, who divided his kingdom and whose reign ended in ruin, Donald Trump is bellowing at the storm, raging at his enemies, raging into the night.