How the South Lawn at the White House will be transformed for Trump’s 80th birthday

Until now, ‘America’s backyard’ was known for low-contact sports or events like the annual Easter Egg Roll. Teddy Roosevelt boxed. Richard Nixon bowled.Dwight D. Eisenhower put in a putting green. George H.W. Bush added a horseshoe pit. Herbert Hoover played a game named for himself to get more exercise, while George W. Bush threw open the space for youth T-ball.The White House and its storied South Lawn are no strangers to sporting events. But they’ve never seen anything like the UFC bout President Donald Trump is hosting to celebrate his 80th birthday on Sunday or the eight-sided, wire-mesh cage complete with an open overhead dome featuring large screens that are surrounded by thousands of arena seats.Sometimes called America’s backyard, the South Lawn was until now known for low-contact sports and joyful events geared toward children or bipartisanship, like the annual Easter Egg Roll or the congressional picnic.The same space being used for blood sport, feting a president who relishes it and playing out in a hulking structure featuring a complicated overhead lighting scheme known as The Claw, illustrates yet another of the White House norms that Trump is gleefully laying to rest — or, in UFC parlance, forcing to tap out.That the president has begun suggesting that he could make the cage-fighting venue a permanent South Lawn fixture further underscores just how far from T-ball the White House has come.“Sports has been central to presidents. I don’t know that it’s been quite the spectacle that it is with the Trump administration,” said Michael Patrick Cullinane, senior historian at the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library.