Donald Trump’s White House UFC Event Would Be Embarrassing Anywhere

With his history of involvement in pro wrestling and boxing and his zeal for garish excess—the man is a failed casino impresario, after all—it makes perfect sense that Donald Trump would want to celebrate both America’s birthday and his own with UFC cage fights on the White House lawn, sponsored by Monster Energy. If there’s been any surprise, it’s been in how the whole affair has so far failed to clear the lowest bar.

The event’s promoters are certainly setting expectations high. “We’re putting on the most historic sporting event in history,” UFC hypeman and CEO Dana White told Time. One problem here is that this fight card would, in absence of the White House backdrop, not be the most historic scheduled for the next month, or an especially big or impressive one by the standards of any month. “Dignity” is not a word usually associated with fight promotion; even so.

On Thursday, multihyphenate Marco Rubio compared the founding of the Ultimate Fighting Championship to the moon landing while making a difficult-to-follow point about the uniquely American nature of the company. Absurd as this might be generally, it’s somehow more so specifically.

The UFC, founded largely to showcase a Brazilian family’s jiu-jitsu skills, was not the first MMA promotion. It wasn’t even the first MMA promotion founded in 1993. (That honor goes to Pancrase, which itself was not even the first Japanese MMA promotion to ask “What if pro wrestling was real?”) White did not, as Rubio claimed, introduce the ideas of rules and weight classes to the sport. None of this made any sense.

Rubio, in his capacity as secretary of state, was at an event with White in Washington, DC, to sign what was for some reason called a memorandum of understanding meant to bring the UFC’s unique virtues to the administration’s sports diplomacy. Perhaps Chechen warlord Ramzan Kadyrov, whose deep ties to UFC fighters the UFC has long insisted do not contractually extend to the UFC itself, will play a part.

White is, to be fair, an innovator. His Power Slap show, which premiered in January 2023—the same month TMZ published a video of him slapping his wife in public—promotes a genuinely novel and uniquely American sport consisting solely of people attempting to concuss each other.

Now, he’s disrupting in the bombast space by claiming that he expects “Super Bowl type numbers” for Sunday’s event. (Netflix, which asserts that its recent Ronda Rousey fight was the most-watched MMA event of all time, pegged peak US viewership at 11.6 million—less than 10 percent of the average audience for the most recent Super Bowl.)

Certainly no expense has been spared for the ostensible most historic event in history. Looking at the White House lawn, you'd be forgiven for thinking organizers literally transported in the contents of a Meta-branded warehouse from Las Vegas and dumped it there.

If UFC Freedom 250 fails to be watched by every person in the US, that may be because, for a card featuring fighters making their entrances from the Oval Office, it’s not exactly thrilling. A generous descriptor would be … fine. In the main event, undefeated 155-pound champion Ilia Topuria will fight interim 155-pound champion Justin Gaethje, who’s been as reliably entertaining a fighter as there is for years. There will be an interim heavyweight title bout and several other fights as well, nearly all of them featuring ranked fighters (and none of them featuring women). Probably relatively few people who aren’t familiar with the pros and cons of various betting apps will be wildly excited by the offerings, but then plenty of people are, and it should be a solid night of action.

Why the UFC’s top, or at least most famous, fighters won’t be part of the spectacle is at once shrouded in opacity and utterly obvious.

Jon Jones, widely regarded as the greatest fighter of all time (and someone with an extensive history of largely driving-related legal issues), will not be fighting. White has claimed there were no negotiations to do so; Jones, more credibly, claims that the UFC, which under White’s watch has pioneered methods of wage suppression that led to the $375 million settlement of a class-action antitrust suit with fighters, lowballed him.

The UFC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Conor McGregor, who remains the UFC’s biggest star despite not having fought in five years—he’s spent the interim period being found liable in a civil case for sexual assault and being a totem for the international far right—will also not be fighting. As WIRED has reported, the White House asserts this is because he hasn’t been in an anti-doping pool long enough to be eligible for a fight and because Trump doesn’t want to be seen as favoring specific fighters. Oddly enough, McGregor—whose relationship to anti-doping protocols was the subject of a New York Times investigation this week—is scheduled for a fight in early July, which White has said he expects to break the UFC’s all-time gate record.

UFC Freedom 250 will not be breaking any gate records because the tickets are free, with Trump, White, and Ari Emanuel—boss of TKO, which owns both the UFC and World Wrestling Entertainment—controlling about 1,900 tickets between them. Much of the rest of the crowd will apparently be filled out by active servicemembers with a waist-to-height ratio of less than 0.55. (Trump’s waist size is not public, but at 6′3″ and with his most recent physical listing him at 238 pounds, he would be unlikely to qualify.)

An evening thunderstorm, which White has vowed will not stop the fights, is forecast for Sunday. It would be just the latest weather-related disaster for Emanuel’s empire. (A 3,000-square-foot American flag that flew above the headquarters of WWE, which boasts Trump among the members of its Hall of Fame, was blown into power lines near a train station in Stamford, Connecticut, this past weekend, making about 40,000 people lose power for most of Sunday afternoon.) It would also, the lightweight title fight aside, likely be the most exciting thing to happen all day.