It's also the 250th anniversary of the US Declaration of Independence: UFC event held on the White House lawn, where a massive octagonal cage fighting arena is set up; $1 million tickets were sold; Fighters will march in from the Oval Office, , the president’s office.When former U.S. President Joe Biden celebrated his 80th birthday, he did so at a private family lunch. The man who replaced him in the White House also held a private dinner with his family overnight between Sunday and Monday to mark his 80th birthday, but Donald Trump, of course, is not settling for that. As always, he has to put on a huge show — this time breaking convention with a UFC contest on the South Lawn of the White House, an unprecedented professional sporting event at the historic residence of U.S. presidents.On that lawn, considered one of the White House’s most prominent symbols — where, for example, Bill Clinton hosted the historic handshake between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat after the Oslo Accords in 1993 — a massive octagonal fighting arena has now been built. The octagon is 47 meters wide and 24 meters high, taller than the White House itself, and will allow 4,000 spectators to watch the fights. Tickets to the event were not sold publicly and, according to Reuters, UFC offered some guests tickets at staggering prices of more than $1 million. About a quarter of the seats are reserved for soldiers, and another 125,000 people are expected to watch the event on giant screens set up in the Ellipse park near the White House.8 View gallery President Donald Trump and his wife, Melania, watch the UFC matches(Photo: Alex Brandon, Pool/AP)8 View gallery (Photos: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters, Nathan Howard/Reuters)The event, dubbed “UFC Freedom 250,” is being officially presented as part of celebrations marking 250 years of U.S. independence, which will be observed next month. It is being held on American Flag Day, which marks the official adoption of the U.S. flag. But it is probably no coincidence that June 14 is also the date on which Trump was born in 1946. The president is a longtime UFC fan, and in recent years has appeared at a series of fighting events, where he received an especially warm welcome. For him, the connection with the UFC world is also political: the organization’s core audience, mainly young men, was one of the groups he targeted in his 2024 election campaign. Trump, whose friend and close associate is UFC President Dana White, called the event “the biggest thing UFC has ever had” and boasted that a “ring right outside the front door of the White House” would be built. “We’re going to have a big fight,” he said. “It’s never going to happen again. It’s never happened before.”8 View gallery The UFC fighting cage is taller than the White House(Photo: Rod Lamkey, Jr./AP)8 View gallery (Photo: Alex Brandon, Pool/AP)The president, who around 12:30 a.m. Israel time attended a private dinner with his family, then went to watch the UFC event. Immediately afterward, Trump will fly to the G7 leaders’ summit, which opens Monday in Evian, France, and whose timing was delayed specifically to allow Trump to watch the UFC event at the White House. The event includes seven fights between 14 mixed martial arts fighters, who will try to kick, punch and grapple their way to victory. The main fight will pit UFC lightweight champion Ilia Topuria, who is Georgian-Spanish, against former interim titleholder Justin Gaethje of the United States. Some of the fighters are expected to begin their walk toward the octagon from inside the Oval Office, the president’s office.The cost of producing the event is estimated at about $60 million, and UFC has claimed that it is fully funding it and is not expected to make a profit. But for the organization, it is a massive advertising campaign, and reports say the production did require a significant diversion of resources by federal authorities. A petition filed in court to cancel the event, arguing that it was being held without authority supposedly required from Congress, was rejected over the weekend. Trump’s critics argue that this is not only a convention-breaking event that cheapens the historic status of the White House, but also further evidence of allegedly improper ties between Trump and businesspeople, while trampling conflict-of-interest rules.8 View gallery Stuntmen performed motorcycle jumps on the White House lawn(Photo: Alex Brandon/Pool via Reuters)8 View gallery (Photo: Nathan Howard/Reuters)Critics of the event point, among other things, to the fact that Trump’s trust purchased shares in TKO Group Holdings, UFC’s parent company, while one of the event’s sponsors, Crypto.com, previously cooperated with Trump Media & Technology Group, which is owned by the president. The White House denied the conflict-of-interest allegations and stressed that the president’s company is managed separately by his family. A poll published last week showed that a large majority of the American public views the event negatively: According to the Reuters/Ipsos poll, conducted among 4,531 adult Americans from June 3-8, only 16% said they thought it was appropriate. Forty-six percent said it was inappropriate, and the rest expressed no opinion. Among Republicans, only 31% said the event was appropriate.The grandiose event at the White House is also seen by critics as being in poor taste, as masses of Americans are now coping with a surge in the cost of living following rising oil prices amid the war with Iran — a war the president now hopes to end quickly, with an agreement that would not immediately achieve the central goal of eliminating the nuclear program, but would reopen tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz and thereby also bring prices down. 8 View gallery UFC fighter Alex Ferreira at a weekend training event in front of the Lincoln Memorial(Photo: Allison Robbert/AP)8 View gallery (Photo: Allison Robbert/AP)“It’s all a distraction,” said Mike Fontaine, a professor of classics at Cornell University, who compared the UFC event to gladiator games in ancient Rome, in which fighters battled to the death to entertain the masses and also suppress unrest against the rulers. “It’s a classic strategy,” Fontaine said. “In ancient Rome, the expression for that was ‘bread and circuses.’”The event also comes amid broader criticism of the changes Trump has been making at the White House since returning to office. Among other things, the president added gold decorations to the Oval Office, paved over the Rose Garden and turned it into a kind of patio, renovated the bathroom near the Lincoln Bedroom and ordered the East Wing demolished to make room for a new and enormous ballroom. Trump is also promoting the construction of a giant arch near the Lincoln Memorial, where weigh-ins for the fights were held over the weekend.Security at the event is especially tight. It is a semi-open event in the area adjacent to the White House, with thousands of invited guests on the lawn and tens of thousands more in the nearby park. This comes in addition to a series of recent security incidents involving Trump and the White House, further heightening sensitivity around the event.