Trump Is No Caesar

A Cheap, Ugly Colosseum Does Not Make Him Emperor.

Let me put two news items from this week side by side, and you can tell me what sort of country we’re living in.

This Sunday, June 14 — Donald Trump’s 80th birthday — there will be a UFC cage fight on the South Lawn of the White House, branded as a celebration of America’s 250th anniversary.

To mark the occasion, the Trump Organization, the family business run by the president’s sons, has partnered with the UFC to sell “Freedom 250” commemorative coins featuring Trump’s face.

The silver one runs about $250. But the gold medallion costs $11,999.99, and its display holder comes with a portrait of Trump and UFC boss Dana White. The sales website brags the coins were “designed by President Trump” himself.

A watchdog group has already sued to stop the event, calling this exactly what it looks like: a money-making scheme run out of the people’s house. And this isn’t a one-off — reporting this week shows the family cashing in on the World Cup too, the same way they cash in on everything else.

Now here’s the second story. On Wednesday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that consumer prices rose 4.2 percent over the past year — the fastest pace in three years, and the third straight month of acceleration. Gasoline is up 40.5 percent from a year ago. Food is up and shelter is up, but energy alone accounted for most of the monthly increase, because the war this administration started with Iran has choked the Strait of Hormuz and pushed crude toward $93 a barrel. And on the very day those numbers dropped, Trump launched new strikes on Iran for taking too long to negotiate an end to the war.

So, in the same week, we get $12,000 gold coins of the president’s dumb, fucking face, and a 4.2 percent hole in our paychecks.

I keep thinking about the Romans this week, and not in a way that flatters the president. Specifically, I think about the phrase “bread and circuses” — the idea that an empire in decline keeps its people quiet by feeding them and entertaining them.

Now, say what you want about the Caesars, but at least they understood the deal had two parts. They gave you the bread with the circus.

The Trump crew, on the other hand, has reinvented the formula. They keep the bread, but try to sell you a $11,999.99 commemorative coin of the emperor on your way out of the Colosseum.

I spent two decades policing Washington, and I know what the White House grounds are. Spoiler alert: they’re not Mar-a-Lago North.

Every square foot of that lawn is maintained by your tax dollars, and every fence line around Sunday’s cage will be secured by federal agents and DC cops pulling overtime that you pay for. (You’re paying for ‘em the same way New York paid through the nose so Trump could nap behind bulletproof glass at the Knicks game Monday night.)

The public covers every cost of Trump’s UFC spectacle. Meanwhile, Trump’s private family business collects every dollar from the sales of the coins.

This is the administration that won an election on the price of groceries. Trump stood up in front of working people in 2024 and swore that prices would come down on day one, that gas would be cheap, that the suffering you felt under the last guy was a policy choice he would reverse. Those people believed him, and a lot of them were cops and firefighters and union guys I’ve known my whole life.

Eighteen months later, their reward is the fastest inflation in three years, a gas pump reading 40 percent higher than last June, a war with no exit that their kids may end up fighting. Oh, and an invitation to buy a twelve-thousand-dollar coin commemorating the president’s birthday party. Tough luck.

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It’s pretty damn obvious that Trump hates his supporters just as much as he hates his opponents.

You don’t schedule a gold-coin drop the same week as a brutal CPI print if you think your supporters are, well, thinking people. That’s something you do if you think they’re marks.

And ask yourself who, exactly, signs off on a private merchandising operation tied to an official event at the executive mansion. Did anyone audit this thing? Probably not, because every person whose job it ostensibly is to object works for the guy, well, on the coin.

I gotta say, though, that there’s a certain genius to this.

Every respectable person in Washington has spent months debating whether holding a UFC bout on the South Lawn is dignified. If you’re especially in-the-know, you’re debating whether the lawsuit to stop the event has standing. But have you heard anything about the Trump Organization’s attempts to profit off the thing?

I haven’t.

So my ask this week is small. Watch the cage fight or don’t. I’ll be honest, on any other lawn, I’d probably watch it. But when somebody at work on Monday brings up the spectacle, bring up the utterly contemptuous coin, and bring up all the ways Trump has made this country unaffordable from that very White House. “Bread first,” tell them. “Then we can talk about circuses.”