The Shameless Grift We All Missed at Trump’s Vile UFC Party

A bogus Trump $250 bill lay atop a blood-spattered baby blue canvas stenciled with corporate names such as Paramount+, Crypto.com, Ram, StarLink, Meta, Bud Light, CrowdStrike, Polymarket, and Anduril.

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Some of the names—along with Live Traders, Rumble, and others—were also on the cushioned upper edge of the octagon installed on the South Lawn of the White House for UFC Freedom 250, the $60 million party the octogenarian threw conflating America’s birthday with his own.

“The real voice of President Trump,” the announcer said. “Download Truth Social today!”

Paramount+ subscribers who watched the livestream were hit with commercials.

“Fight unfair!” the defense technology contractor Aduril’s ad said between matches.

All of the corporate entities, including the event’s producer, the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), were using the White House and their association with Trump to promote their interests while a succession of fighters beat each other bloody.

A facsimile $250 Trump bill, such as the one left amid the gore, actually symbolized a limit to Trump’s power as well as his megalomania. He has been pushing the U.S. Department of the Treasury to mark the nation’s 250th birthday with a $250 bill bearing his name, likeness, and signature.

But the 57-year-old director of the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Printing and Engraving did not just go along.

The bureau’s director, Patty Solimene, is a retired Army colonel who served for 24 years, seven of them in Special Operations, with multiple deployments. She had just returned from Iraq when she was hit by a car while bicycling to her command at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, an accident that caused her to lose her left leg below the knee. Nevertheless, she remained on active duty for another nine years, deploying to Afghanistan and becoming an elite Jumpmaster parachutist. She also became a Paralympian and holds a triathlon amputee world record.

In March of 2024, Solimene became the first woman to head the Bureau of Printing and Engraving and was as highly regarded there as she had been in the military. She responded to Trump’s $250 bill request by noting that a new bill can take years to produce and, in any event, federal law prohibits putting the name of a living person on currency. She was reassigned.

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“I have never sacrificed the values or character of myself or the organization and always prioritized the U.S. Currency Program and the value each employee brings to the mission,” she wrote in a goodbye email to her colleagues.

Solimene added, “The buck stopped here.”

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that the Trump administration would seek to change the law. He displayed a mock-up showing the president with the same glowering expression as in the mugshot taken in Fulton County, Georgia, on charges—since dropped—of seeking to overturn the 2020 election.

Republican U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina filed the Donald J. Trump $250 Bill Act, but the legislation seems to be one exercise in Trump’s vanity that is too much even for the cowering toadies in Congress. It appears to be going nowhere.

Meanwhile, Trump and his crew have been grifting as if their pockets are marked the bucks go here. They went so far as to use Marines in dress uniform as props at Sunday night’s UFC Freedom 250 event. There was a flyover by jet fighters and a B-1 bomber.

At the event’s end, the octogenarian birthday boy and much of his family stepped into the octagon of corporate sponsors. They lingered amid logos and gore, alongside people increasingly willing to cheapen themselves as they cash in. The night had a dystopian feel, and it seemed that paranoia about a Trumpian end to actual American greatness might just be prescience.

Back when the Kennedys hosted White House events, they brought culture and class. The Trumps just bring crass.

Whether or not the Claw built for the event remains, we are left with an image from the spectacle’s end, when a photographer took a picture of a $250 Trump bill that somehow ended up lying on the octagon’s canvas amid blood stains as real as if it were in the coliseum of ancient Rome.