June 3, 2026, 6:48 p.m.
Barbara Perry looks at the arch rising over a stage on the South Lawn and thinks of a roller coaster and an amusement park. She looks at the president, who is building that structure and turning the White House into a sports venue for a brutal exhibition of mixed-martial-arts fighting, and thinks of P.T. Barnum.
Perry, as the co-director of the Presidential Oral History Program at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, and as the author or editor of 17 books on presidents, knows her White House history. But, like everybody else, she has never seen anything like this president and this addition to the White House grounds.
“I’ve struggled going back through history to try to come up with parallels,” she told National Journal. She says we are witnessing a third transition in American presidents. First came what she calls the “constitutional” presidents who generally adhered to the Founders’ notions of the office. Theodore Roosevelt and his “bully pulpit” then brought the age of the “personal president,” who craved popular support. Now, she said, Donald Trump has introduced “the reality president,” emulating the reality TV practices he honed for more than a decade as impresario of The Apprentice.
“The reality, circus-ringleader president takes to the illogical extreme the personal president,” she said. “You then add to that a touch of P.T. Barnum with his ‘sucker born every minute’ mentality and recall the Founders’ fears of demagoguery, and you have a ringmaster with his three-ring circus.”
While the president would protest any charges of demagoguery, he has not shied away from comparisons to Phineas Taylor Barnum, the legendary 19th-century huckster and showman who ran a New York museum of oddities before teaming with James A. Bailey to run a circus and sideshows. Trump embraced the comparison in a January 2016 appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press.
Host Chuck Todd noted Trump was being compared not just to Barnum, but also to Harold Hill from The Music Man, Seinfeld's George Costanza, Kim Kardashian, and Biff from Back to the Future. He asked if Trump considered any of those comparisons a compliment. The Republican candidate responded, “P.T. Barnum,” adding, “We need P.T. Barnum a little bit, because we have to build up the image of our country.” With that, he bought into what his sister, a federal judge at the time, told his biographer Timothy O’Brien in 2005: “He is P. T. Barnum.”
Barnum, who died in 1891, would approve of the construction of the octagon stage on the South Lawn, as well as the UFC lighting grid—known as “the Claw”—that Perry took for a roller coaster. He would almost certainly smile at the president’s suggestion on Wednesday that it remain a White House fixture long after the fight being put on to mark Trump’s 80th birthday on June 14.
Less certain is how the Founders—or any of the 44 other presidents—would feel about this use of the White House.
Trump is not the first to have a sporting event on White House grounds. Abraham Lincoln enjoyed playing an early form of baseball on what was then called the “white lot” between the White House and the Ellipse. And President George W. Bush, a former Major League Baseball team owner, held T-ball tournaments for children on the South Lawn during his eight years in office.
P.T. Barnum (AP Photo/File)
AP Photo/File
These events were wholesome and fun. But they were not flashy, even when stars Cal Ripken Jr. and Willie Mays participated. And Trump likes flashy.
In only 16 months back in office, Trump has been a constant presence at big sporting events. He became the first president to attend a Super Bowl, and he attended a New York Yankees game a weekend after attending the U.S. Open men's final in Queens.
According to ESPN, the Yankees game last September was Trump's eighth major sporting event since returning to the White House the previous January. He also attended the Daytona 500, the NCAA wrestling championships in Philadelphia, the FIFA Club World Cup final in East Rutherford, New Jersey, and UFC fights in Miami and Newark, New Jersey. Then, in November, he attended an NFL game in Washington. At several of those events, he ordered that Air Force One be flown over the venue.
Tevi Troy, who was a senior White House aide to Bush before writing several presidential histories, also has come up short trying to find precedents for the upcoming White House UFC fight. “No precedent for that,” Troy told National Journal. “He definitely loves pageantry and is high on the scale of pageantry-loving presidents.”
Probably no president has been more vocal about his love of parades, particularly after he sat through a French Bastille Day parade in 2017. In 2018, he wanted the Pentagon to “top” the French parade. But opposition from the Pentagon and D.C. officials stymied him in his first term. Last year, he brooked no such opposition and ordered a military parade on June 14. According to the Army, 6,169 soldiers, 62 aircraft, and 128 tanks were on hand to wish the commander in chief a happy 79th birthday.
A year later, he wants to go even bigger for his 80th.
His desire to have the nation celebrate his birthdays with spectacle and brutal sports competition has reminded some of the ancient Roman emperors. “People watching this fight will be whipped into a frenzy by what’s happening in the ring,” Perry said. “It’s a little bit like the gladiators in ancient Roman times performing in front of the emperor.”
In AD 119, Hadrian put on quite a show to mark his 43rd birthday—a gladiatorial show lasting six days in which at least 100 lions, 100 lionesses, and many other wild animals were slaughtered and hundreds of gladiators were killed. A hundred years later, the emperor known as Philip the Arab presided over “endless chariot races, the slaughter of hundreds of exotic animals and 2,000 gladiators.”
There may be some blood shed at Trump’s birthday celebration in the Octagon, though presumably no animals will die and none of the modern gladiators will perish. Perry wonders what earlier presidents would have thought if they could see their current successor so gleefully preside over a modern set of games.
“This whole concept would be foreign to the Founders, and they would just be appalled,” she said. “But it is fascinating that Trump, I think, truly does love this form of entertainment. He clearly loves being an impresario of this new presidential reality show.”
