A leading White House historian said the Founding Fathers would have been “repulsed” by the Ultimate Fighting Championship event that will take place on the White House South Lawn.
Edward Lengel, chief historian of the White House Historical Association during President Donald Trump’s first term, told HuffPost that hosting “a vicious and violent sport” at the White House “transcends the bounds of tastelessness,” and the fight night “sullies the image of this country, and what the White House should represent.”
A series of mixed-martial arts fights is scheduled to take place at the People’s House on June 14, the same day as Trump’s 80th birthday. The fights are being billed as part of America’s 250th anniversary celebrations.
Promising “the greatest show on earth,” the president has suggested the temporary arena being erected within the grounds of the White House will hold 4,000 people, and as many as 100,000 could take in the spectacle from the nearby 52-acre public park, the White House Ellipse.
Photos of the under-construction UFC arena show the structure towering over the White House.
Lengel, who has written extensively on George Washington, served as chief historian of the White House Historical Association, a nonprofit that aims to preserve and share the history of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, between 2016 and 2018.
The presidential historian said he was not “outraged” about the event because it’s temporary, but characterizes the fights as “another episode of tastelessness” inflicted on the White House by the Trump administration. He previously spoke out about the demolition of the East Wing.
Lengel points out his grandfather was a professional wrestling referee, and his father was a boxer, but he believes UFC is “a very bloody sport.”
“It’s a vicious and violent sport, and to put it on the South Lawn in public at the White House transcends the bounds of tastelessness, and it sullies the image of this country, and what the White House should represent,” he said.
While “strange things” have long happened at the White House, he insists the violent match-ups go well beyond what the Founding Fathers would have envisioned.
“I’m a historian of the founders, on George Washington, and I know what Washington intended for the White House. I know what Thomas Jefferson intended,” he said. “Washington definitely believed that entertainment should take place at the White House, but he was very specific that that entertainment needed to be carefully managed, it needed to have an air of gravitas and ceremony and control, and it needed to lift up rather than drag down the public image of the presidency and of the nation. I think Washington was very careful to try to lift up the image of the president and the presidential office.”
“Is this the first time that a president has dragged down that image? No, of course not. But it’s doing it in a new way that I think would have repulsed the founders,” added Lengel, who directed the Washington Papers Project, a large collection of the Washington family’s correspondence.
Even Jefferson, arguably the least “uptight” of the Founding Fathers, would have objected to a UFC fight as it smacks of “Imperial Rome,” he said.
Among the more raucous events held at the White House was the notorious inauguration of Andrew Jackson in 1829, where more than 20,000 ordinary Americans from across the nation spontaneously descended on the capital, with the president — who ran on being a tribune of the people — forced to flee the chaos.
The seventh president, who also hosted a White House feeding frenzy when he invited the public to come to eat a 1,400-pound block of cheese, was among America’s most violent national leaders, most notoriously as a general in the First Seminole War where Native American villages were destroyed and Spanish-controlled Florida was essentially seized for the United States.
But even Jackson, variously dubbed “American Caesar” and “King Andrew,” would “not have gone to this kind of extreme,” Lengel thinks.
“Jackson did have a genuine background as a backcountry woodsman. He actually did come from the common people, which is not true of the current president,” the historian said.
Violence “was there but [Jackson] kept it to the side. He didn’t celebrate it at the White House. He was a violent president, but he didn’t embrace it in a way, like ‘let’s show people beating each other to a pulp in front of the White House.’ I can’t imagine him endorsing that,” Lengel said.
HuffPost has contacted the White House and UFC for comment. An unnamed staffer in the White House press office did call HuffPost’s inquiry “ridiculous” while forwarding the request.
