There are many ways for an 80-year-old man to celebrate his birthday: a quiet brunch with family at home, a voucher for Home Depot. Or maybe, a giant steel octagon called ‘The Claw’ erected on your lawn for the Ultimate Fighting Championship, followed by a high-profile legal dispute.
The brunch route was taken by Joe Biden four years ago, when his wife shared a photograph on her Instagram account of them sharing a coconut cake with their kids and grandchildren. “A perfect birthday celebration filled with so much love,” she wrote at the time.
Boy, she must feel really stupid now!
Because it really takes a different kind of octogenarian to look at the White House’s South Lawn and think: This calls for a cage fight. Preferably with Adam Sandler in attendance. It’s a slightly baffling, truly novel idea that really summarizes how this president likes to lead.
Unfortunately, Sandler won’t be in attendance at the big UFC event — according to sources, the invitees have been dropping out in droves, from Sandler to Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson to Jared Leto. And then there’s those killjoys in Virginia who filed that lawsuit trying to stop it. But even they would have to admit that hardly anything in the world could more accurately visually summarize America today, under the leadership of Donald Trump, than a bunch of people in a cage.
And if you’re looking for a birthday gift for Donald and America — both of them young in global terms and terrifyingly, worryingly old in human terms — then you can look no further than the market. What do you get the man who has everything? More inflation, obviously!
As prices skyrocketed to the highest in years, the president let us in on a little secret on Wednesday: he “loves the inflation.” That’s another example of the kind of innovative, out-of-the-box kind of thinking we need around here, in this country that spent so long resting on its laurels with its understated celebrations and its democratic guardrails.
Inflation languishing at 4.2 percent isn’t enough — for Donald, we can probably push it to six. Imagine the joy on his face. Forty dollars for a dozen eggs? Tears in his eyes. Gas at eight bucks? He’ll get in the cage!
Perhaps this is, after all, the natural progression of the Republic. What started as an experiment in a new kind of governance punctuated with occasionally brutal duels has now become… an experiment in a new kind of governance punctuated with occasionally brutal duels.
We’ve all seen Hamilton. Those guys didn’t sit around all day, kowtowing to a load of boring bureaucrats about rules and regulations. They made the rules and regulations! They tore up the old script and wrote a whole new one! The king is out, the colonists are colonizing, Dana White is the face of America, INFLATION IS GOOD!
Besides, what are critics really proposing instead? Sheet cake and some candles? Please. This is America. If you’re turning 80 while occupying the most powerful office on Earth, go ahead and commemorate the occasion with title fights, giant screens, enough pyrotechnics to make a monster truck rally blush, and a “no fish-hooking” rule. If you don’t like it, go ahead and avert your gaze.
And what of the lesser Americans, the ones who are not Donald Trump and don’t get a large section of the White House lawn and a rotating carousel of greased-up men duking it out, Gladiator-style, for their birthdays? Well, those whiny, woke snowflakes will have to get it together. We have to remember what we’re here for in this family — who we’re here for in particular. And what, you can’t forgive Grandpa a little war in the Middle East and a resulting economic crisis? On his birthday?!
Yes, if Gramps wants a cage fight, some inflation and the occasional geopolitical crisis, then we are quite literally powerless to defy him. One can only hope that, since he curses every sporting event he turns up to (sorry, Knicks), he brings some of that energy to his own celebration. Because I know we all get out what we put into the world, but even America probably doesn’t deserve this.
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