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“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.

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.

500-Year-Old Slave Revolt of 1526 Redefines Freedom as US Turns 250

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.

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”........

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