WASHINGTON – For Donald Trump’s 80th birthday, he is giving himself the gift of blood and gore on the South Lawn. Maybe lots of it, with some quick day-trading money on the side.

The president who jokes about his extrajudicial killings on the high seas, makes explosion noises as he describes missile strikes, told his rallygoers to beat up protesters and openly encouraged police brutality is now, with a wife-slapping friend and political donor, bringing literal bloodsport to the White House.

For several hours on a Sunday evening next month, pairs of combatants from the Ultimate Fighting Championship are to pummel each other to submission on an elaborately constructed stage for Trump’s amusement. About 4,000 Trump supporters will be permitted to watch in person while another 85,000 can watch on giant screens from the Ellipse, the adjacent park where Trump infamously incited the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol as part of his failed coup that resulted in 140 police officers injured and five dead.

“The hardest ticket I’ve ever ― I have never seen anybody want anything so much as people want those tickets,” Trump bragged to lawmakers attending the White House Congressional Picnic earlier this month. “There’s no better thing to watch than this.”

What Trump failed to mention in his boast was that he personally stands to profit from the extravaganza, having purchased as much as $50,000 of stock in TKO Group Holdings, the company that owns UFC, on March 25. Trump had already been heavily promoting his June 14 fight night by the time of the stock purchase and has continued to do so since then.

“This will be the greatest show on earth,” he said during a May 6 visit to the Oval Office by a handful of UFC fighters.

Trump himself is likely to be ringside, as he has during UFC fights he has attended as president — close enough to get splattered by blood and sweat.

Such a display of violence-as-entertainment has never taken place on White House grounds in the nation’s history. (While Theodore Roosevelt brought boxing to the White House basement, it was primarily part of his own exercise regimen, not for public consumption.) Indeed, critics say Trump’s spectacle has more in common with the bloodlust “sports” of imperial Rome in its decline, when gladiators were forced to fight to the death.

“Turning the people’s house into a pay-per-view theater to promote sponsorship opportunities and choreographed violence more befits a Roman emperor than an American president,” said Norm Eisen, a top lawyer in Barack Obama’s White House. “Instead of circuses, Trump should be focused on bread — grocery bills, gas prices and the economic needs of the American people.”

What the bloody display will do for a nation already awash in a wave of political violence since Trump entered politics a decade ago — targeted attacks on immigrants, Muslims and Jews; the shootings of Democratic lawmakers in Minnesota; the murder of right-wing provocateur Charlie Kirk; the assault on former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband; a gunman’s attack on the Centers for Disease Control; attempted assassinations of Trump himself ― is a question that has largely gone unasked.

“It’s hard to argue any other single figure in the world has as much influence over our country’s discourse,” said Amanda Carpenter, a former aide to Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and now a researcher at the advocacy group Protect Democracy. “The fact he continually uses it to normalize and encourage violence rather than discourage it is a choice he makes each day to make America less safe.”

UFC holds a near-monopoly on mixed martial arts, a formerly niche sport so violent that many states banned it when it began gaining traction 30 years ago. John McCain, a prisoner of war during Vietnam and eventually a U.S. senator from Arizona and Republican presidential nominee, called it “human cockfighting.”

While UFC in the early 2000s instituted some rules on a format that had previously been billed as not having any — gouging out an opponent’s eyes, for example, is now prohibited, as is tearing open an opponent’s cheek or nostril — the matches are notoriously violent and often end with one or both fighters bleeding profusely.

Trump and his White House claim that the UFC event is part of the ongoing celebration of America’s 250th anniversary, but the sport is not nearly as interwoven into American society as football, basketball, baseball, or various Olympic events. The White House would not say whether other sporting contests were considered for the June 14 exhibition and offered only a statement that mirrors Trump’s own boasts about the fights.

“This will be one of the greatest and most historic sports events in history, and President Trump hosting it at the White House is a testament to his vision to celebrate America’s monumental 250th anniversary,” said White House spokesman Davis Ingle.

Critics like Eisen believe the reason for choosing UFC over other sports is simple: the company’s president and CEO Dana White has donated more than $3 million to Trump, his superPACs and the Republican Party over the past eight years. The former amateur boxer in 2023 was captured on video getting slapped in the face by his wife at a New Year’s Eve party and then responding in kind. Trump’s personal financial stake in the matter, Eisen and others said, is icing on the cake.

“The agenda of this administration seems to start and stop with how to make Donald Trump richer,” agreed Jordan Libowitz with the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

White — who at the recent shooting at the White House Correspondents Dinner refused to duck beneath his table, saying later: “It was fucking awesome. I literally took every minute of it in” ― did not respond to HuffPost queries.

In a recent interview on the podcast of Katie Miller, wife of top Trump aide Stephen Miller, though, he agreed the White House fights will give his company more visibility than ever.

“More people are going to tune in, globally, for this fight, whether they have ever watched the UFC, like the UFC, don’t like the UFC, just to see it at the White House,” he said. “It’s really big for the brand.”

As a young man, Trump avoided military service in the Vietnam War and its associated risk of actual violence with a diagnosis of “bone spurs” from a physician friend of his father.

Enjoying violence vicariously has, for decades, been another matter entirely.

In 1997, The New Yorker recounted Trump’s habit of watching a favorite martial arts movie, Jean-Claude Van Damme’s “Bloodsport,” but only the parts featuring the karate-chopping and kicking. His then-teenaged son Eric was responsible for fast-forwarding through all the boring plot exposition and dialogue.

As he began his first run for president in 2015, Trump regularly encouraged his rallygoers to shut down protesters who would show up, with force if necessary. “Just knock the hell — I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees,” he said.

After winning the office, Trump, in his official capacity, encouraged law enforcement to use physical violence against accused criminals. During a visit to Long Island in 2017, for example, he told them they need not worry about protecting the heads of those they arrest as they placed them in patrol cars. “Please don’t be too nice,” he said.

Trump wanted his immigration agents to shoot those attempting to cross into the United States illegally. He wanted police to shoot protesters in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd.

After his return to office last year despite his attempted coup, one of Trump’s first actions was to pardon several hundred of his supporters who on Jan. 6 had assaulted police officers on his behalf.

Months later, he began ordering the military to kill suspected drug smugglers without a trial or even a formal accusation by destroying their small boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific. To this day, he continues joking about those nearly 200 extrajudicial killings, suggesting that he has inadvertently damaged the fishing industry.

“To be honest, if I were a fisherman, I wouldn’t want to go fishing,” he said.

With those killings, as well as with subsequent missile strikes in Iran, Trump’s White House has released what are essentially snuff videos — sometimes mixed in with cartoon imagery or clips of sports-related violence.

As he describes military strikes that have resulted in deaths, Trump makes accompanying explosion sounds — “bing,” “ping,” “boom” — to illustrate.

His apparent enjoyment of violence as entertainment might have remained a mere personal quirk, had it not been endorsed and normalized by his entire party, one scholar of political violence said.

“The Republican Party has transformed from a traditional conservative political party with a clear conservative policy platform to what we refer to as a personalist political party centered on Trump and Trump’s wishes,” said Erica Franz, a political science professor at Michigan State University. “When he says or does things that are inflammatory and harmful for democracy, no one in the party speaks out against it.”

The coming South Lawn fight ticket is not the first time Trump has played impresario to mixed martial arts. It was Trump who gave White his start a quarter century ago when his newly purchased UFC was having difficulty getting television deals and bookings because of its level of gore.

Trump, who at the time still ran casinos in Atlantic City, invited White to stage his fights at his Trump Taj Mahal in 2001.

Justin Gaethje, one of the fighters scheduled to participate in the June 14 event, thanked Trump during the May 6 visit for helping the sport grow.

“They thought we were just absolute animals,” he said. “And you gave us a chance to fight in your property.”

Trump agreed that most establishments wanted no part of UFC.

“They couldn’t get any arenas because it was so violent that they couldn’t get arenas,” he told Gaethje.

Seven years later, Trump tried to create his own brand of mixed martial arts using a Russian fighter known for his brutality. “We have Fedor the Russian. His thing is inflicting death on people,” Trump said of Fedor Emelianenko, whom Trump was trying to market as a star in both live fights and a “reality” television show. “It’s sort of like, you just — somebody dies!” It was, instead, Affliction Entertainment, as Trump called the project, that died after two fights.

Two decades later, it is unclear why Trump chose to use the White House to boost White’s business in an effort that began last summer, long before the March 25 stock purchase.

Michael Cohen, Trump’s longtime personal lawyer who was involved in his 2008 Affliction enterprise, said Trump is merely trying to maintain his hold on young men, a key segment of the voting base that helped return him to the White House in 2024. (Polling has shown Trump’s approval rating with young men slipping significantly since that election, though not by as large a margin as some other groups.)

“UFC fans are Trump’s hardcore base, and he is rewarding their loyalty by hosting an event on White House grounds. From a presidential standpoint, it’s unique. From a political perspective, it’s strategically genius,” Cohen said.

“It’s MAGA base maintenance,” agreed Mac Stipanovich, a veteran Republican political consultant who broke with his party after it was taken over by Trump. “No elitist tennis, foreign soccer, or even golf, the sport of country clubbers. Nope. Bombast, performative violence, and cultish devotion. Red meat for the rubes.”

Tossing such red meat from the White House itself, experts worry, will be exactly the opposite of what the country needs now.

“Unfortunately, our political leadership has not engaged in efforts to unify the country but has instead stoked societal divisions and sought to ratchet up tensions. This is the sort of behavior we would expect with leaders in power backed by personalist parties,” Franz said. “This results in their supporters receiving critical cues that their behaviors are justified, and it can result in greater support among them for political violence.”