The Circus

I have read about the Roman emperors since my youth, and one thing has always seemed clear in the stories that survived them, Roman power required two elements to sustain itself before the people, blood as a backdrop and praise as currency. Commodus, the son of Marcus Aurelius, wore a lion skin and wielded the club of Hercules to descend into the arena and slaughter animals and gladiators before tens of thousands of people gathered in the Colosseum. The Senate, which he himself had hollowed out of any real power, applauded and granted him increasingly extravagant titles between one combat and the next. Decades later, Domitian would demand, within the palace itself, to be called lord and god. The purpose of these spectacles was never merely to kill; it was to remind those present that the life of the person in the arena and the approval of those occupying the stands depended on the very same person.
Almost two thousand years later, on Sunday, June fourteenth, twenty twenty six, the south lawn of the White House was transformed into an amphitheater to celebrate, simultaneously, the eightieth birthday of Donald Trump and the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of United States independence. A steel structure of twenty eight meters, baptized The Claw, dominated the lawn where presidential helicopters normally land. Actors dressed as Revolutionary War soldiers stood guard while fourteen fighters crossed the corridors of the building, some passing through the Oval Office, to reach the octagon. An Air Force flyover opened the night, followed by the national anthem. The crowd chanted USA whenever an American competitor faced a foreigner, which did not always guarantee victory for the local fighter. I watched the photos arrive on my phone in fragments, from a distance, the way I see almost everything that happens in that country which weighs so heavily upon my own.

Seated near the octagon, alongside the president, were men who today exercise the role once reserved for client kings before Roman emperors, bartering visible loyalty for proximity. Mark Zuckerberg, who suspended Trump accounts after the attack on the Capitol in January twenty twenty one and disbursed twenty five million dollars to settle the lawsuit filed by the president himself, conversed briefly with him between fights. David Ellison, of Paramount Skydance, was also there, just days after the Department of Justice approved the merger of his company with Warner Bros Discovery. Neither of them needed to explain aloud the reason for being there. Physical proximity already said everything.

The fighter Josh Hokit defeated Derrick Lewis by knockout in the second round and, in the subsequent interview, removed a gold chain from his own neck to present to the president as a birthday gift. The White House published the photo of the gesture hours later. Less than a year earlier, in August twenty twenty five, Tim Cook had entered the Oval Office with a glass plaque mounted on a twenty four karat gold base, an offering that accompanied the announcement of another hundred billion dollars in Apple investments in the United States. In both cases, the precious metal did not buy the leader; it confirmed, before the cameras, who needed the president more than he needed the one extending the tribute.

It was after delivering the chain, still before the microphone, that Hokit used the pinnacle of his career to declare to the crowd and the entire country that Michelle Obama was a man, asking if he was not right. The audience around him applauded, and Joe Rogan, who was conducting the interview, smiled, hesitating, before closing the segment with the name of the athlete and moving away from the microphone.

Dana White, a longtime friend of Trump and owner of the UFC, classified the comment as false and crude the following day, treating the matter as mere nonsense. The White House spokesperson, questioned about the episode, preferred to praise the performance of the fighter inside the octagon and avoided the rest of the question. Trump posted on social media that the night had been incredible, omitting any mention of either Hokit or Michelle Obama. The silence of the man who sat just a few feet from that microphone at the moment of the declaration is already, in itself, the answer that matters.

In Rome, what made the games dangerous was not only the blood in the arena, but what they authorized afterward, when the lights went out and everyone returned home knowing exactly how much could be said and done near the emperor without suffering sanctions. A president who watches a man utter that insult, sees the audience applaud, and chooses silence afterward, transmits the lesson that Commodus dictated to the Senate from the front rows, that proximity to power is worth more than decency, and that the silence of someone who could condemn the affront functions, itself, as a form of applause.

I watched this sequence of news during a night guard shift here in northern Israel, looking up at a sky where any misplaced light could be a drone coming from Lebanon, and I reflected that my safety depends, to some extent, on the personal disposition of the very same man who fell silent in the front row of that octagon. The interceptors that protect this country arrive when Washington so decides, and Washington, at this moment in its history, is led by a man whose public morality seems to be measured by the amount of gold offered to him and by the willingness to tolerate what he refuses to condemn.

The Colosseum crowd roared the same way both at the death of the lion and that of the gladiator. What mattered, for those in the stands, was to be close enough to the imperial gallery so as not to be, in the next fight, the one who would descend into the arena. Two thousand years later, on the other side of the world, we are still deciding where to sit.