Dispatches from the present
It’s 8:15 p.m. on Friday, June 12th, and we’re at the base of the Lincoln Memorial, a few hundred of us, for the UFC Freedom 250 press conference, the curtain raiser for the president’s birthday weekend, whose culminating fight the mini jumbotrons on either side of us tease as “The Most Historic Sporting Event of All Time.” The crowd is pretty well mixed—mostly groups of young guys along with the families and couples, but the races and ages are all covered. The mood is mellow; the UFC shirts are many; the MAGA hats, so far, are numbered at only one. Above us, lining the rim of the memorial, dozens of National Guard troops have yet to disperse, the start time having been pushed over concerns about the heat lightning making intermittent dashes out of the clouds.
A half mile northwest, at the Kennedy Center, they’re still waffling about the right time to take Trump’s name off the wall. A half mile east, the grass on the Mall still shows the big-font markings spelling out “86 47” (“kill Trump”) that the sunrise had revealed the day before. A half mile west, across the Potomac, Memorial Circle awaits eventual excavation for Trump’s proposed 250-foot triumphal arch. And a half mile southeast, there’s King, looking out of limestone eyes across the tidal basin to Jefferson, his back to it all. It was 63 years ago that he stood where Dana White will soon appear and called on the nation to fulfill Jefferson’s “promissory note.”
For a half hour, we remain stalled by the weather. I listen to a guy next to me running the gambit of Manosphere patois in a conversation with one of the girls in his group (“You’re my biggest hater, bro,” he says, with the listless, finger-poking inflection of Clav, and then, trading in the nasal, hyper-ironic intonation of Nick Fuentes, “I’m joking, Jesus, I’m joking”). At one point, the sound guys get the audio working and we can hear the hype commentators talking to the cameras by the stage. A roar goes up, but it’s cut immediately when the audio goes out again. So they resort back to the playlist: Stevie Ray Vaughan’s “Voodoo Child,” which is more than fine with me, until it reveals itself as some weirdly emptied-out remix.
At around 8:30, the sky starts doing crazy things. A lurid orange-pink burgeons in the clouds; a rainbow, after positioning itself over the span of the Mall, loses its right half and darkens into a lustrous, arcing spear; the lightning makes forays into increasingly low realms of the sky. Everyone is getting their phones out and taking awed panoramic videos. A helicopter glides down the chute of the reflecting pool, then banks sharply at the crowd and does a low, tight circle counterclockwise around the Lincoln. In there, someone is getting the best video of all.
For the next twenty minutes, suspended in that strange light, it almost feels as if we’re inside an AI-generated photo—not just because the surrealism of the weather has compounded that of the event but also because, when it comes down to it, none of this really means anything. That is: it doesn’t mean anything beyond its worth in views, its capacity for virality, its compatibility with the algorithm. In the Dana White-narrated hype video that will soon play on the screens, the pablum tying the UFC’s greatest moments to the presidential monuments is almost nonsensical in its looping emptiness. The writing sounds like AI, and—as with seemingly every viral Truth Social post from Trump these days, and as with the countless promotional videos the UFC Instagram is pumping out—the visuals themselves are clearly generated by AI. The video doesn’t really play with the crowd. Toward the end, one guy puts his arm around his girlfriend, sensing the imminence of a sentimental close—otherwise, it gets only a few whoops.
But no matter: the helicopter keeps circling, one, two, six times. The camera man retrains his focus, watching through his viewfinder as real life turns itself into slop, or slop turns itself into real life, or the two become one.
Sunday night is fight night: seven bouts on the South Lawn, culminating in a face-off for a lightweight title. I linger for a while at the Hotel Washington, where all the high rollers seem to be staying for the weekend. There’s Tony Hinchcliffe, poking out for a few photos with fans. Black vest over a crisp white tee, big gold chain and big gold belt buckle, eyes very icy, face very red. (Is it the testosterone regimens these guys are on that make their faces that particular shade?) A few minutes later, Kid Rock emerges, staying low under the brim of his hat as he crosses the street toward the White House lawn. A block away, the cops open the traffic barrier for a silver Escalade. There, alone in the back seat, looking down at his phone, is Ted Cruz.
I wander around for a while and talk to the fans. When it comes to the politics of the event, its implications beyond the fighting, I get a similar response from most people. Says the lesbian woman sitting on a bench with her partner, when asked about Trump’s decision to stage the show on the lawn: “It’s not gonna hurt me if he does it or doesn’t.” Says the middle-aged white guy waiting for some of the fighters to emerge from their hotel: “Is it appropriate? No. But it’s already happening. What am I gonna do about it?” Says the young black guy with onyx earrings, a long ponytail and designer sunglasses: “It probably shouldn’t have been at the White House. It’s just UFC fans though.” Says the Bulgarian man with the well-trimmed beard talking to a vendor selling MAGA merch: “You just gotta have fun, man.”
With most people, the mention of Trump gets a furrowed brow or the wave of an indifferent hand. He is an unnecessary interjection, or a humorous one, or a tired one. Whatever the case, he isn’t worth any real airtime. He is the specter behind this whole thing, but he is also a non-issue. In memeifying himself, he has also embalmed himself, exempted himself from any kind of serious judgment. It’s 2026, remember: politics is all a joke.
By 10 p.m., almost everyone is through the gates and onto the Ellipse. The dead hours have officially arrived, as they always seem to in downtown D.C., even if there are thousands of extra people around. A few cops gather around an iPad on the hood of a squad car to watch the fights. A National Guardswoman leans over a traffic barrier to conspire with some kids on Lime scooters about navigating the street closures. And there goes Alex, the pedicab driver from Alexandria, who’d told me earlier about giving the right-wing influencer Nick Shirley a ride. (“He’s the guy that uncovered all that Somali fraud,” he said.) Now, he’s carrying a man with the build of a powerlifter off into the night.
At the World War I Memorial, some kids are taking photos with the sky tracers now beaming up from the White House lawn as their backdrop. One of them stands with his back to the camera and his arms outstretched, as if summoning the spectacle, or standing in divine awe of it. By Lafayette Park, I meet a guy snapping street photos, a photography student visiting from San Jose. He didn’t know about UFC 250 until now, and though he doesn’t like Trump, he likes the idea: “I think it’s sick. Something new, right?”
By the time I get home, heavyweight Josh Hokit has won the fourth fight, received a handshake from the president, and called Michelle Obama a man. Asked to address his victory remarks, the White House refused. I go to the Times app to see who’s fighting now, but what appears first is an article published that morning on “The Existential Dread of a Deepfake Expert.” Apparently, a man named Hany Farid, “the world’s leading expert in the field of digital forensics,” has “stopped trusting his own eyes.” “Every image I see, I’m drawing lines for shadows and doing geometry in my head, trying to figure out what I’m looking at,” he explains. “It’s over. Within a year or two, our whole visual system will be utterly useless … Every time there’s a big news event, we’re just drowning in this slop.”
Slop: the word of the hour. Slop that’s indistinguishable from real life; slop that is real life; slop that comes directly from the White House’s social media accounts, from the UFC’s, from the speakers pretending to play Stevie Ray Vaughan—to some, it may feel like drowning; to others, it’s just a nice swim. Last Friday UFC announced its global viewership numbers for the event: 34 million.