Trump’s UFC Cage Fight Is an Apt Metaphor for a Nation Built on Colonial Violence
The White House’s Freedom 250 spectacle grotesquely exposed the settler-colonial legacy of 1776.
By Jesse Hagopian ,
July 2, 2026
Fireworks go off during "UFC Freedom 250" mixed martial arts event on the South Lawn of the White House on June 15, 2026, in Washington, D.C.Saul Loeb - Pool / Getty Images“On July 4th, 1776 … the United States became the greatest force for freedom, justice, equality, and prosperity in the history of the world,” President Donald Trump declared in a promotional video for the Freedom 250 campaign, the administration’s flagship initiative commemorating the U.S.’s semiquincentennial. Among the centerpiece events planned for the nation’s 250th birthday celebration was an Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) cage fight on the grounds of the White House.
The June 14 event, which occurred on Trump’s 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.
Liberals found the event crass. Sen. Patty Murray called it “out of touch.” New York Times opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote, “On the 250th anniversary of our country’s founding, America’s increasingly senescent president turned the White House lawn into a tacky, bloody gladiatorial arena.” Meanwhile, CNN quoted one historian who asked, “What does a UFC fight have to do with America’s greatness?”
The historian’s question assumes that the values represented by the spectacle — domination, hierarchy, and the glorification of power — 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 Aimé Césaire: “No one colonizes innocently.”
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.
Americans are taught that their nation was born in the cradle of liberty. But Césaire’s insight requires us to confront a more disquieting truth: The U.S. republic emerged from another womb altogether — 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’s 1776 than with a spectacle of combat staged at the center of U.S. empire?
The cage fight, surrounded by representatives of every branch of the armed forces, was part of Trump’s effort to cultivate a cult of personality. Writing under Nazi rule, cultural theorist Walter Benjamin described fascism as the “aestheticization of politics” — 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.
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’s colonial foundations — and recovering the traditions of freedom forged by those who resisted them — can we pursue a different future.
National Innocence or Colonial Brutality?
Trump’s 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: “The 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.” President Joe Biden similarly argued, “Deep in the heart of America burns a flame lit almost 250 years ago — of liberty, freedom, and equality.” 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 “fairest of them all” to obscure its colonial origins.
The U.S. republic emerged from 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.
It’s 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’s 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’ genocide of Indigenous peoples. In a 1928 speech, he praised white American settlers for having “gunned down” millions of Indigenous people until only a “few hundred thousand” remained. As James Q. Whitman, author Hitler’s American Model, notes, “Beyond its laws, the Nazis also admired America’s conquest of the West.” Nazi leaders viewed the United States’ seizure of Indigenous lands and westward expansion as precedents for their own project of Lebensraum (“living space”) — the conquest and ethnic cleansing of Eastern Europe.
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 “town destroyer” for ordering the destruction of dozens of Haudenosaunee towns during the Revolutionary War. “In a very real sense,” Estes concludes, “the founding of the United States was a declaration of war against Indigenous peoples.” One of the principal grievances driving many advocates of independence was the British Crown’s attempt to restrict westward expansion after the Seven Years’ War. The Declaration of Independence itself denounced Indigenous peoples as “merciless Indian Savages,” 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.
For anti-colonial thinkers such as Aimé Césaire, 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 Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, one of the book’s most important contributions was its effort to “locate the origins of fascism within colonialism itself.” 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.
Only by confronting the republic’s colonial foundations — and recovering the traditions of freedom forged by those who resisted them — can we pursue a different future.
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 “patriot” 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’s 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 “excited domestic insurrections amongst us” — a phrase widely understood as a reference to Dunmore’s proclamation. For many colonial elites, one of the gravest dangers posed by British rule was that it might undermine slavery itself.
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, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” and consider his conclusion:
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.
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:
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’t the Pilgrims. We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock; the rock landed on us. We were brought here against our will … We were not brought here to enjoy the constitutional gifts that they speak so beautifully about today.
Malcolm X’s 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 — one that pushed the ideals of liberty and equality far beyond anything the U.S. founders were willing to imagine.
Fear of a Black Republic
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.
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 — the first Black republic and the only nation ever created through a successful slave revolution.
At a moment when the United States restricted citizenship and political power along racial lines, Haiti offered a strikingly different vision — one in which solidarity with the struggle against slavery and colonialism mattered more than ancestry or skin color.
The contrast with the United States is striking. Haiti’s 1805 Constitution declared that “Slavery is forever abolished” and that “all acception of color” was “necessarily to cease,” while the U.S. Constitution protected slavery and racism through the Three-Fifths Clause and the Fugitive Slave Clause. Haiti’s 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’s 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 — one in which solidarity with the struggle against slavery and colonialism mattered more than ancestry or skin color.
Yet Haitian revolutionaries also understood that freedom’s greatest enemies often masqueraded as its guileless defenders.
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 “the 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.” These slaveholding interests from powerful nations, he argued, were united behind an “unequivocal and carefully constructed” plan for “the restoration of slavery.” Yet they did not openly proclaim themselves enemies of freedom. Instead, he observed, they sought to “envelop themselves in the mantle of liberty in order to strike it more deadly blows.”
As historian Leslie M. Alexander explains in her book, Fear of a Black Republic, Haitian independence “transformed global conceptions of freedom and challenged existing assumptions about who possessed human rights and who did not.” The revolution exposed the lie that slavery was natural or permanent and proved that enslaved people could overthrow their oppressors and govern themselves.
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, 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.
As the uprising spread across Saint-Domingue in 1791, President George Washington declared, “Lamentable! To see such a spirit of revolt among the Blacks.” Alexander Hamilton described the Haitian Revolution as a “calamitous event.” In 1793, Thomas Jefferson — the author of the July 4, 1776, Declaration of Independence — feared that the Haitian Revolution threatened the entire slave system of the Americas, worrying that “all the West India Islands will remain in the hands of the people of colour” and that slaveholders south of the Potomac might one day have to “wade through” similarly “bloody scenes.” 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: “If something is not done, and done soon, we shall be the murderers of our own children.”
By 1802, Jefferson expressed the great fears of freedom-loving enslavers everywhere when he said that Haiti had already “given considerable impulse to the minds of the slaves” and that “a great disposition to insurgency has manifested itself among them.”
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’s greatest crime, in the eyes of enslavers, was that it cracked open history and revealed another future waiting inside — a future in which Black people not only won their freedom but established their own sovereign nation.
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.
The fact of the Haitian Revolution also demolishes the claim that the United States led the world toward abolition. As PragerU — the far right propaganda organization that produces videos for children — asserts, “America was one of the first places on earth to outlaw slavery.” Or as one of their flagrantly inaccurate videos proclaimed, “White people were the first to formally put an end to slavery … white men led the world in putting an end to the abhorrent practice.”
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.
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 — long before Britain, France, or the United States — and helped spread emancipation throughout the Americas, including through its support for Simón Bolívar’s 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’s political and economic system was built upon it.
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.
The Fight for the Next 250
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.
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’s 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 “a natural and unalienable right to that freedom” bestowed “equally on all mankind.” Thomas Paine was another such radical. His bestselling pamphlet Common Sense helped ignite the American Revolution, while his 1775 essay “African Slavery in America” denounced slavery as “an outrage against humanity” 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.
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.
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’s first trillionaire, Elon Musk — whose fortune has been propelled in part by his investments in SpaceX, a company dedicated to colonizing Mars.
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.
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 — 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.
More than 70 years ago, Aimé Césaire warned that “a civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a stricken civilization.” 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.
As Louverture declared during the Haitian Revolution: “I want Liberty and Equality to reign … I work to bring them into existence. Unite yourselves to us, brothers, and fight with us for the same cause.”
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Jesse Hagopian
Jesse Hagopian is a Seattle educator, the director of the Zinn Education Project’s Teaching for Black Lives Campaign, an editor for Rethinking Schools, and the author of the book, Teach Truth: The Struggle for Antiracist Education. You can follow him at IAmAnEducator.com, Instagram, Bluesky or Substack.
