Trump’s trust bought between $15,000 and $50,000 in TKO Group Holdings, the company that owns UFC, back in March. Three months later, the Octagon was sitting on the White House South Lawn for his 80th birthday, ringed by ads for Crypto.com, Scotts Miracle-Gro, and his own Truth Social.
Barbara Res, a former executive vice president at the Trump Organization who oversaw projects like Trump Tower, says the man doesn’t even like his birthday. She recalls female employees throwing him a surprise party in the late 1980s with a cake shaped like a record. He wanted it over fast and resented that people took time off to celebrate him.
Her take on why he’d build a whole UFC spectacle around the day anyway: “He thinks it will make him look like this big shot.” The only reason he planned it, she says, was to “make money for himself.”
Jeffrey Engel, who runs the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University, landed in the same place. Whether the event was dignified is a question of taste, he said. What isn’t: “The president of the United States is using the White House and using the White House lawn to make money for himself.”
About 4,000 people packed the South Lawn on June 14, with Mark Zuckerberg and Cabinet secretaries in the crowd and military jets crossing overhead during the anthem. Chants of “USA! USA!” carried across the grounds while corporate logos sat in the camera’s sightline behind the cage.
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