Defeated at the Polls, the White House Books a Fight Card
Hand a government a crushing electoral defeat and watch what it reaches for. This administration reached for spectacle. Days after Democrats were set to take control of both the House and Senate, with the White House struggling with his party's deep losses in Tuesday's midterm elections, the president's public act of governance was to offer a job to a fight promoter.
The job is White House press secretary, largely vacant since Karoline Leavitt stepped aside in August. The president offered it to Dana White, the CEO and president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, and told him to bring along fighters as aides. On Truth Social he wrote that "The Great Dana White, a violent Fighter and Warrior, has been offered the job of Press Secretary of the United States". This is not staffing. It is a message: the government that just lost at the ballot box intends to answer with more of the same performance, louder.
Behind the performance runs a second current — the enforcement of loyalty. Calley Means, a senior adviser at the Department of Health and Human Services until last month, aired explosive claims on Joe Rogan's podcast and now accuses two of the president's top operatives, among them Susie Wiles, of hounding him; he posted what he called a "formal request" that they stop. And the machine does not only turn inward. Trump ordered the Justice Department to examine alleged threats against Republicans, singling out Slotkin — the state's prosecutorial power swung at the opposition. A government that cannot win arguments in public reaches for the apparatus instead.
The party is not holding together under the strain. In the Senate, several Republicans are pushing to delay the leadership elections scheduled for next week after the midterms defeat — a maneuver that, as the reporting notes, may open the door to a challenge against John Thune. The knives are out internally because they have nowhere else to point. Even former Maryland governor Larry Hogan called the midterms a "complete and total rebuke of Trump" and faulted the White House for doubling down on unpopular approaches while ignoring political independents. That is the honest diagnosis from inside the tent. The answer from the top of it was to audition a UFC executive.
Read together, these are not disconnected curiosities. They are one story about how power behaves when voters reject it: it reaches for distraction, it purges the disloyal, it fights over the chairs, it points its prosecutors at its critics — and it does everything except reconsider what it is doing to people. The one thing an electoral rebuke has not touched is the apparatus of repression itself.
Consider who that apparatus is still grinding. Federal immigration agents detained Carel Aaron Van Der Merwe, a Wisconsin state patrol trooper, at an airport on Thursday. He immigrated to the United States at fourteen and has waited seven years for his asylum case to be heard. He was released from custody — but the detention happened, in the same week the president was publicly musing about which fighters might make good press aides.
That is the gap this administration is asking everyone to ignore. At the top, the spectacle rolls on untouched by defeat. At the bottom, a man who wears a state trooper's uniform and has waited seven years for a hearing gets pulled aside at an airport. The reshuffle is theater for the people who already hold power. The cost lands, as it always does, on the migrants and the workers who do not.