Trump’s pathetic gamble with Dana White couldn’t mask his midterm humiliation | CFU

IAfter getting destroyed in the midterm elections, it was only a matter of time before Donald Trump did something outrageous to try to distract the public from his catastrophic losses. Before the midterm elections, published reports suggested the possibility of an apocalypse, global or domestic — a nuclear strike against Iran, the suspension of last week’s martial law, the invalidation of individual races, such as in Alaska — but Trump opted for banality in the face of Armageddon, offering his vacant press secretary overture to Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White.

It was absurd and widely argued that a confused Trump had wrongly confused the UFC’s White with the more sensible Dana White, former Heritage Foundation staffer Dana White. Because public reactions made him look even more lost, confirming the feelings of recklessness and disorder, utter chaos and buffoonery that led to the Republicans’ defeat in the midterm elections, the president declared that his offer to White was just a joke. As a disciple of the famous McCarthyist Roy Cohn, who taught Trump one of his main political pillars: never apologize or admit wrongdoing. Never. – Of course, we should not take Trump at his word.

Either by mixing PR professional Dana White with the UFC leader and having to backtrack anyway, Trump’s bluster was finally pierced by last week’s mandate that more of the electorate no longer be charmed by his chatter, nor energized by his ugly charisma. The downward spiral began. Her position as press secretary is vacant because her last choice, Katie Zacharia, lasted less than a week. Failure can only mean that Trump will step up to his worst instincts and play the hits that have always worked, in the most watched arenas.

One of those areas has always been sports, and so this shows that, joke or not, he would use White to squeeze another piece of life out of a news cycle. When Trump needed headlines or a spotlight, he turned to sports. A decade ago, he exploited the public’s still-bizarre adulation and resentment toward black athletes by attacking Colin Kaepernick and the NFL, and sports have been the focus of his culture wars ever since. He and his Justice Department moved from the NFL to the NBA to MLB trying to turn Pride Night into an anti-Christian grievance. The WNBA is now in its sights.

Trump has always relied on sports to save himself. Trying to appeal to the machismo of his base and give America’s 250th birthday a splash, Trump hosted a UFC cage match on the South Lawn of the White House in early June — an event that was highlighted by one of White’s fighters racially insulting former first lady Michelle Obama. Given the black community’s animosity toward him but the number of high-profile black athletes who support him – Lawrence Taylor, Mike Tyson, Darryl Strawberry, Herschel Walker, among others – the sport has provided cover for his racism.

Trump was counting on sports to give him the boost and muscle he always dreamed of, but this time the gamble failed. It all looked pathetic. He looked confused and like he didn’t know what he was talking about, and there was no way out. Professional White publicly announced that she was not a candidate. Trump looked baffled and used another teaching from Cohn: always stay on the offensive and increase the attack — telling reporters Sunday that the UFC’s White “loved the idea” and that “you wouldn’t mess with him.”

None of this resonated. What resonated was a tired America that rejected him where Republicans hadn’t lost in decades, and in one case, in Kansas, in nearly a century. He and his party have been so completely repudiated that even for people who were laughing, the jokes are no longer funny, and for once even the distracting and famous power of sport couldn’t inflate what is a sagging tent.

• Howard Bryant is the author of 11 books, including Full Dissidence: Notes from an Uneven Playing Field, and Kings and Pawns: Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson in America. He also writes on Substack