On the 20th anniversary of the attacks, Trump found ways to keep the spotlight on him. And make a little money.
www.politico.com
as the ringside bell chimed in honor of the 20th anniversary of Sept. 11, the moment of silence at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino was interrupted by a woman’s repeated screams of “Feel that, f---ers!” and “F--- you!”
“Get out of here!” the crowd yelled back. “Shut the f--- up!”
The yelling continued. The bell tolled ten times. On camera, the former president’s face was framed by a black and yellow Triller Fight Club backdrop advertising the comeback of Evander Holyfield, the 58-year-old boxer who had been out of the ring for a decade, a close friend with a “tremendous heart,” the former president said. To Trump’s right, his son, Don. Jr., stood with his eyes cast downward.
“May they rest in peace and never be forgotten,” said Michael Buffer, the “Let’s Get Ready to Rumble” ring announcer.
Unlike at the inauguration, where cameras were still trained on his every move as outgoing president, this time even finding him was a more difficult and bizarre exercise. C-SPAN had a camera with Trump in New York City, but if you were watching the rolling cable coverage of the 9/11 proceedings, you might have only seen him briefly on Fox News. Few journalists tweeted about the visit. But it was all over Don Jr.’s feed. Scrolling through, you would quickly come to a video of the president’s son in a lime green t-shirt, teasing the Holyfield fight, with a strange promise. “I’m definitely asking about aliens, because I think now, maybe we get a solid answer about what exactly is going on at Area 51,” he said.
Doing so generated an automatic response from Triller Fight Club, a social media company trying to break into the fight and entertainment business with self-described “variety shows.” “He’s going to spill it all LIVE on PPV — DON’T MISS OUT,” the text message read.
Don Jr. had advertised this event as a fly-on-the-wall-style peek into the Trump family living room. “We would be doing this anyway,” he said. He praised his father’s recall skills and his knowledge of boxing from his days in Atlantic City. When the family celebrated Thanksgiving last year at Camp David, he said, they ordered the Mike Tyson vs. Roy Jones Jr. fight on pay-per-view.
Trump did seem fluent in the world of boxing. Listening to him talk about Holyfield’s weight class, or matchups of old, felt normal in the way his presidency rarely did. His color commentary was often more general and anodyne than what Don Jr. promised.
As Joe Fournier lost an uneventful fight to his friend, David Haye, in the first undercard bout, Trump remarked, “You know, look at that left jab, that’s good. Greatest ever, left jab, was Ernie Holmes — was, uh, Larry Holmes,” he corrected. “If you look at Larry Holmes’ left, remember that?”
Grisham agreed. “The jab,” he said.
“Remember the jab?” Trump said.
“George Foreman’s was pretty good, too.”
“His was great. But for that pure left jab.”
Don Jr. added: “We may have to get you in the ring now.”
“Yeah,” his father said, “I wanna do that actually.”
This was not exactly Norman Mailer and George Plimpton covering the “Rumble in the Jungle.”
Mostly, Trump sipped on a Diet Coke as others tried to cut the silence with non sequiturs.
“How about a fight between myself and you?” Trump asked Junior dos Santos, a Brazilian MMA fight who guest-commentated. “Look at the arms on this guy. So do you think people would believe it if I knocked him out? Would they believe it? Would they say this is a legit deal?”
“In the fight world, you never know,” said dos Santos.
Trump all but begged dos Santos to utter the word “rigged” when he asked about a fight between Óscar Valdez and Robson Conceicao, where judges had made a “terrible decision,” dos Santos said, by declaring Valdez the winner.
“We’ve seen decisions where they carried the winner out,” Trump said.
Dos Santos agreed. “Conceicao was much better in my opinion. In everybody’s opinion.”
“So what did the crowd do?” Trump asked, grinning. “Were they OK with it? Did the crowd believe it?”
If he was trying to set up an allusion to Jan. 6 insurrection, dos Santos didn’t recognize it.
After more than two hours, it was time for Holyfield.
The retired great stepped out into the ring, a red robe tied loosely at the waist.
“I think you’re gonna learn a lot by the first minute,” Trump said, hedging against his friend. “First minute’s gonna tell you a lot. One thing I’ll say, Vitor looks very sharp, very sharp.”
“All right let’s go.”
Trump was right. As he crossed the one-minute mark, Holyfield wasn’t punching. He put his gloves up, protecting his face, then lost his footing, stumbling into the ropes. “Yeah, it’s, uh, it’s looking a little tough for Evander right now,” Trump said. Vitor Belfort knocked him down a second time. He stood up. “He’s having a hard time out there.”
The ref agreed. He stopped the fight before the two-minute mark.
“Right from the beginning you could see it,” Trump said. “He was not the same fighter. He lost a lot. That left jab was very slow. He lost a lot.”
The comeback Triller promised didn’t come. Trump and Don Jr. never talked about aliens. Holyfield’s opponent, Belfort, put his face in the camera to challenge YouTube star Jake Paul to a fight on Thanksgiving. Triller offered $30 million for the match. And the night was over.
Trump got the last word. “This is like a rally,” he said.
“I hear it’s going crazy on the internet — absolutely crazy.”