Strange things are afoot at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, giving rise to an obvious question: how did we get here?<\/p>\n
Rising from the South Lawn of the White House is a 92ft-tall skeletal structure known as \u201cthe Claw\u201d. Beneath it sits an octagonal cage surrounded by sponsor logos, temporary grandstands and thousands of seats for a mixed martial arts card on Sunday night to celebrate Donald Trump<\/a>\u2019s 80th birthday and the Ultimate Fighting Championship<\/a> brand.<\/p>\n The event has prompted comparisons to Idiocracy, Mike Judge\u2019s satire of a future US where politics, entertainment and corporate branding become indistinguishable. Others have gone further, dismissing it as a \u201ckleptocratic spectacle\u201d<\/a>.<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Strange things are afoot at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, giving rise to an obvious question: how did we get here? Rising from the South Lawn of the White House is a 92ft-tall skeletal structure known as \u201cthe Claw\u201d. Beneath it sits an octagonal cage surrounded by sponsor logos, temporary grandstands and thousands of seats for a … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-74846","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74846","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74846"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74846\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74846"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74846"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74846"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}