This rules.Kevin Dietsch/Getty
At first, when I saw these photos of curling scaffolding outside the White House, I thought construction was beginning on the Trump Arch. That assumption, however, shows my limited fluency in Donald Trump’s vanity projects.
This is actually something else entirely: a tarantula-like stage being built for the president’s birthday cage fight extravaganza, called UFC Freedom 250. The fights, which will be part of Trump’s America 250 celebration, will reportedly cost $60 million. Trump announced the event last year during a visit to the Iowa State Fair. This summer, it’s happening for real, featuring boxers Ilia Tupuria and Justin Gaethje.
Oh, you didn’t realize a cage fight was happening at the White House soon? Neither did many of us. Here is a list of things that people at the Center for Investigative Reporting’s New York office think the arena, at least in its current iteration, resembles instead:
- Alien egg
- Elon Musk’s first installation on Mars
- Mall bungee jumping setup, near the food court, right around the corner from Claire’s, probably smelling faintly of cheese.
- Rollercoaster, but little
- Church carnival in a parking lot
- The millionth Transformers film
- The launch celebration for a new and improved NuvaRing. This one is sort of high-concept, and I don’t really understand it, but I believe my colleagues and here’s a link where you can judge for yourself.
- St. Louis Arch (a.k.a The Gateway Arch, but a Lego Technic version.)
- McDonald’s Arches.
- Installation purpose-built for a mid-sized city’s bid to host the Olympics
I’m no architecture critic, so there’s not much else for me to add here. If tickets to the fight didn’t (reportedly) cost $1.5 million, I’d check it out. I think the Transformers movies are pretty neat, and I think that there are many worse things the president could be wasting his time on than a UFC fight.
