The UFC Claw is emblazoned with the red-white-and-blue, the Marine Band will play, there will be a military flyover and a fireworks display, as the league tries to dissolve the lines between entertainment, spectacle and patriotism. For Trump, the potential is even greater. Critics have decried the White House event as akin to the gladiator contests of ancient Rome, at which bloodthirsty emperors would preside with life-or-death authority over hand-to-hand combat. This isn’t just a role he covets; it’s the role he has been playing, as an entertainer, for decades.

Trump takes pleasure in presiding over conflict. The world comes to him, where he, the perpetual winner, lords over contests, over victories and defeats. You’re fired. You don’t hold any winning cards. You’ve lost the match. For many Americans, there is nothing surreal about this delight in domination. It simply reflects the world they live in, where people are losing all the time, at the gas pump, at dead-end jobs, in marriages that founder on the shoals of stress and poverty.

There is a strange, touching tenderness to the way UFC fighters come together after a match, often bloody and battered. The winner respects the loser, may lift him up or touch him in some way that acknowledges the mutual martyrdom of causing and receiving pain for the enjoyment of others. When life has been reduced to pure struggle, the last and final freedom is the freedom to suffer.

It’s a strange metaphor for America on its 250th birthday, but the optics will be spectacular.