Hitler dreamed of a 1,000-year Reich; Putin is said to have baroque dreams of territorial conquest meant to restore a dubiously historical empire he calls “Greater Russia”. Sure, there are people around Donald Trump who imagine using his rise to power to establish some sort of grand, civilizational project: there are the white nationalists who dream of a country purged of those they deem racially impure; there are the Christian nationalists who imagine a future theocracy in which women wear long braids and skirts, and don’t vote; there are the techno-reactionaries who imagine a future of interplanetary colonies, techno-assisted eugenics, and polygamous harems.

But Trump himself is conspicuously small in his dreams: his are comparatively little ambitions, not extending far beyond the reach of his ego and his senses.

He wants praise. He wants to see his name and his portrait everywhere. He wants to feel like a big man, to see those he feels have wronged him be penitent and upset. Maybe most of all, he wants to indulge in his own bad taste, repeatedly visiting the lowbrow staples of the 1980s, when he was young and at the height of his tabloid fame.

He loves the musicals of Andrew Lloyd Webber. He loves the music of Bon Jovi and the Village People. And he loves the gaudy, clownish tokens of masculinity that appeal to very small children: big trucks, big muscles, and demonstrations of physical strength.

And so it felt fitting that on Trump’s 80th birthday, at an event nominally meant to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding but really functioning as a celebration for a very special boy, the White House hosted a cage fight for the Ultimate Fighting Championship. The UFC is a competitive league for mixed martial arts – a vaguely sports-like endeavor that combines elements of kickboxing, wrestling, and traditional boxing, and seems designed to saturate a television audience’s appetite for maximum violence.

The event, planned for months, required a diversion of Secret Service resources, use of military musicians, and the construction of a large octagonal cage and audience arena on the White House’s south lawn, all at untold taxpayer expense and in likely violation of numerous ethics rules. On Saturday, the night before the event, the combatants posed shirtless, nose to nose, at the ceremonial weigh-in – a press event that seems primarily designed to pique the interest of online gambling markets – in front of the Lincoln Memorial.

On the big night, a bad weather forecast seemed like it might spare the country the humiliation of having the fights go ahead. But God chose to punish us instead, and the cloud passed. Trump, visibly stooped, hobbled in and sat uncomfortably in the front row to listen to a band of US Marines play a tepid rendition of The Boys are Back in Town.

Mixed martial arts is a frantic and unbeautiful spectacle, with none of the redeeming grace of boxing and little in the way of required strategies. The primary assets required seem to be physical size and a willingness to hurt someone.

Before each bout, artificially tanned women in sequined, American-flag themed miniature outfits would smile vacantly and hold up a placard with the round number on it; these were the “Octagon Girls,” a staple of UFC fights who serve a purely ornamental function, and their exit from the stage initiates the competition.

Fights are three- or five-rounds long but typically only last a few minutes, a form perhaps well suited to an era of degraded attention spans. Shirtless men in spandex shorts adorned with their names face each other and trade high kicks before locking bodies and falling to the floor, which on the White House lawn was emblazoned with an image of a can of Monster Energy. Once they are laying down together, one hits the other repeatedly in the face.

The object seems to be to inflict repeated head injuries, which might help explain why so many of the fighters issued effusive praise for Trump. After his fight, one victor, a redhead with pronounced cauliflower ear named Bo Nickal, thanked the president first and God second.

In Trump’s imagination, hosting a UFC fight on the White House lawn likely affirmed many of his own most base and childlike fantasies of narcissistic gratification. The use of government property and national landmarks for a birthday celebration for him – one that was a profit-making enterprise for many of his friends in the private sector – helped further his own efforts to symbolically fuse the federal government with his person, to insist that he is America and is the state.

That the event was the UFC – cynically primitive, a celebration of violence and brute strength – similarly reaffirms his values. The US is him now, the event seems to say.

Trump wages war at will without Congress. That is already plenty imperial. Now he presides over spectacles of violence carried out for his entertainment, like some dysfunctional Roman despot eating grapes at the Colosseum. Soon, he’ll be appointing his favorite horse to the cabinet.

At the beginning of the broadcast, when the rain clouds were still lingering over Washington DC, the television carriers stalled for time. Meat-headed men in too-small suits remarked, over and over again, how crazy it was that they were at the White House and chattered idly about various fighters, whose locker room, they remarked with satisfaction, was in the executive office building.

At one point, a montage played in which various fighters’ faces were projected on to DC landmarks – the Capitol building, the reflecting pool, the Washington Monument – while a voiceover made a paean to the virtues of violence. “A dominance so undeniable that it becomes permanent,” the voice cooed.

This is, of course, the fantasy of Trumpism – permanent domination. The movement’s hope is that Republicans, through sheer force, have won the game: defeated the forces of pluralism, dignity, and self-government, foreclosed any possibility of meaningful political competition, and issued their opponents a painful and humiliating defeat, TKO. But this hope is futile: no domination is permanent.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist