Noah Weiland

NEW YORK — President Donald Trump walked onto the floor of Madison Square Garden on Saturday night from the same corner that the mixed martial arts fighters did, his own fighters at his sides.

Just before 10 p.m., Trump squeezed into a row of folding chairs below the metal-fenced octagon accompanied by the men who do his battles on Twitter and in Congress — his sons Donald Jr. and Eric and Reps. Kevin McCarthy and Mark Meadows — and found a new kind of release at a moment of high tension in his presidency: a real, blood-soaked, stitches-requiring fight.

His half-day visit to New York to attend the Ultimate Fighting Championship 244 was as unusual a presidential trip as it was conveniently timed, converting his metaphorical political fights into literal ones. His appearance came a year from Election Day 2020, roughly 24 hours after a raucous campaign rally and just days after the House formally endorsed an impeachment inquiry of him.

It also came shortly after news that Trump had formally declared Palm Beach, Florida, his permanent residence.

The conflicts and betrayals gave this visit important symbolism, said Michael D’Antonio, who wrote a biography of Trump.

“He feels embattled and threatened. He probably identified with the fighters,” D’Antonio said. “He’s spoiling for a fight. He wants to punch somebody, but he doesn’t have that person before him.”

Trump may have anticipated a friendlier welcome from the fans of a sport whose champions have visited him at the White House, where others have declined to do so. But within seconds of Trump’s entrance, the room was a cocktail of boos, roars and cheers, a din that Trump was eager to spin in his favor. From his seat, he retweeted his son Eric, who claimed that the arena had been chanting his father’s name (words that were not audible to the reporters traveling with Trump and sitting nearby), and Donald Jr., who said the reaction was “overwhelmingly positive.” On Sunday morning, Trump said reports of the booing were “fake news.”

At times, the arena felt like an island in the middle of a city that voted heavily against Trump in 2016. Some in the crowd wore “Make America Great Again” caps and “TRUMP 2020” shirts, applauding him and giving thumbs-up. At various points, Trump waved and pointed at followers near his ringside side seats.

“He should be a man of the people. He should come and watch them fight,” said Anthony Whealy, who was sitting near Trump. “You don’t want your president to go and sit around and watch very boring sports.

Perhaps anticipating a sour response, event organizers at Madison Square Garden didn’t display Trump’s image on the large screens dotting the arena, a move that prompted boos and taunts at the World Series game in Washington last Sunday.

Minutes after the president appeared, a young man just yards from Trump flashed both middle fingers as the president turned to wave at those cheering him. Just on the other side of the octagon, another man did the same. Outside the arena, a protester carried a sign: “Headlock Him Up.”

Among those who booed was Adam Abdalla, a publicist from New York who called Trump’s appearance “a big distraction.”

“For him to expect New Yorkers to embrace him for basically leaving the state to dodge the law is kind of laughable,” Abdalla said, discussing Trump’s reported interest in changing his official residence to avoid New York income taxes.

“There are too many people in the industry who are immigrants, who are from the slums, who are from everywhere” for the setting to have been entirely pro-Trump, said Gabriella Bain, a UFC fan who was sitting close to the octagon.

As the crowd Saturday night thrilled to the most violent kicks and punches, Trump, who was wearing a suit and red tie, sat mostly stone-faced, his arms crossed, but watching intently.

“He loves to reduce everything to a kind of elemental blood level,” said D’Antonio, the Trump biographer. “If there’s blood that’s spilled and it’s not his, it’s thrilling to him.”

Trump is no stranger to fight nights. When mixed martial arts were struggling to find an audience, Trump hosted a UFC event at the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City. In 2007, he appeared at a World Wrestling Entertainment event, where he preened for the crowd by the ring. In 2008, Trump partnered with Affliction Entertainment, a mixed martial arts company, to host pay-per-view fights in the United States and a reality television show in Russia.

The trip this weekend was the kind of brief escape that Trump may have imagined would be routine before his presidency, before he realized the traffic trouble it causes. For a president who marvels at the perks of the job — a red button that summons a butler and a Diet Coke, the custom-branded pens that Sharpie designed for him — his trip to New York displayed the apparatus he has savored as a head of state: Osprey helicopters and large police escorts that followed Trump down a fenced-off 34th Street.

On Saturday, the seats reserved for the president and his entourage were close enough to hear the kicks land and the thuds of bodies hitting the floor.

“Put him in a body bag, Johnny!” one fan shouted nearby during one match.

“Finish him!” another shouted near the end of a final round in one match.

The night’s premier match ended in a knockout: One fighter had such a large gash above his eye that a doctor ordered the competition over.

For a president who now jokes about behaving more presidentially, the event featured the brand of pageantry kitsch that Trump once used on television and his own live entertainment projects: tuxedo-clad announcers, bikini-clad women who circled the octagon and elaborate entrance routines by the fighters.

“This,” said Anthony Alvarez, a fan who drove from Rhode Island to see the fight, “is an American sport. This is as American as it gets.”

This article originally appeared in

It's Not Like Trump Should Have to 'Watch Very Boring Sports'

(Letter from Below the Octagon)

“He’s the man that seeks out people and experience and knowledge and wants to touch it and feel it and be with it on the ground,” Stewart said at the Kennedy Center Sunday night, referring to the late chef and television host Anthony Bourdain, “so that he can then channel that for his art and redirect that back to you as something completely different and new.”

Chappelle, the longtime stand-up comedian and former television host, was celebrated as the 22nd recipient of the Mark Twain Prize, considered the top honor in comedy. Speakers who spanned the comedian’s decadeslong career in comedy testified to how far-reaching his influence has been: Bradley Cooper, Tiffany Haddish, Kenan Thompson, and Sarah Silverman were just some of the guests who described Chappelle as far ahead of his peers.

Much of the show was a tribute to the first part of Chappelle’s career, which included the Comedy Central show “Chappelle’s Show.” Debuting in 2003, it featured bits that are seen as canonical in the comedy world: about a black white supremacist, a black George W. Bush or a mock sports fantasy draft for different races.

The show “allowed Dave to be his entire self, to express his intellect, his anger, his morality, his silliness, his hypocrisy, his sadness, his blazing talent,” said Neal Brennan, a comedian who was a co-creator of the show and who gave a speech Sunday that brought Chappelle to tears.

Chappelle’s largely improvised show was so funny, Brennan said, that Chappelle “surprised himself by how funny he was.”

At the time, Chappelle was the rare black comedian with his own television platform. Several speakers told of how complicated it was early in Chappelle’s career to find acceptance.

Brennan remembered that when he was pitching “Chappelle’s Show” to television networks, one woman asked him why they needed Chappelle “when we have Chris Rock.”

“See, back then, there could only be one popular black comedian at a time,” Brennan said. “Unlike today, when there can be three.”

“Chappelle’s Show,” which lasted only three seasons, was revered for skits that commented on how black people were stereotyped and characterized by white people, often for white audiences. His discomfort with that dynamic in part led to his disappearance from the network and public life altogether, he admitted.

“Chappelle’s Show was a rare thing,” Brennan said Sunday. “It was a fully faceted document of a human being living in the United States of America while having the surreal experience of being born with black skin.”

The speakers on Sunday briefly alluded to a trip to South Africa that Chappelle took after quitting. They mentioned the relative anonymity he has since found in rural Ohio, where he owns acres of land and has hosted live music in cow barns.

In the years after he left television, Chappelle’s reclusiveness became almost mythological, his few public appearances receiving tabloid attention. Yet Sunday, it was only when Stewart spoke that Chappelle’s absence from public life was addressed at any length. Stewart cited Chappelle’s courage in walking away from a reported $50 million to continue making “Chappelle’s Show.”

The ceremony did little to explain the breaking point in Chappelle’s career and life. In highlight reels of Chappelle’s comedy, there was often at least a decadelong gap between jokes or scenes, highlighting his older, more challenging, more thrilling skit-based humor against his more recent and uneventful stand-up comedy.

The more recent comedy, including several Netflix specials, has resulted in a bevy of negative reviews from critics who say Chappelle lost his smart and progressive take on current events. He has called LGBTQ Americans “the alphabet people” and has fixated on the sexual transgressions of famous men, including joking about R. Kelly’s alleged misconduct.

But as Sunday’s program made clear, Chappelle keeps a towering reputation among peers.

Aziz Ansari, another stand-up comedian, said that Chappelle’s most creative material has often been found in the most secluded settings.

“My favorite Dave sets have got to be the sets that I don’t think anyone will ever get to see, small club shows that are super intimate that go late in the morning, 5-6 in the morning,” he said. Ansari said he had heard stories of comedy club employees alerting guests to car-towing, but the guests did not move.

“That’s how compelling this man can be,” Ansari said.

The ceremony Sunday, which also featured music performances from Mos Def, Erykah Badu and John Legend, functioned in part as a homecoming. Chappelle, the son of professors, first got attention as a teenager from Washington on the show “Star Search” and at small comedy clubs, where he was known as a prodigy, as several speakers noted. A marching band from his high school, the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, opened the show.

Chappelle spoke at the end, smoking a signature cigarette, and said that comedy saved his life.

He thanked his mother, who was in the crowd, for teaching him the virtue of the African griot, the storytelling sage who functions as a kind of human library of oral histories.

He said that his mother attended his earliest shows, sleeping in the back of the room until he took the stage.

“Do you know how long that car ride is home?” he joked.

Knowing he had to give a more polished thank you to his eventual audience on PBS — the ceremony will air on Jan. 7 — Chappelle interrupted his acceptance speech to pose with a contrived grin next to the Mark Twain bust given to the award winner.

“I know they’re going to edit some of this out,” he said, using an expletive. “It’s been an honor. Thank you.”

Dave Chappelle, Subversive and Charming, Wins Mark Twain Prize for Comedy

WASHINGTON — Dave Chappelle, in the words of Jon Stewart, a former Comedy Central colleague, is the “black Bourdain.”

<h1>WASHINGTON — A jury in Kentucky awarded Sen. Rand Paul more than $580,000 in damages on Wednesday in a lawsuit that he filed against a neighbor who assaulted him as he did yardwork.</h1>

The neighbor, Rene Boucher, pleaded guilty last spring to felony assault after tackling Paul in November 2017. Boucher, who was sentenced in June to 30 days in prison, will appeal the verdict, said his lawyer, Matthew Baker.

“We can hold different views, whether it’s politics, religion or day to day matters,” Paul, R-Ky., wrote Wednesday on Twitter after the damages were announced. “It’s never ok to turn those disagreements into violent, aggressive anger. I hope that’s the message from today.”

Boucher, 60, who had lived next door to Paul for 17 years at the time of the assault, claimed in court documents that he had festering irritation over the senator’s habit of stacking debris near the line that divides their properties. One day, when he saw Paul using a lawn mower to blow leaves onto his yard, Boucher approached him and tackled him.

The attack left Paul with broken ribs and caused a case of pneumonia, which kept the senator out of Washington for nearly two weeks.

Boucher, a retired anesthesiologist who once invented a rice-filled vest used for back pain, claimed that he simply lost his temper and that it was not a political attack — an accusation that Paul and his aides have made.

“Any description of this attack that implies a ‘yard dispute’ justifies such violence and misses the point,” Sergio Gor, a spokesman for Paul, said in a statement last year.

The assault occurred in an otherwise peaceful, well-to-do neighborhood. But Paul, 56, was known for his quirks as a homeowner, including growing pumpkins on his property and fertilizing them with fish emulsion.

The decision Wednesday came on the third day of a trial in Bowling Green, Kentucky, where Paul lives and where the attack occurred. Paul and Boucher testified during the trial.

The total compensation was split into categories: $375,000 in punitive damages, $200,000 for pain and suffering and almost $8,000 for medical expenses.

In his lawsuit, Paul had sought up to $500,000 in compensatory damages and up to $1 million in punitive damages.

This article originally appeared in <a id="94d6674b-00dd-4b3d-a3de-67418a61cc9d" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/30/us/politics/rand-paul-attack-jury-damages.html">The New York Times</a>.

Jury awards Rand Paul over $580,000 in damages from attack

The neighbor, Rene Boucher, pleaded guilty last spring to felony assault after tackling Paul in November 2017. Boucher, who was sentenced in June to 30 days in prison, will appeal the verdict, said his lawyer, Matthew Baker.

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Noah Weiland

Articles written by the author

It's Not Like Trump Should Have to 'Watch Very Boring Sports'

Dave Chappelle, Subversive and Charming, Wins Mark Twain Prize for Comedy

Jury awards Rand Paul over $580,000 in damages from attack