I know this is one of the less consequential little skid marks in our greater national disaster, but: Donald Trump's damn cage match arena on the White House lawn. I cannot stop staring at this thing.
Look at it. Just look!
Kate Klonick
The last dying breaths of democracy, everyone, sponsored by Monster Energy drinks.
It lights up, of course. Actually, that's a gross understatement: The "arena" has LED lighting that is programmed to flash or ripple or otherwise jingle its keys at you, and it shoots beams of light into the sky, and the net visual result is "abandoned carnival ride in Scooby Doo episode suddenly comes back to life."
FactPost
Huh, looks a little like that one scene from Poltergeist.
Donald has threatened to leave this contraption up for the rest of his term; we'll see. But it's just so him. What a perfect visual representation of what he thinks America is all about; cheap, shitty casino-styled spectacle. Sports gambling made into a national religion. And the whole thing, just a big White House grift meant to benefit the business empire of one of Trump's creeptastic asshole friends.
Trump was there for UFC 309, and he was joined by Rock, Elon Musk and incoming Cabinet secretaries Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, among other dignitaries. But when he walked out, he did so alongside Dana White, the CEO of UFC.
Amid the fights, Trump took a moment to make a suggestion to White, a longtime personal friend dating back to the early days of UFC.
“He leaned over to me and says, ‘We should do a fight at the White House,’” White recalls in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “I said, ‘Yes, we should.’ I didn’t know what he meant … I was thinking maybe there’s some room that he’s thinking about where we’d have it. He’s like, ‘No, we’re gonna do it outside on the South Lawn.’”
Sorry, did I say one of Trump's creeptastic friends? I meant two. The use of the White House as Monster Energy drink-sponsored UFC fight club also benefits David Ellison's Paramount, the same Trump-allied company currently wrecking CBS News and 60 Minutes and now aiming to own CNN. Paramount+ will be streaming the matches to any patriotic American who, ahem, pays them the monthly subscription fee, and the whole stunt appears to be a loss leader for the UFC and Paramount, a way to boost the companies by associating both of them with the White House, the presidency, and the tackiest most jingoistic version of America these concussed gerbils can come up with.
“What this fight is really all about, and why we’re doing it at the White House, is it’s the 250th birthday of America. So from the first fight of the night until the main event, we will tell the story of America,” White says, rebuffing the notion that he wants the event to be seen as a political one. “You’ve got the far right, you’ve got the far left, and people thinking that this is going to be like some type of political thing. This is the 250th birthday of America. That’s the story that we’re going to tell. If you are American, this is relevant to you as an American. Everybody, no matter what your politics are, or any of that other bullshit.”
This is a dream, right? I'm in a coma right now, and this is just my brain inventing a whole lot of nonsense. I'm sure the medical staff will revive me any moment now, and preferably before I dream of a stunt cage match between a guy dressed as Uncle Sam and another one in a Bald Eagle costume.
So yeah, I'm a bit obsessed over this whole thing. I never would have thought, growing up, that the 250th American anniversary would involve any of the words now gracing our headlines, whether it be the phrase "White House cage match" or reports of Trump's top White House staff convening in the Situation Room to discuss "nipple-related documents".
I'll let you pause there. No, wait, I'm the one who needs to pause. I need a moment. Hang on.
Okay, I'm good now. Sorry about that. Ahem.
If you want to know just how big a grift this whole White House stunt is and how committed Trump is to boosting, ahem, corporatized cage match fights as our nation's new top export, on Thursday the United States Secretary of State will be hosting Dana White himself to, hang on let's go to the actual U.S. government press release for this one:
Secretary of State Marco Rubio will participate in a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) signing ceremony at the U.S. Department of State with Dana White, President and CEO of UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) on Thursday, June 11, at 2:00 p.m. ET.
The MOU signing will mark a new public-private partnership to enhance sports diplomacy initiatives and collaborate on the global growth of mixed martial arts. Additional details will be announced following the ceremony.
UFC is the world’s leading mixed martial arts organization. As an American-founded organization, the UFC has grown into a major global sports platform, reflecting U.S. leadership in modern combat sports promotion, athletic performance standards, and international event production. Its events are broadcast worldwide and contribute to the United States’ broader cultural and sports influence through professional competition and athlete development.
Shorter Marco Rubio: There's nothing that embodies our nation's new diplomacy more than the sport of sweaty half naked men beating the shit out of each other for the entertainment of spectators and compulsive gamblers. It is our contribution to world culture, and you're welcome.
I'm so done.
Setting President Felon T. Screwworm's latest national embarrassment aside, however, the big news of the week remains Trump ally Elon Musk's "SpaceX" "IPO", which can be neatly summarized as the biggest single Wall Street con in history. In history.
If you think I'm overselling that, here's another good thread running down the many, many ways the Musk move is a scam from top to bottom.
Max Kennerly
No matter how cynical you may have become on this topic, a read through this and other threads will still show you you're not cynical enough. The company's valuation is almost entirely fictitious, and the supposed long-term upside being described really, really sounds like fraud. The money so-called investors will be shoveling into the company will primarily serve as an opportunity for company insiders to cash out at wildly inflated prices, while shareholders themselves are blocked from having any power to do anything.
Max Kennerly
This thing is just a PolyMarket insider trading scheme with an official Wall Street coat of paint slapped on.
You would think, therefore, that investors would be avoiding this SpaceX "IPO" like the Wall Street ebola that it is, but you'd be wrong. If you can believe anonymous insiders, Gullible Idiots Who Still Fall For Elon Musk's Tired Scams are falling over each other to buy into it.
SpaceX’s initial public offering has attracted demand for more than four times the available shares, according to people familiar with the matter, ahead of the Elon Musk-led rocket, satellite and artificial intelligence firm stopping taking orders.
"What began as a rocket startup is now a big bet on satellites, AI and Mars" says a video description at the top of that post. So even before we get to the first word of the story the financial coverage is already skewed towards Musk's fantasy announcements rather than the truth: That "Mars" plan remains an impossible fiction, the "satellite" plans bounce between the merely impossible (Starlink is rapidly approaching market saturation already) and the intentionally fraudulent (there is no scenario in which "data centers in space" would, with current and near-future technology, make financial sense for anybody); and Musk's AI efforts have so far proven so money-hemorrhaging and directionless that the company has now resorted to renting out their data centers to their AI competitors rather than trying to make use of them itself.
It all sucks! It sucks very much! And yet there are still a very large number of people in this world who not just want to give Elon Musk their nest eggs, but will beat each other senseless with deli meat just for the chance to "invest" first!
All of this has got me thinking, which is a bad habit that I still can't break no matter how much grief it has been responsible for since I reached the age of two. Surely there's a limit to how much money MAGA investors have to throw around, right?
At what point does the whole movement collapse because nobody who's a fan of Trump or Musk can still afford pants?
The 29-year-old software project engineer in Santa Barbara, California, put $2,000 of her savings into the $TRUMP meme coin – a purely speculative crypto token whose value is often driven by social media hype. All that remained, she thought, was to sit back and wait for the price to climb.
Instead, the price plummeted. At the end of May, her $TRUMP holding was worth less than $120. Meanwhile, the Trump family pocketed hundreds of millions of dollars from the token sales after putting little to none of their own money into the project.
That's from a Reuters analysis that estimates that Trump and his family have made at least $2.3 billion in crypto-associated profits since he scuttled back into the White House. And if you're wondering where the money came from, it came from Trump's own fans. Yup. He scammed them.
On the other side of that cash bonanza for America’s first family: the more than a million investors whose net losses totaled $2.3 billion at the end of April, according to a Reuters analysis. Those investors include retail buyers of crypto and crypto-linked equities, as well as those who invested indirectly through funds like ETFs with exposure to Trump crypto. The loss total includes paper losses on unsold investments.
While a measurable amount of those Trump family profits undoubtedly came from American and foreign actors who "invested" in Trump crypto fully expecting to lose their money to him—that is, who were using it as a money-laundering operation for bribery—there aren't a million people doing such laundering. Most of those million investors thought, albeit very stupidly, that they were investing in a Trump-approved company and would somehow make a profit out of it. We can call them stupid, because they are stupid, because if you give Donald Trump or his itchy creepy offspring money without first looking into what has happened to nearly everyone else who's ever given them money then that's on you and you have nobody to blame but yourself.
But put it all together, and we've got the MAGA faithful losing $2.3 billion to Trump-branded scams just to Trump and his immediate family, with the SpaceX IPO bleeding them of tens of billions of soon-to-be-lost dollars. Add to that the Dr. Oz and Robert Kennedy Jr.-inspired fake "health" scams, the emergency room visits after drinking raw milk, and whatever the flying hell "Ka$h" Patel has been up to, throw in rapidly spiking gas prices, and here's my question:
Is there a limit, here? Is there a limit to how much of their life savings MAGA Americans can flush down the golden toilet before there's no more money to squeeze out of them?
What happens then? You had at least one proud member of the Jan. 6 riot who flew in on a private plane; as many have pointed out, the Trump/MAGA movement's core appears to be made up of America's petty bourgeoise, people who Trump and Musk personally wouldn't want in the same room as them but who are among the better-off residents of their own communities.
I realize that both Donald and Elon would love to take these people for every $2,000 they can pry out of them, but every time it happens you're left with some percentage of your fan base that can't afford to lose the next $2,000.
After decades of right-wing scamming, I'm genuinely wondering how the conservative base still affords food. Or, as I said, pants.
I don't know the answer here. I expect, unfortunately, that the sort of people who would willingly give either Elon or Donald money even after this many years of having both men lie about anything and everything are probably fairly well off. Many of them appear to own boats. At minimum, then, they could sell their boats in order to give Elon and Donald more money, although that might swamp the secondhand boat market and cause its own share of problems.
There's got to be a limit, though. Right? All these MAGA-allied grifters and cheats are eventually going to bleed their fans so dry that those fans start starving to death and the grift dries up, right?
Right?
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