The Real Reason Emperor Trump Is Putting on His Gladiator Games
It was his birthday, and Emperor Hadrian wanted to throw a party.
Over six days in Rome, he put on a gladiatorial show that involved the slaughter of 100 lions and 100 lionesses. The animals were forced to fight either with one another or with men.
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The spectacle 1,900 years ago was by no means a one-off. When Hadrian was four, and the Colosseum was opened in AD 80 to great fanfare by Titus, over 9,000 wild and tame animals were slain over the inaugural games that went on for 100 days.
Elephants, bears, crocodiles, lions, tigers, and leopards were all captured in Africa and brought to Rome to satisfy the emperor’s—and the public’s—bloodlust.
For his 43rd birthday extravaganza, Hadrian also threw balls to the screaming crowds, which could be shown to officials and redeemed for gifts such as horses, gold, silver, or food.
No doubt, Hadrian and his entourage got a kick out of the horror. One of his predecessors, Emperor Commodus (AD 180–192), didn’t just put on the gladiator games; he took part himself.
But this was not just entertainment; it was politics.
During Hadrian’s time, the wealth gap between the patricians and the plebeians was enormous. The rich enjoyed lives of great splendor, with plentiful food, wine, and culture. The poor scrabbled to survive in cramped living conditions, with meager portions of porridge, stale bread, olives, and cheap wine.
It was the height of the Roman Empire, and the centuries-old divide had evolved into a huge gap between the very rich and the very poor.
Instead of lifting up the working classes through civil reforms to create an aspirational middle class, the emperor elite adopted a “bread and circuses” strategy to calm the restless masses.
The circuses were the gladiator contests, held in great amphitheaters, where huge, baying crowds would cry for blood, little caring that some of the humans thrown to the animals for their delight were being punished for relatively minor crimes with a gory death.
The bread was the basic necessities thrown to the audience as gifts rather than rights.
The strategy—and it was extremely successful for a long time—was to distract people from thinking about the deeper issues affecting them. Such as food and shelter, right and wrong.
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At the end of a week in which the world has welcomed its first trillionaire, it seems hardly necessary to point to the parallels.
I say “welcomed” because it was the public who bought into Elon Musk’s dream. Nobody made them buy SpaceX shares. But the IPO only emphasized the growing divide in 2026 USA.
And Emperor Donald Trump cast off his clothes a long time ago.
He tried sending Americans abroad to fight in foreign wars to deflect from the restlessness at home, and that didn’t work. There is no glory in a war you cannot win. And besides, where’s the spectacle in grainy pictures of burning buildings in faraway countries on CNN?
So, on Sunday night, to celebrate his 80th birthday, Donald Trump tore a page out of Hadrian’s playbook by turning the White House into the Colosseum.
Blood will be drawn by the tattooed gladiators pitched into hand-to-hand combat. There are no Marquess of Queensberry Rules in UFC. Only oblivion or pained surrender.
The president and his henchmen would have you believe it is entertainment. It’s not. At least, not at the White House.
Watching other humans fight satisfies some primeval urge that dates long before Hadrian’s empire. But it doesn’t lift the human condition; it exposes us and shows how little we really have evolved as a species.
Trump’s cage fight night is a crass diversion from the realities of a MAGA Empire caught up in a foreign war it cannot end, a culture of haves and have-nots, growing seclusion from the rest of the world, and the exposure of a secret world of pedophilia and corruption that strikes at its very heart.
And instead of doing something meaningful about it, Trump is fiddling while America burns.
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