{"id":767,"date":"2026-07-02T17:10:02","date_gmt":"2026-07-02T17:10:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/smartmovinghome.com\/?p=767"},"modified":"2026-07-02T17:10:02","modified_gmt":"2026-07-02T17:10:02","slug":"trumps-ufc-cage-fight-is-an-apt-metaphor-for-a-nation-built-on-colonial-violence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/smartmovinghome.com\/?p=767","title":{"rendered":"Trump\u2019s UFC Cage Fight Is an Apt Metaphor for a Nation Built on Colonial Violence"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\u201cOn July 4th, 1776 \u2026 the United States became the greatest force for freedom, justice, equality, and prosperity in the history of the world,\u201d President Donald Trump declared in a promotional video for the Freedom 250 campaign, the administration\u2019s flagship initiative commemorating the U.S.\u2019s semiquincentennial. Among the centerpiece events planned for the nation\u2019s 250th birthday celebration was an Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) cage fight on the grounds of the White House.<\/p>\n

The June 14 event, which occurred on Trump\u2019s birthday and Flag Day, delivered exactly what he promised: a pageant of power, violence, and nationalism staged at the seat of U.S. power. Thousands gathered around an octagonal cage erected on the White House grounds; cabinet secretaries mingled with senators, tech billionaires with celebrity athletes, media personalities with corporate sponsors, all beneath military flyovers and pyrotechnic displays. Under the lights, fighters bloodied one another as the crowd roared its approval.<\/p>\n

Liberals found the event crass. Sen. Patty Murray called it \u201cout of touch.\u201d New York Times<\/em> opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote, \u201cOn the 250th anniversary of our country\u2019s founding, America\u2019s increasingly senescent president turned the White House lawn into a tacky, bloody gladiatorial arena.\u201d Meanwhile, CNN <\/em>quoted one historian who asked, \u201cWhat does a UFC fight have to do with America\u2019s greatness?\u201d<\/p>\n

The historian\u2019s question assumes that the values represented by the spectacle \u2014 domination, hierarchy, and the glorification of power \u2014 are fundamentally at odds with the ideals of the founding of the United States. But what if the contradiction lies not between the cage match and the American Revolution, but between the history that people in the U.S. are taught and the history that actually unfolded? To answer that question, it helps to begin with an observation from Martinican poet and anti-colonial theorist Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire: \u201cNo one colonizes innocently.\u201d<\/p>\n

Americans are taught that their nation was born in the cradle of liberty. But C\u00e9saire\u2019s insight requires us to confront a more disquieting truth: The U.S. republic emerged from another womb altogether \u2014 the smoke of burning villages, the holds of slave ships, and the ambitions of a colonial elite willing to unleash unspeakable violence in pursuit of wealth and power. Indeed, what better way to party like it\u2019s 1776 than with a spectacle of combat staged at the center of U.S. empire?<\/p>\n

The cage fight, surrounded by representatives of every branch of the armed forces, was part of Trump\u2019s effort to cultivate a cult of personality. Writing under Nazi rule, cultural theorist Walter Benjamin described fascism as the \u201caestheticization of politics\u201d \u2014 the transformation of political life into spectacle in order to generate emotional attachment to authority. By fusing combat, militarism, celebrity culture, and nationalism into a single public performance, the White House cage match endeavored to cast repression, xenophobia, and extreme inequality not as threats to freedom but as expressions of national strength.<\/p>\n

As the United States approaches its 250th anniversary, the country faces rising authoritarianism, ongoing state violence against Black communities, a worsening affordability crisis, widening wars, climate catastrophe, attacks on immigrants and LGBTQ+ people, and an escalating siege on critical education. We can no longer afford to leave the meaning of 1776 to Donald Trump, establishment Democratic Party politicians, billionaire-funded media outlets, or the sanitized narratives found in many textbooks. Only by confronting the republic\u2019s colonial foundations \u2014 and recovering the traditions of freedom forged by those who resisted them \u2014 can we pursue a different future.<\/p>\n

National Innocence or Colonial Brutality?<\/h2>\n<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s over-the-top jingoism obscures a deeper truth: The refusal to reckon with the United States as a settler-colonial project is a bipartisan affliction. As President Barack Obama declared: \u201cThe patriots of 1776 did not fight to replace the tyranny of a king with the privileges of a few or the rule of a mob. They gave to us a republic, a government of, and by, and for the people, entrusting each generation to keep safe our founding creed.\u201d President Joe Biden similarly argued, \u201cDeep in the heart of America burns a flame lit almost 250 years ago \u2014 of liberty, freedom, and equality.\u201d Trump did not invent the founding fairytale of innocence; he inherited and radicalized this bedtime story that has from the beginning called the United States the \u201cfairest of them all\u201d to obscure its colonial origins.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s clear Trump has exploited the bipartisan faith in American exceptionalism to suppress dissent and concentrate executive power. Yet his authoritarianism is less an aberration than the latest expression of a recurring pattern. From slavery and Indigenous dispossession to Jim Crow, Japanese American incarceration during World War II, McCarthyism, COINTELPRO, and NSPM-7 today, authoritarianism has repeatedly resurfaced. Its roots lie in the colonial foundations of the republic, where conquest, racial hierarchy, and state violence became enduring instruments of governance. The 20th century\u2019s most infamous authoritarian movements did not emerge from nowhere. They drew upon centuries of colonial practice. For example, Adolf Hitler openly admired the United States\u2019 genocide of Indigenous peoples. In a 1928 speech, he praised white American settlers for having \u201cgunned down\u201d millions of Indigenous people until only a \u201cfew hundred thousand\u201d remained. As James Q. Whitman, author Hitler\u2019s American Model<\/em>, notes, \u201cBeyond its laws, the Nazis also admired America\u2019s conquest of the West.\u201d Nazi leaders viewed the United States\u2019 seizure of Indigenous lands and westward expansion as precedents for their own project of Lebensraum<\/em> (\u201cliving space\u201d) \u2014 the conquest and ethnic cleansing of Eastern Europe.<\/p>\n

The Nazi fascination with the U.S. frontier was rooted in a historical reality that many accounts of 1776 still minimize. As historian Nick Estes, a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe, writes, the Haudenosaunee remember George Washington as the \u201ctown destroyer\u201d for ordering the destruction of dozens of Haudenosaunee towns during the Revolutionary War. \u201cIn a very real sense,\u201d Estes concludes, \u201cthe founding of the United States was a declaration of war against Indigenous peoples.\u201d One of the principal grievances driving many advocates of independence was the British Crown\u2019s attempt to restrict westward expansion after the Seven Years\u2019 War. The Declaration of Independence itself denounced Indigenous peoples as \u201cmerciless Indian Savages,\u201d revealing that Native nations were viewed as obstacles to colonial expansion rather than sovereign peoples. Independence swept aside those restraints and accelerated a centuries-long project of dispossession, forced removal, and genocide.<\/p>\n

For anti-colonial thinkers such as Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Walter Rodney, fascism was not a departure from colonialism but one of its logical destinations. As historian Robin D. G. Kelley argues in his introduction to C\u00e9saire\u2019s Discourse on Colonialism<\/em>, one of the book\u2019s most important contributions was its effort to \u201clocate the origins of fascism within colonialism itself.\u201d Kelley and the anti-colonialists he draws on have shown that white supremacy, dispossession, dehumanization, and state violence did not begin with fascism. Those methods had long been refined through colonial conquest, empire, and racial domination before they were turned inward against Europe itself.<\/p>\n

Most people in the U.S. have been taught to view 1776 as the starting point for understanding the origins of freedom. But the choices confronting enslaved people during the American Revolution reveal the limits of the \u201cpatriot\u201d vision. In 1772, Lord Mansfield ruled in favor of James Somerset, an enslaved African who resisted being returned from England to slavery in Jamaica, alarming colonial slaveholders who feared Britain might eventually restrict slavery. Those fears intensified in 1775 when Lord Dunmore, Virginia\u2019s royal governor, offered freedom to enslaved people owned by rebel colonists if they escaped and joined the British side. Thousands fled to British lines. So threatening was the prospect of enslaved people claiming freedom that the Declaration of Independence condemned George III for having \u201cexcited domestic insurrections amongst us\u201d \u2014 a phrase widely understood as a reference to Dunmore\u2019s proclamation. For many colonial elites, one of the gravest dangers posed by British rule was that it might undermine slavery itself.<\/p>\n

The American Revolution looked very different from the tobacco and cotton fields than it did from the plantation house or Independence Hall. Take the question Frederick Douglass asked in his famous speech, \u201cWhat to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?\u201d and consider his conclusion:<\/p>\n

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This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, [is] inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

More than a century later, the Black revolutionary and anti-colonial thinker Malcolm X advanced a similar critique, urging Black people to reject the assumption that their freedom originated with the American founding:<\/p>\n

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We are Africans, and we happen to be in America. We are not Americans. We are a people who formerly were Africans who were kidnapped and brought to America. Our forefathers weren\u2019t the Pilgrims. We didn\u2019t land on Plymouth Rock; the rock landed on us. We were brought here against our will \u2026 We were not brought here to enjoy the constitutional gifts that they speak so beautifully about today.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Malcolm X\u2019s challenge forces us to confront the reality that the American Revolution was shaped by conquest, slavery, and elite rule. Once we abandon the assumption that 1776 represents the highest expression of freedom, another revolution comes into view \u2014 one that pushed the ideals of liberty and equality far beyond anything the U.S. founders were willing to imagine.<\/p>\n

Fear of a Black Republic<\/h2>\n<\/p>\n

To understand the limits of the American Revolution, we need only compare it to the Haitian Revolution, which erupted shortly thereafter in the same Atlantic world. The Haitian Revolution breached the walls U.S. and European empires had erected around the idea that freedom was the sole property of white people, and rescued the idea of emancipation as the natural human condition.<\/p>\n

Beginning in 1791, enslaved people in the French colony of Saint-Domingue revolted against one of the most brutal slave systems in the world. Under the leadership of figures such as Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, they defeated French, Spanish, and British armies and, in 1804, established Haiti \u2014 the first Black republic and the only nation ever created through a successful slave revolution.<\/p>\n

Read more Judge Blocks Pentagon \u201cEscort\u201d Policy for Journalists Entering the Building<\/a><\/p>\n

The contrast with the United States is striking. Haiti\u2019s 1805 Constitution declared that \u201cSlavery is forever abolished\u201d and that \u201call acception of color\u201d was \u201cnecessarily to cease,\u201d while the U.S. Constitution protected slavery and racism through the Three-Fifths Clause and the Fugitive Slave Clause. Haiti\u2019s commitment to freedom was not limited to people of African descent. After independence, Haitian leaders granted citizenship and full rights to many Polish soldiers who had defected from Napoleon\u2019s army and joined the revolutionary cause. At a moment when the United States restricted citizenship and political power along racial lines, Haiti offered a strikingly different vision \u2014 one in which solidarity with the struggle against slavery and colonialism mattered more than ancestry or skin color.<\/p>\n

Yet Haitian revolutionaries also understood that freedom\u2019s greatest enemies often masqueraded as its guileless defenders.<\/p>\n

Toussaint Louverture, the brilliant Haitian general who led the revolution, understood that systems of domination rarely announce themselves as such and prefer to hide behind a mask of innocence. Writing in 1799, Louverture warned of \u201cthe unity that exists between the proprietors of St.-Domingue who are in France, those in the United States, and those who serve under the English banner.\u201d These slaveholding interests from powerful nations, he argued, were united behind an \u201cunequivocal and carefully constructed\u201d plan for \u201cthe restoration of slavery.\u201d Yet they did not openly proclaim themselves enemies of freedom. Instead, he observed, they sought to \u201cenvelop themselves in the mantle of liberty in order to strike it more deadly blows.\u201d<\/p>\n

As historian Leslie M. Alexander explains in her book, Fear of a Black Republic<\/em>, Haitian independence \u201ctransformed global conceptions of freedom and challenged existing assumptions about who possessed human rights and who did not.\u201d The revolution exposed the lie that slavery was natural or permanent and proved that enslaved people could overthrow their oppressors and govern themselves.<\/p>\n

The panic was immediate among enslavers and the leaders of the new United States. As historian Brian Jones notes in his book, Black History Is For Everyone<\/em>, over a nearly two-year period from 1791 to 1793, U.S. officials sent approximately $726,000 to Saint-Domingue to support enslavers attempting to crush the uprising.<\/p>\n

As the uprising spread across Saint-Domingue in 1791, President George Washington declared, \u201cLamentable! To see such a spirit of revolt among the Blacks.\u201d Alexander Hamilton described the Haitian Revolution as a \u201ccalamitous event.\u201d In 1793, Thomas Jefferson \u2014 the author of the July 4, 1776, Declaration of Independence \u2014 feared that the Haitian Revolution threatened the entire slave system of the Americas, worrying that \u201call the West India Islands will remain in the hands of the people of colour\u201d and that slaveholders south of the Potomac might one day have to \u201cwade through\u201d similarly \u201cbloody scenes.\u201d Fearing that the rebellion would inspire enslaved people in the United States, Jefferson warned that unless slaveholders and the U.S. government acted quickly to contain its influence, they would bring ruin upon themselves: \u201cIf something is not done, and done soon, we shall be the murderers of our own children.\u201d<\/p>\n

By 1802, Jefferson expressed the great fears of freedom-loving enslavers everywhere when he said that Haiti had already \u201cgiven considerable impulse to the minds of the slaves\u201d and that \u201ca great disposition to insurgency has manifested itself among them.\u201d<\/p>\n

The hostility was not merely rhetorical. After becoming president, Jefferson imposed an economically devastating embargo on Haiti, and the United States refused to formally recognize Haitian independence until 1862. Haiti\u2019s greatest crime, in the eyes of enslavers, was that it cracked open history and revealed another future waiting inside \u2014 a future in which Black people not only won their freedom but established their own sovereign nation.<\/p>\n

This history undermines one of the most common defenses of the founders: that they were merely people of their time. The Haitian Revolution demonstrates that the brutality of slavery was not beyond the moral imagination of the 18th century. Enslaved people, abolitionists, Maroons, and Indigenous resisters understood it well. Haiti proved that a republic could be built on abolition rather than slavery. The question was never whether a broader vision of freedom was possible, but whether those who benefited from oppression would surrender power.<\/p>\n

The fact of the Haitian Revolution also demolishes the claim that the United States led the world toward abolition. As PragerU \u2014 the far right propaganda organization that produces videos for children \u2014 asserts, \u201cAmerica was one of the first places on earth to outlaw slavery.\u201d Or as one of their flagrantly inaccurate videos proclaimed, \u201cWhite people were the first to formally put an end to slavery \u2026 white men led the world in putting an end to the abhorrent practice.\u201d<\/p>\n

The truth is the United States maintained slavery longer than every independent nation in the Americas except Brazil and Paraguay (with the Spanish colonies of Cuba and Puerto Rico abolishing slavery later as well). Black Haitians abolished slavery in 1804 \u2014 long before Britain, France, or the United States \u2014 and helped spread emancipation throughout the Americas, including through its support for Sim\u00f3n Bol\u00edvar\u2019s anti-colonial struggles. It took the bloodiest war in U.S. history to finally destroy the institution of slavery in 1865 because so much of the nation\u2019s political and economic system was built upon it.<\/p>\n

The history of emancipation in the Americas reveals that the most expansive visions of freedom emerged not from white men with silver shoe buckles and powdered wigs, but from barefoot Black revolutionaries with natural curls and the scars from leg irons. At stake in our interpretation of the American Revolution is more than the reputation of the founders; it is the kind of society we believe is possible and the future we are struggling to create.<\/p>\n

The Fight for the Next 250<\/h2>\n<\/p>\n

If the next 250 years are to bring us closer to freedom than the last, we must reject the colonial lie that the founding of the United States marked the fulfillment of freedom. Yet rejecting that lie does not mean denying its significance.<\/p>\n

The American Revolution did help demonstrate that kings could be overthrown and challenged hereditary rule. Its language of liberty was seized upon by women, laborers, abolitionists, and democratic radicals who insisted that freedom meant far more than independence from Britain. Take formerly enslaved Boston abolitionist Prince Hall, who seized upon the American Revolution\u2019s own language to demand the abolition of slavery. In a 1777 petition to the Massachusetts legislature, Hall and seven other free Black men insisted that enslaved people possessed \u201ca natural and unalienable right to that freedom\u201d bestowed \u201cequally on all mankind.\u201d Thomas Paine was another such radical. His bestselling pamphlet Common Sense<\/em> helped ignite the American Revolution, while his 1775 essay \u201cAfrican Slavery in America\u201d denounced slavery as \u201can outrage against humanity\u201d and called for its abolition. As Hall and Paine demonstrate, the American Revolution raised expectations for freedom that many of its most powerful leaders worked just as fiercely to keep from becoming universal.<\/p>\n

To decolonize our understanding of 1776, however, is not simply to recover missing voices to the story of the American Revolution. It is to recognize that the most expansive traditions of freedom were not the product of a colonial elite, but instead lived in Indigenous resistance to conquest, in slave rebellions, in the Haitian Revolution, in abolitionism, in Reconstruction, and in the many social movements for collective liberation.<\/p>\n

It is no accident that these traditions are being targeted today. Voting rights are under attack. State violence continues to be inflicted on Black communities. The United States continues to occupy Native land and refuses to honor treaties it signed with Indigenous nations. Educational gag orders and book bans seek to prevent people from learning about racism, colonialism, and inequality. As the United States celebrates its 250th birthday, it also celebrates an economic order that has produced both 44 million people living in poverty and, however briefly, the world\u2019s first trillionaire, Elon Musk \u2014 whose fortune has been propelled in part by his investments in SpaceX, a company dedicated to colonizing Mars.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the deepest legacy of colonialism is not only the conquest of land, but also the conquest of political imagination itself. Two hundred and fifty years after 1776, we are still taught that the highest expression of freedom is expansion \u2014 ever more power, ever more wealth, ever more conquest. The colonial imagination of the U.S. elite can conceive of colonies on Mars more readily than justice on Earth. We are asked to believe that colonizing another planet is a realistic and noble ambition while guaranteeing housing, health care, education, and dignity for every person is dismissed as utopian fantasy.<\/p>\n

More than 70 years ago, Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire warned that \u201ca civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a stricken civilization.\u201d His warning remains our own. Once we understand that some of the deepest roots of authoritarianism lie within the colonial foundations of the republic itself, we can better grasp the scale of the transformation necessary to achieve genuine freedom. Decolonizing 1776 therefore requires more than rethinking the past; it requires reclaiming our capacity to imagine a different future that can guide the struggle for the next 250 years.<\/p>\n

As Louverture declared during the Haitian Revolution: \u201cI want Liberty and Equality to reign \u2026 I work to bring them into existence. Unite yourselves to us, brothers, and fight with us for the same cause.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more FBI Report Describes Graffiti as a Tactic of \u201cAnarchist Violent Extremists\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The White House\u2019s Freedom 250 spectacle grotesquely exposed the settler-colonial legacy of 1776.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":766,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-767","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"yoast_head":"\nTrump\u2019s UFC Cage Fight Is an Apt Metaphor for a Nation Built on Colonial Violence - Smart Moving Home<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/smartmovinghome.com\/?p=767\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Trump\u2019s UFC Cage Fight Is an Apt Metaphor for a Nation Built on Colonial Violence - Smart Moving Home\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The White House\u2019s Freedom 250 spectacle grotesquely exposed the settler-colonial legacy of 1776.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/smartmovinghome.com\/?p=767\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Smart Moving Home\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-07-02T17:10:02+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"17 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/smartmovinghome.com\\\/?p=767#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/smartmovinghome.com\\\/?p=767\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/smartmovinghome.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/ec0d70042821fd684a174c8d0e8becfa\"},\"headline\":\"Trump\u2019s UFC Cage Fight Is an Apt Metaphor for a Nation Built on Colonial Violence\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-07-02T17:10:02+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/smartmovinghome.com\\\/?p=767\"},\"wordCount\":3328,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/smartmovinghome.com\\\/?p=767#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/smartmovinghome.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/07\\\/9ac85d89e143eb024af494af27d818f4.jpg\",\"articleSection\":[\"Interesting\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/smartmovinghome.com\\\/?p=767#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/smartmovinghome.com\\\/?p=767\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/smartmovinghome.com\\\/?p=767\",\"name\":\"Trump\u2019s UFC Cage Fight Is an Apt Metaphor for a Nation Built on Colonial Violence - 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