Saturday Night & Sunday Morning

Trump Goes to the Fights and Promises a War

“Everybody out there who’s had Saturday night and Sunday morning can say, “He’s telling us about our lives.” — Rodney Crowell, live at the Irvine Bowl, 1976

“Saturday night’s all right for fighting.”—Elton John

Saturday night Trump launched himself onto TikTok with a 13-second video of his “walk-on” at UFC 302 — ultimate fighting, cage matches — in Newark, New Jersey. Sunday morning, he was on Fox & Friends. Three anchors arrayed like supplicants across from Trump in a dim, pine green approximation of “classy” I’d have blamed on a bad set designer if I didn’t know it was Trump’s club in Bedminster, New Jersey.

“These people are sick,” Trump begins one of the several segments Fox broadcast across the day. A very cold open. “They’re deranged.” Which people? They don’t need to be named. Their names are interchangeable. Clinton or Biden, Comey or Willis or Bragg. “I talk about the enemy on the outside, and the enemy within,” says Trump. Outside: Russia, China, “easily” handled. “But the enemy within…” He shakes his head. “They are doing damage to this country.” Such as? The interview is about the conviction. That’s the “damage,” Trump, in this telling, is the nation.

Another segment begins just as chilly. Absent context, a Fox hosts ask Trump how he’ll seek revenge. His answer comes sideways: “Lotta people said, ‘We have no choice but to elect Trump, because he’s only one who can withstand this.” There’s an enemy already within the gates, stronger than any superpower. “Lotta people”—the mythic We, the People—summon Trump, “the only one.”

The enemy within, the need for a strongman who can do what nobody else can. Each segment Fox has cut begins with a trope of classical fascism.

Don’t forget Saturday night. Trump’s regular cage fighting walk-on music—UFC 295, UFC 296, Saturday night in Newark—Kid Rock’s “American Bad Ass,” played as he took his seat ringside, close enough to pick up the copper scent of blood. There’s a lot of bravado in “Bad Ass” — “fuck all y’all” is one pithy lyric — but I think its essence, the nature of its oddly frantic “masculinity,” is best expressed by this anxious non sequitur: “Never gay, no way, I don’t play with ass.”

Back to Sunday. One segment continues as if everyone knows that the fundamental fight is the nation, embodied in Trump, vs. the supervillain known as “Intel.” As in intelligence agencies, as in “deep state.” Cage match.

In the main event Saturday night, a Russian crushed an American with a hold called the “D’Arce Choke”—which, I learn, “is very similar to an anaconda choke, but the entry is on the opposite side.” What? Who cares. It destroys. The details are not the point. By naming the enemy simply “Intel,” likeyou already know who or what it is, as if you share the strongman’s hatred, Trump and Fox sweep their viewers into conspiracism as if it’s simple as “they sky is blue.”

“Intel,” Trump expounds, is "evil... They were doing things I won’t mention here because it’s so conspiratorial.”

Cue Q. Fox viewers are free to imagine the meaning of “evil.” This false freedom is key to the con. It makes the believer feel not passive but active, a collaborator in an expose that hasn’t actually been exposed. What’s the evilest evil? Child. Trafficking. Trump knows this is where the believer’s mind is going. He’s led it there.

There’s a lot of abrupt editing to these segments. They seem jumpy, agitated, unless you’re on their wavelength—in which case it makes sense to jump from “Intel,” and the implication of the innocent children, to Hillary Clinton. “I could have done it,” Trump says of imprisoning Clinton. He frames not “doing it” as a strongman’s generosity.

But even a great man can only be pushed so far. Now, he says, “I may feel differently.” He’s setting up a narrative of necessity. He doesn’t want to hit. But if he must, he will hit hard.

In a Saturday night “highlight,” an American defeated a Pole by yanking his arm out of its socket. The American leaps up, punching the air with joy.

“The arm’s broken!” says one announcer.

“The arm’s broken!” exclaims another.

“You saw it snap!”

“Yeah!”

“It’s limp by his side.”

The American climbs out of the cage. Trump rises from his ringside seat. The fighter clasps Trump’s hand in both of his. Trump leans in and whispers.

Sunday morning: Trump says when he first came to Washington, he was soft, a “civilian.” He learned the hard way. This time it’ll be different. Now he knows who the “fighting generals” are, and ones who are “woke.” A Fox host reaching for the man of action: “Are you going to fire those generals? The woke generals?”

Trump promises a purge.

In 2021, three retired generals wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post titled “3 retired generals: The military must prepare now for a 2024 insurrection.” I think about it more often than I’d like.

Politics, for Trump, is like ultimate fighting. Show biz, which is all there is, which is why, even though the pain is real, no holds are barred. You can hurt your enemies any way you want, as much as you want.

On a UFC podcast called UFC Unfiltered, Trump boasts of being the man who made the fight possible, back in the beginning, when Trump alone—in his telling—provided venues.

He remembers that early, blood-soaked brawling: “Rough. It was so rough, it was great.”

Sunday morning, speaking to Fox, he speculates on what will happen if he’s sentenced to prison. What his people will do. The believers. “At a certain point,” he says, “there’s a breaking point.”

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UPDATE: When I started this Substack I said I’d include the voices of fellow travelers. Peter Montgomery, research director for People for the American Way, notes in response to the above one of Trump’s latest emails, titled “I’m on the warpath.” From the body:

“Day of Reckoning” is doing double duty, ostensibly an election but recognizably an allusion to a QAnon “Storm,” the stakes made plain by the absurd but widely-believed claim that Biden sent the full force of the FBI to assassinate Trump. Trump, in this fairy tale, survived through a mixture of fortune, cunning, and toughness. God didn’t permit Deep State to kill him that day; and Trump outfoxed his foes; and Trump’s so tough that Deep State can’t kill him.

Then there’s this:

The “unprecedented response” Trump is looking for in the email is recipients’ money. But it’s more double duty language, written in the context of “war,” assassination, and the “breaking point” of civil war. Trump doesn’t want civil war. He doesn’t believe it’ll happen. But he’s willing to play Russian roulette with the prospect—only, the gun’s pointed at us.