Taking a page from Imperial Rome's tradition of bread and circuses to entertain and mollify the populace, President Donald Trump and Ultimate Fighting Championship President and CEO Dana White are moving ahead with a proposed UFC match on the White House grounds during next year's July 4 Semiquincentennial celebration. The president was "dead serious" about hosting the fight when he raised the issue earlier this summer, said White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt last month, and now details of the planned match are beginning to come into sharper focus.
The match is "absolutely going to happen," White said to The Associated Press on Tuesday. "Think about that, the 250th birthday of the United States of America, the UFC will be on the White House South Lawn live on CBS." While Trump and White have traveled in similar circles for some time now, this collaboration between the President of the USA and the President of the UFC is a unique confluence of overlapping interests, both political and personal.
A cage fight at the White House sounds like a "columnist's crazy fever dream," said The Wall Street Journal. But given the UFC's "assimilation into the culture — or perhaps, the culture's assimilation into the UFC," at this point, "how can anyone be shocked?" The proposed White House match has "gone from a notion into the planning stages," said the Los Angeles Times, marking the "second thrill of the week" for White, who on Monday finalized a massive streaming partnership with Paramount estimated to be worth $1.1 billion annually. The streaming agreement is a "significant shift" from UFC's "traditional pay-per-view model," said CBS News, and makes UFC an "essential partner" for an aggressively growing Paramount, said the Journal.
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That deal comes shortly after a "contentious endeavor" to carry the recent merger between Paramount and production company Skydance "over the finish line" for the creation of a "new entertainment giant," said The Associated Press. That merger was "previously scrutinized" by Trump, said Politico. The FCC ultimately approved the merger after the president settled a lawsuit against Paramount's CBS News division, which agreed as part of that settlement to hire an in-house "bias monitor" whose job seems "designed to ensure little critical is aired about the current administration," said former Washington Post columnist Glenn Kessler to The Guardian.
For Trump, the UFC's popularity with young men (a "key demographic" in his 2024 electoral victory) has made the president a "regular fixture" at certain events, where he is "greeted like a rock star," said Fox Sports. Trump has "embraced the UFC's culture of defiance, machismo and spectacle" to help "buttress his image as a rebel against liberal norms," said Karim Zidan at The Guardian. All of this comes as the country transitions toward an "abrasive new blend" of entertainment and "confrontational politics" that is "perfectly embodied by both Trump and White."
What next?
White plans to meet with the president and his daughter Ivanka Trump by the end of the month to "finalize details and review venue renderings," said CBS News. "When he called me and asked me to do it, he said, 'I want Ivanka in the middle of this,'" White said to the network, describing his conversation with the president. Ivanka's possible role in the proposed event "marks her return to her father's political orbit after a three-year hiatus," The Daily Beast said. The onetime White House senior adviser had previously joined her father to sit "cage-side at multiple UFC events."
While no fighters have been confirmed for next year's proposed brawl, a number of high-profile athletes have already signaled their willingness to compete in the event. Fighter Conor McGregor, who visited the White House this past spring but hasn't competed in several years, has "expressed interest," said Time. White has insisted in multiple interviews that it's still too early to determine fight participants, but if McGregor "starts getting in shape and training, and stays the course, that's the fight he wants," he said in an appearance on "Pardon My Take" on Tuesday.
