President Donald Trump announced Thursday that the White House will celebrate America’s 250th anniversary with an epic athletic event on its grounds—but the actual sport will have few ties to this country. Unlike hosting a US-originating pastime like baseball, basketball, or our version of football, the president will welcome a mixed martial arts competition, he told a crowd at the Iowa State Fairgrounds. Is the president’s embrace of a discipline rooted in Asia and Brazil over a sport from this country another sign that his so-called “America First” stance is continuing to soften? Or is he just leaning into a sport he’s familiar with as a longtime casino proprietor?
Details on the event remain scarce. According to multiple news outlets, Donald Trump told a Des Moines crowd, “We’re going to have a UFC fight—think of this—on the grounds of the White House.” That initialism is a reference to the Ultimate Fighting Championship, a MMA promotions company now owned by talent-agency-turned-combat-sports conglomerate Endeavor, a public company led by big-ticket Democrat donor and vocal Kamala Harris supporter Ari Emanuel.
Of course, Emanuel isn’t who most folks think of, if or when they mull the UFC. That honor goes to Dana White, a longtime Trump hype man employed by the fight company as president and CEO (he also reportedly holds a small ownership stake). White, who was caught on tape in an alleged domestic violence incident with wife Anne White in 2022, has praised Trump as “the toughest, most resilient guy I’ve ever met in my life” and “the legitimate, ultimate American badass of all time,” words that cynics might assume have swayed Trump’s interest in his company.
If the White House match happens, it will be an incredible turnaround for a sport that was banned in most states until just a couple of decades ago. The UFC—which once marketed itself as “no holds barred,” although rules do indeed exist today—faced bipartisan ire when Republican Senator John McCain sent letters to governors of all 50 states in 1996 encouraging its ban. It was “barbaric,” “not a sport,” and “human cockfighting,” McCain wrote. In consequence, the UFC went dark in the US until the turn of the millennium, when those laws were lifted state by state.
The now-shuttered Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City was the site of a UFC bout soon after, in 2001, so if this White House match goes off, it won’t be the president’s first time hosting one of the company’s events. “We’re going to have some incredible events, some professional events, some amateur events. But the UFC fight is going to be a big deal, too,” Trump told assembled Iowans Thursday. “It’s going to be a championship fight, full fight, like 20,000 to 25,000 people and we’re going to do that as part of ‘250’ also.”
According to a pool report quoting White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, the president is “dead serious” about the plan to host this globally inspired sporting event at the White House, even as more expressly and traditionally American pursuits like baseball (the modern version of which was invented in New York in the 1840s), basketball (Massachusetts, 1890s), and American football (East Coast, 1960s) go unmentioned.
It’s news sure to rile former Trump supporters like Tucker Carlson, who has recently complained that Trump’s promise to focus on American excellence and boosterism appears to be slipping. “Let’s focus on my country, where I was born,” Carlson said last month, as he chewed over America’s bombing of Iran. Is Trump’s desire to mark America’s founding with a new, non-traditional, and foreign-born sport a yet another sign—like his softened stance on undocumented farmworkers—that the president is sneakily, incrementally going multicultural and woke? If so, this is certainly a July 4 for the history books.
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