Forget the press secretary “joke.” As Donald Trump seeks to survive the catastrophic fallout of the 2026 midterms, he doesn’t need a new spokesperson. He needs a new gladiator at the Pentagon.
The internet has had a field day with Trump’s Truth Social post offering Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White the White House press secretary job — with plenty of speculation that the president confused him with Dana W. White, the former Pentagon spokesperson.
Trump has since said he was only kidding. But look at what he actually wrote. He called White a “violent Fighter and Warrior.” He wanted UFC champions as “assistants” to “defend us against the Lunatic Left.” Um, OK.
First, as many readers know, I was a press secretary on Capitol Hill for years, and the last thing one should be is a violent fighter. But in the upcoming Trump 2.5, that might be the number-one requirement for working in the White House.
The biggest harbinger of this was Trump’s choosing the deranged and combative Stephen Miller as chief of staff, who will carry on the venom of MAGA politics even though a majority of Americans voted against it. With that in mind, it is easy to see how his embattled, impeachment-dodging defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, could be replaced by the equally mano-a-mano UFC CEO.
I don’t think this is some wild hallucination on my part. It’s the logical final evolution of an administration obsessed with turning the Department of Defense into a high-testosterone cage match. Didn’t we get a sample of that this past summer with a literal one on the White House lawn?
And White is Trump’s excuse for putting a corporate CEO in charge of the Pentagon. He’s a cheapened-down CEO version of Charles Erwin, Robert McNamara or the egomaniac Donald Rumsfeld, who were corporate titans prior to their tenures at Defense.
Hegseth’s lack of experience running anything legitimate was perhaps his biggest downfall. Well, let’s be honest, it’s hard to rank all the things Hegseth was deficient in.
But one of the things he was proficient in was bellicose bombast, bullying and bravado. He has almost destroyed the lustrous history of exceptional leadership in the military. He brought to the Pentagon a relentless push away from a modern, structured military bureaucracy and toward an overly aggressive, lethal, hypermasculine “warrior class” mindset that was the antithesis of keeping peace.
That is exactly how a UFC brawl is promoted, and how Trump has promoted White. He all but drew the connection himself when he praised White in those terms as a potential press secretary last week.
By floating White’s name, Trump isn’t looking for someone to fight with the press. He’s looking to double down on the “high-T” muscle-bound MAGA ethos that has tried to impose itself on the U.S. military. Hegseth was the perfect fit for MAGA theology. White would be its heir apparent.
Right now, the media is largely blind to this connection. Reporters are busy with internet jokes about the name confusion with the former Pentagon spokesperson while missing the bigger story. White is more than a potential spokesperson. He represents Trump’s next iteration of fighting.
The political reality is that Hegseth’s reign is coming to an end. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are pushing back, including Republican Thomas Massie, who today went to the House floor to introduce impeachment articles against Hegseth.
And incoming Democrats, most notably Hakeem Jeffries, who has taken the unusual step — for him — of openly supporting impeachment, saying it’s a “hard yes.” The current defense secretary is in Trump’s target zone of people to blame for the massive GOP midterm wipeout, when most voters voiced their strong disapproval of the Iran war.
Hegseth is a goner, for sure.
That’s why White looks so ripe. He offers a massive, seemingly untouchable shield of media noise and aggressive swagger. He also offers a continuation of the “warrior ethos,” “high T,” and no “beardos, weirdos or trannies.”
That is the locker-room language of the new Pentagon under Hegseth, and no one knows locker rooms better than White.
Then there’s the calendar. Trump has a small window to make this possibility a reality. The current GOP Senate majority has a rapidly closing window before the newly elected Democratic Congress takes over in January. If Trump wants to jam a norm-shattering, hyper-loyalist combatant and shameless promoter into one of the most powerful positions in the world, it would require a lightning-fast confirmation during this exact lame-duck session.
Would Republican senators go along? Some would surely balk. But Trump has never needed unanimity. He needs 51 votes, including one from JD Vance. So, will enough Republicans look away one last time rather than pick a fight with him?
Bizarre and totally unhinged as it may be, the move would perfectly fulfill Trump’s primary post-midterm goal: violently seizing the news day back from victorious Democrats. Forget the impeachment votes, the investigations and the voters who just delivered a rebuke. Suddenly, the story would be whether the head of the UFC can run the Pentagon.
So go ahead and chuckle at White and Trump’s press secretary “joke.” When Trump reaches for a “violent Fighter and Warrior” with the word “Secretary” on his lips, don’t assume he had the White House briefing room in mind.
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