Donald Trump, the President, took in some New York City culture last night. It was his first such appearance after he renounced the state of his birth for Florida, in what Governor Andrew Cuomo suggested was an elaborate dodge to avoid disclosing his tax information.
While in the Big Apple did he check out the newly refurbished Museum of Modern Art? Catch a performance by the New York Philharmonic or attend Jazz at Lincoln Center? Maybe he went to see The Irishman at the Belasco Theater? No, he headed straight to Madison Square Garden to watch people writhe around on canvas and beat the snot out of one another.
“UFC 244” (I haven’t seen the first 243, so I’m a little behind) featured Jorge Masvidal squaring off against Nate Diaz, in what’s essentially boxing except they keep fighting even when they fall down. (Have you seen this stuff? It’s wild!) Anyway, the real action was in the stands, when the 45th President of the United States entered Madison Square Garden to a wall of noise that was definitely more on the “boo” side than the “we support your foreign and domestic policies” side.
This is the second such boo-ing Trump has received at a sporting event in recent days. He got baseball-sized raspberries hurled his way at Nationals Park in Washington, D.C. during Game 5 of the World Series last week. But D.C. is a political town, and tickets to a championship game are only for the elite, one could rationalize. UFC at MSG, so the thinking goes, is a magnet for the beer-belching bridge-and-tunnel crowd from Staten Island, North Jersey, Nassau County and Trump and Archie Bunker’s ancestral homeland of Queens, right? Right?
Wrong. The viral videos prove once again that all this red state/blue state stuff is an oversimplification of this great nation. Furthermore, they prove that there is one thing that unites more of us than people realize: an admittance that Donald Trump is an embarrassment, even to folks who think that UFC events are worth going to on a Saturday night.
Booing the President, we hereby announce, has now eclipsed all sporting events to become the true national pastime. We shall boo him at the World Series. We shall boo him at UFC 244. We shall boo him at the Stanley Cup and the Daytona 500. We shall never surrender, but we shall pay way too much for an arena hot dog.