This weekend POTUS Donald Trump is hosting the Ultimate Fighting Championship on the White House lawn in a zeitgeist defining event, aired live on the Ellison family’s Paramount+ streaming service, featuring ample opportunities for insider dealing and corruption.
UFC Freedom 250 Defining Cultural Event of 2026
This US News report from March, when the event was officially announced, captures the normie view of the event pretty well:
Cage-match fighting is coming to the White House to fete President Donald Trump, a proud proponent of cage-match politics.
In the coming weeks, crews will erect a 6-foot (1.83 meter) wire-mesh fence shaped into an octagon on the lawn, where UFC fighters will use a combination of kickboxing, jiujitsu, wrestling and other martial arts in a June 14 mixed martial arts show timed for Trump’s 80th birthday and as part of the nation’s 250th anniversary.
The celebration of bloody, brute force dovetails with Trump’s gleefully combative charisma and extreme ideological masculinity — a brawling, no-holds-barred approach to the highest office in the land.
“I have respect for fighters, you know, when you can take 200 shots to the face and then look forward to the second round,” Trump told podcaster Logan Paul as he campaigned for his second term.
Trump was the first sitting president to attend a UFC show, taking in a 2019 fight that was stopped because of a cut over the loser’s eye that left blood pouring down the fighter’s face.
To the uninitiated, the sport celebrates violence. It is wildly popular with young men.
The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf did more tut-tutting:
You’ve probably guessed that my own preference is no vulgar entertainment at the White House, but not because I don’t enjoy any forms of it or wish to sneer at fans of UFC. It’s my preference for the same reason that I’d gladly gamble on a Saturday night at a basement poker table but not on Sunday morning at a church altar: There are times and places for things.
Most presidents have tried to maintain decorum at their residence, knowing the White House is a symbol of the United States and that its gravitas is the work of generations. White House events needn’t be fancy or cater to elites in order to be appropriate. The venue belongs to champion Little League teams as much as it belongs to the winner of the Masters, as much to bluegrass bands as to classical cellists. But there’s a difference between popular entertainment and what Trump is planning, which many citizens find distasteful—and is thus unsuited for a jubilee meant to unite us.
According to polling the event is not popular with the public at large:
pic.twitter.com/0lTms6vZlf
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) June 10, 2026
The Hollywood Reporter had details on the origin of the event:
The most audacious media spectacle in recent memory was hatched on the floor of Madison Square Garden, less than two weeks after the 2024 presidential election.
On Nov. 16, 2024, President-elect Donald Trump walked into New York’s most famous arena to loud applause from a friendly crowd, as Kid Rock’s “American Bad Ass” played.
Trump was there for UFC 309, and he was joined by Rock, Elon Musk and incoming Cabinet secretaries Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, among other dignitaries. But when he walked out, he did so alongside Dana White, the CEO of UFC.
Amid the fights, Trump took a moment to make a suggestion to White, a longtime personal friend dating back to the early days of UFC.
“He leaned over to me and says, ‘We should do a fight at the White House,’” White recalls in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “I said, ‘Yes, we should.’ I didn’t know what he meant … I was thinking maybe there’s some room that he’s thinking about where we’d have it. He’s like, ‘No, we’re gonna do it outside on the South Lawn.’”
President-elect Donald Trump shakes hands with Dana White during the UFC 309 event at Madison Square Garden on Nov. 16, 2024, in New York City. Photo by Sarah Stier/Getty Images“When [White] initially mentioned the idea of putting on a UFC event on the South Lawn of the White House, I truly did not believe him. I thought he was kidding,” says Craig Borsari, the chief content officer of the UFC.
“He’s funny, but he’s not a joke around kind of guy,” White says of Trump. “Literally, when he says something, consider it done.”
Note that part about Dana White and Donald Trump being “longtime personal friends. We’ll be debunking that myth later in this post.
The ensuing construction eyesore has given liberals plenty to complain about:
Can’t be repeated enough👇🏽
Just so insane pic.twitter.com/ZIQCw71uPM
— The Tennessee Holler (@TheTNHoller) June 4, 2026
It’s also given Trump a cheap trolling opportunity that he didn’t miss:
President Donald Trump says he might keep the UFC Claw structure on the White House lawn permanently 👀
“The Eiffel Tower was supposed to be taken down immediately, and then they said we sort of like it, let’s leave it up longer.
We’re building something in front of the White…
— Hype_feed (@yourhypefeed) June 3, 2026
The good news is the UFC claw will be taken down promptly after the event is completed.
pic.twitter.com/WpNLm7CmCt
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) June 10, 2026
The above is from a White House response to a lawsuit that is attempting to stop the event, via ESPN:
Plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit filed late Saturday are attempting to halt the June 14 UFC Freedom 250 card on the South Lawn of the White House.
The suit, filed by the Public Integrity Project in District of Columbia federal court, alleges that the Department of Interior and the National Park Service violated federal law by organizing a private sporting event on public property and failing to obtain congressional approval for the event’s multiple construction sites. An emergency application for a preliminary injunction to stop the event was filed early Sunday morning in the same court.
The suit claims violations of park service regulations by allowing the event to occur, that the construction of the UFC’s claw stadium structure on the South Lawn needed congressional authorization because it is federal parkland, and that there was not an environmental review “before undertaking ‘major federal action’ significantly affecting the quality of the human environment.”
The DOJ response to the suit is amusing, per CNN:
Justice Department lawyers told US District Judge Amit P. Mehta that a ruling blocking the event, which is set to take place this coming weekend, would upend months of careful planning and unfairly burden a host of parties on the other side of the case, including President Donald Trump, thousands of spectators and more than a dozen athletes expected to participate in the event.
“No one is holding plaintiffs in a jiu jitsu lock, forcing them to watch UFC Freedom 250 against their will. The public interest does not favor allowing them to exercise a heckler’s veto, particularly at this late date,” the government attorneys wrote in a court filing, referring to claims from the two plaintiffs that the event was causing them to suffer an “aesthetic injury,” among other alleged harms.
But this is all pretty surface level stuff. As some of you may know, my past life (and current side-hustle) entailed covering the UFC and mixed martial arts for almost twenty years, first for Vox Media and then independently.
Therefore, I’m compelled to bring a little more depth to the discussion because there is a whole web of conflicts of interest at the heart of Donald Trump’s relationship with the UFC, its parent company TKO, and TKO’s head honcho Ari Emanuel.
Let’s start with a minor player.
White House Comms Director Ex-UFC Press Guy
Steven Cheung, White House Communications Director has a fascinating resume that includes a tenure at the UFC, per the Spectator:
Though reporters covering the Trump administration are very familiar with Steven Cheung, the Donald’s combative White House communications director, he’s not a recognizable face to the general public. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt plays good cop, deflecting questions; Cheung is bad cop, trolling the media on X. But Cheung had a moment in the spotlight early this month during a press conference in which Trump announced reduced prices for GLP-1 “fat drugs.” “Where’s Steve?” Trump said. “He’s taking it.”
The press is very familiar with Cheung’s weight issues. When one media outlet compared him to the rather overweight Bond villain Oddjob, Cheung leaned into the racially tinged stereotype and posed for a photo while wearing a bowler hat. Trump himself has called the 43-year-old “my sumo wrestler.” Cheung grew up in Sacramento, the son of Chinese immigrants, and participated in sanctioned amateur sumo wrestling tournaments in the early 2000s. The experience, he said, helped shape his “discipline and competitive spirit.”
Cheung, for whom no job is too odd, has been with Trump since the beginning. He was “director of rapid response” during Trump’s 2016 campaign and has continued to rise through the ranks. He’s also worked for Arnold Schwarzenegger, Elise Stefanik and as a spokesman for the Ultimate Fighting Championship. In November of last year, after Trump’s re-election, Cheung posted on Instagram: “It’s been a hell of a ride – a campaign for the ages. We finally finished the story.” Included among the photos with that post was a (presumably AI-generated) image of himself as a blood-spattered UFC fighter sitting on a stool, with a besuited Trump as his cornerman. In the next image, his hands are reaching for Joe Biden’s throat. With Cheung, Trump has definitely chosen his fighter.
Interestingly Cheung has delegated press for the event to the UFC which will control all reporter access to the South Lawn this Sunday.
There’s also a comical amount of small-time grifting and souvenir selling going on around the event, but let’s get to the big stuff.
Wheeling, Dealing, Insider Trading
One of the facts that has emerged since the UFC Freedom 250 was announced is that Trump himself is an investor in TKO, via the Athletic (archived):
President Donald Trump purchased between $15,000 and $50,000 worth of stock in TKO Holding Group, the parent company of UFC and WWE, weeks ahead of a White House UFC event he’s promoted for months.
The purchase was disclosed in Trump’s May 8 financial disclosures, which are publicly available through the U.S. Office of Government Ethics. Those documents do not specify how much stock Trump purchased but say he acquired it March 25 — a little more than two weeks after the Freedom Fights 250 fight card was publicly revealed.
Trump’s personal stock portfolio is under renewed scrutiny this week after the Pentagon’s announcement that it is awarding a $9.7 billion defense contract to Dell Technologies, in which the president has invested millions of dollars over the last three months.
Here’s some added value analysis — TKO and Dell Technologies have more in common than just selling shares to Donald Trump.
Which brings us to the money brains behind this deal.
Egon Durban, the Mastermind and Middleman
The financial mastermind behind both entities is Egon Durban of private equity firm Silver Lake.
Please indulge me a quick run through some of Durban’s resume highlights.
Durban’s first mega deal was buying Skype from eBay in 2009 for $1.9 billion and selling it to Microsoft in 2011 for $8.5 billion.
In 2012, Durban became a board member of Ari Emanuel’s William Morris Endeavor talent agency, with Silver Lake taking a 31% share.
In 2013, Durban “led the $24.4 billion” deal that took Dell private.
Fortune wrote up Durban and Dell as “The Gamblers Behind Tech’s Biggest Deal Ever” in 2016.
In 2016, William Morris Endeavor purchased a controlling share in the UFC for $4 billion.
In 2018, Durban led the deal that saw Dell return to the stock markets as a publicly traded company.
In 2021, Endeavor purchased the rest of the UFC.
In 2023, Endeavor purchased pro-wrestling promotion the WWE. Soon after it spun the UFC and WWE into a new publicly traded entity called TKO.
Two years later, Silver Lake acquired Endeavor itself and took the company private. As part of that deal Silver Lake owns over 60% of TKO.
I wrote about that deal in 2025:
The next couple of years under Trump will be all about TKO parlaying their relationships with the administration into fat contracts. Then, they’ll start setting up the real transition, which will be yet another major opportunity for the financiers to pay themselves.
The already completed transition from publicly traded Endeavor Group to privately held WME Group should make it clear that UFC fans should keep an eye on all the players holding major TKO ownership stakes.
Players like Mubadala CEO Khaldoon al-Mubarak whose investment fund owns a big chunk of Silver Lake, which owns a big chunk of WME Group, which owns a big chunk of TKO, which owns all of the UFC.
Soccer fans paid attention when al-Mubarak joined UAE National Security Advisor Sheikh Tahnoon to meet with President Trump last week (Mubarak owns Manchester City’s premier club team), but UFC fans should be paying attention as well.
The UAE government, whose money al-Mubarak manages at Mubadala, is positioning itself as a key regional and financial ally of the Trump regime. And because the UAE owns a big piece of the UFC, what’s good for the UAE is good for WME Group.
This year, Durban has acquired a piece of the NFL’s Las Vegas Raiders and brought along WME/TKO execs Ari Emanuel and Mark Shapiro as well.
But let’s get back to the matter at hand because there is more family bloggery afoot.
State Department Announces Diplomatic Deal With UFC
The WTF never stops with these people. The NY Post reported on a new Trump regime/UFC scheme that is pretty vague in the details but rumors are swirling that it is a substantial deal for TKO:
Secretary of State Marco Rubio and UFC CEO Dana White have reached an agreement to use cage fights for diplomacy, the State Department said Monday — as Iran peace talks remain in flux.
Rubio and White will sign the agreement Thursday afternoon at the State Department ahead of the seven-fight event at the White House.
“The MOU signing will mark a new public-private partnership to enhance sports diplomacy initiatives and collaborate on the global growth of mixed martial arts,” the department said in a press release.
“As an American-founded organization, the UFC has grown into a major global sports platform, reflecting US leadership in modern combat sports promotion, athletic performance standards, and international event production,” the statement said.
“Its events are broadcast worldwide and contribute to the United States’ broader cultural and sports influence through professional competition and athlete development.”
Follow The Post’s live coverage of President Trump and national politics for the latest news and analysis
It’s unclear what exactly the MOU will entail.
This could be more Trump admin vaporware or it could be a multi-gazillion dollar giveaway to Durban, Emanuel and company, time will tell.
Meanwhile the Trump admin is missing no opportunity to shakedown monied marks with a yen for access.
Partner Investment Opportunities Revealed
Per MMA news site Sherdog:
At the UFC White House card on June 14, approximately 4,000 to 4,500 individuals will be able to attend in the newly constructed arena built for this event alone. It will be held on the White House lawn, with stands for seating and a giant framework overhead for lighting and possibly rain protection in the event of inclement weather. Some have hailed the structure, which was seen being put together in Pennsylvania, as something reminiscent of a roller coaster.
The promotion has said it will be spending around $30 million of its own money to run this event, reportedly without assistance from the government. Public seating will not be available, although there will be limited opportunities for fans to win contests and earn tickets. Otherwise, those seats will be specifically sold by the UFC in conjunction with the White House, with the expectation of businesspeople, politicians, celebrities and foreign dignitaries likely in attendance. Additionally, the UFC is offering an enhanced package it is calling a “partner investment,” which has a price unlike any ticket the UFC has ever sold.
As revealed by Uncrowned on Wednesday, the money coming in for each ticket will be distributed to various parties. The White House and/or President Donald Trump will receive part of the proceeds, the UFC and its parent company of TKO take their standard percentage, and some of it will go “to the troops.” This all gets turned up to 11 when the “partner investment” is involved.
Those that purchase these VIP packages will be given a special welcome reception solely for those members as well as UFC and White House figures. They will have reserved seating for the pre-fight press conference as well as the ceremonial weigh-ins. Partners will be given all-access passes to events on June 13, the day before the fights, which will include a concert put on by country musician Zac Brown. They will also receive cageside seats for UFC 329 on July 11 in Las Vegas, which may be headlined by Conor McGregor vs. Max Holloway 2. Finally, they will have an additional arrangement for a future WWE event.
The cost of this package? $1.5 million.
And per Vanity Fair, the package is in demand, “there’s been a monthslong frenzy over access to the June 14 event, with even the capital’s most powerful denizens frantically jockeying for a spot. The White House… has fielded an onslaught of requests from top-dollar donors, lobbyists, and members of Congress clamoring for seats.”
Great graft if you can get it.
Enough with the long and short cons surrounding the event, let’s do some debunking.
The Dana White-Donald Trump Bromance Myth
MMA writer Tim Wheaton has done a thorough job debunking this canard in his piece “Dana White Has Been Lying About Donald Trump for a Decade“. Here’s a taste:
Dana White has been selling false narratives about his relationship with Donald Trump for a decade. The portrayal suggests that Donald Trump was integral in giving the fledgling sport of MMA a chance when no one else wanted to be near it. The truth is, Trump and the UFC reached their success stories entirely independent of one another. In fact, Trump was most active in working with the competition against the UFC directly. They only became allies once each needed something the other could provide.
…here’s (a) claim directly from Dana White himself, rewriting the history of the UFC to support Trump:
“Arenas around the world refused to host our events. Nobody took us seriously. Nobody. Except Donald Trump. Donald was the first guy that recognized the potential that we saw in the UFC.”
Let’s take a closer look at this claim and break down why the narrative is completely false. Donald Trump hosted three UFC events between 2000 and 2001 at his Taj Mahal Casino, the Mark G. Etess Arena. Even during the fledgling era of the UFC, they still hosted 23 events between 2000-2004 with most of these being in the USA. Thus, the UFC was not struggling to find venues to book events even during its worst years.
White is also crediting Trump with helping the UFC with success. Trump hosted the UFC in 2001 yet White goes on to explain that the UFC was on death’s door before The Ultimate Fighter premiere in 2005. Plus, the UFC only sold roughly 3,000 tickets to the Trump-hosted event. While the next event, UFC 32 at the Continental Airlines Arena in East Rutherford, not a Trump venue, sold four times that amount with 12,500 tickets. Simply, the UFC did not see any boost from working with Donald Trump. One can see evidence of this, given that they never worked together again after that.
Wheaton also details Trump’s heavy involvement with UFC competitor Affliction MMA, but this 2016 piece from Bleacher Report summarizes it well:
Trump’s deepest dive into MMA came with a company that was, at the time, hellbent on taking down the UFC.
In 2008, Affliction Clothing, a manufacturer of MMA apparel based in Seal Beach, California, decided to stage a rare and brazen challenge to the UFC’s dominance. Affliction Entertainment was formed as a separate company to stage pay-per-views with the ambition of cutting into the UFC’s revenue pie.
…Affliction’s biggest flourish arguably came from a little deal it struck with a man called Donald Trump. Just ask Trump himself. There was something tremendous in the air.
“It’s really something that I’m doing because I enjoy doing it,” Trump told reporters during a Trump Tower news conference for Affliction Entertainment. “If we make money, that’s great. I think we will. I think it will be successful. What I do is usually successful.”…There was one very direct, concrete connection between Affliction Entertainment and Team Trump. That came when Affliction announced Michael Cohen, executive vice president in The Trump Organization and special counsel to Trump himself, as the venture’s new chief operating officer.
Despite Trump’s claim at the time that Affliction MMA “probably will (take out the UFC). … All the fighters want to be with us, and I think it probably will take over”, Affliction went bust in short order.
All of that was forgotten in 2016 when the UFC was under new ownership and Donald Trump was running for president.
Lowkick MMA has more:
…in 2016, Trump hit the road as a presidential candidate and needed a boost for his masculinity. After all, he was a draft dodger who hung out with The View and Oprah, a coastal elite more associated with daytime television than locker rooms. He was more popular as a feature on the Emmy award show than he was with men.
The UFC opened its doors to help him look tough and they made up a false narrative along the way. He began making appearances cage-side at UFC events, especially in vital swing states such as Florida, with broadcasted walkouts like he was a fighter himself, surrounded by American flags.
During Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign had UFC leader White suggested that Trump change his media approach and instead start interviewing the manosphere. Sitting with live streamers and podcasters, the next era of media. White thanked the new media as he spoke on podium on election night, “I wanna thank the Nelk Boys, Adin Ross, Theo Von, ‘Bussin with the Boys,’ and last but not least, the mighty and powerful Joe Rogan!”
But why are the Trump White House and the UFC both insisting on the Dana White + Donald Trump = BFFs narrative?
Possibly to obscure the close relationship of the actual UFC boss Ari Emanuel and Trump. Emanuel is, after all, a key Democratic party insider, mega donor and brother of 2028 presidential hopeful Rahm Emanuel.
As Zach Arnold and I wrote for the MMA Draw under my given name:
The face of this circus is UFC CEO Dana White.
The ringleader is TKO chairman Ari Emanuel.
But don’t expect many left-leaning reporters or Democratic pundits to mention his name on cable news or podcasts as they ragebait off of the event.
Talking about Ari Emanuel can be very bad for your career after all.
Dana White, on the other hand, he’s a punching bag for the press and pundits (fittingly, his all-time peak media coverage came in January 2023 when he got caught beating up his wife on video).
The only media afraid of Dana are those last desperate folks still clinging to a “career” in MMA media.…We’ve been aggressively covering Ari Emanuel’s leading role in the UFC and WWE since 2023, and it never ceases to amaze how few people are aware that he owns the UFC and drives the political maneuvering behind the organization.
…what does TKO get for backing Trump? Simple: access. The kind of access that lets Ari Emanuel help David Ellison acquire first Paramount and then WBD, which led directly to the UFC’s $7.7 billion Paramount deal.…How can people not understand that Ari Emanuel has been running the show? Easy.
First, there is a code of silence about Ari’s involvement. Don’t say his name. He’s the King of Hollywood. Endeavor represents everyone on every side of the table. Job security.
Second, money. Ari Emanuel neutered Jeffrey Katzenberg at the Simon Wiesenthal Dinner in 2024 before taking out Joe Biden (as he bragged to Tina Brown).
In the 2028 US Presidential race, it will be Ari Emanuel’s donations and ability to bundle key financiers that will make or break certain Democratic contenders. (See: Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, his brother Rahm Emanuel, and Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff.)
…
Which brings us to point three. A key regional Democratic staffer reminded Zach of a brutal point. Democrats don’t watch the UFC. They don’t want to be associated with cage fighting.
See the recent CNN commentary about the lawn of the White House being turned into the Roman Colosseum with a claw. Therefore, Democrats don’t know anything about the UFC or its audience. They pay no attention to management or who is making the decisions.
It’s why they ignored UFC mega-manager Ali Abdelaziz and Trump insider Ric Grenell going to Dearborn, Michigan, for the 2024 US Presidential race to help Donald Trump eke out a win over Kamala Harris.
Therefore, when Democrats find out that it’s Ari Emanuel who is running this circus and is running the UFC White House event, there is serious cognitive dissonance.
How can One of Us be Trump’s enabler? It’s why there was no political blowback to Ari Emanuel cashing in a favor, reportedly by calling President Trump to ask for help in the LiveNation/Ticketmaster case.
Ari Emanuel became a billionaire thanks to UFC & WWE, not because of his Hollywood agencies.
He’s a key man of influence in this Trump 2.0 White House. Emanuel is on pace to make hundreds of millions of dollars in extra personal wealth. He’s also going to be a key player in both the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic Games and the 2028 US Presidential contest on the Democratic side.
And yet Democrats are whistling past this graveyard in a Great Pretending because they want his Hollywood cash and access to all of his controlled media assets.
Why should Ari Emanuel leap into the spotlight when he can quietly control both the Democratic and Republican parties from the sidelines?
I’ve gone on too long already but I do want to include a couple more points.
UFC Fighters and Fan Backlash Linked to Israel
This event, while it’s generating more PR for the UFC than anything in its history doesn’t appear to be especially popular with UFC fans and fighters.
The comments are all negative on any UFC post that’s White House related pic.twitter.com/IDfZ9qn8zt
— Dovy🔌 (@DovySimuMMA) June 10, 2026
Here’s what UFC Middleweight champ Sean Strickland has had to say:
UFC American Champion Sean Strickland says “he got the call” and was uninvited to the White House Freedom UFC250
“You’re not Israeli enough to go to UFC250 Israel edition 😅” pic.twitter.com/Pnb3MF60RX
— Irlandarra (@martinez_j7902) June 9, 2026
Popular UFC fighter Bryce Mitchell echoed Strickland’s points:
Bryce Mitchell reacts to Sean Strickland being banned from the UFC White House event:
“I’m not surprised at all. We ought to be able to criticize our own nation, let alone a foreign nation.
[Israel] is the only nation you’re not allowed to criticize. Something’s gonna change,… https://t.co/6sri1cYTuD pic.twitter.com/9Gu5voVf4G
— Championship Rounds (@ChampRDS) June 4, 2026
James Li had me on his podcast to discuss the event and chose to promote it with a similar anti-Israel angle:
In Defense of Sport
I also feel duty bound as a former fan of mixed martial arts to share the positive case for the sport itself.
Ben Fowlkes’ piece “What do you like about this UFC and MMA stuff anyway?” does the job:
Many’s the time I tried to convince someone that this was a legitimate sport to follow (and write about) by telling them that it’s essentially what boxing was to our father’s and grandfather’s generation. You take away the skull T-shirts and energy drink ads and nü metal vibe and you have, at the core, the same darkly fascinating world of combat sports that has existed for at least a couple centuries now. Many, many aspects of the bare-knuckle London Prize Ring fights in the early 1800s would be very familiar to fight fans today, and probably vice versa.
I think this is mostly because fighting is so elemental. It is probably the simplest sport there is. It’s just two people, stripped to the waist, fighting over a big sack of money until someone can’t or won’t continue. It’s sports without the metaphor. You’re not throwing a ball into a hoop as a representation of physical dominance. It is a literal rather than figurative combat, with no need for a more complex game through which to route and ultimately sanitize the violence.
That’s why it apalls some people. Other sports mimic a struggle for supremacy. Fighting is nakedly and obscenely the struggle itself. There’s a certain brutality to that, but also an intimacy. Two people who share that cage (or that ring or that YAMMA Pit or whatever) for any significant length of time are often changed by each other. Sometimes the change is purely emotional or psychic and other times it is very physical and even permanent. I know fighters with plates in their faces and screws in their hands who will still get a weirdly wistful look in their eyes when they tell you about who did that to them and when. They carry pieces of each other around with them forever.
And historian Patrick Wyman has a little more of a meta take:
“What the Roman games or gladiatorial games and this event have in common, in my opinion, is that while they are both theoretically pitched at the public as mass entertainment, they’re actually elite politics — or at least elite politics is the driving force behind them,” Wyman says. “This is gender all the way down. If you are the President of the United States and you want to project an image of toughness and masculinity, you choose to associate yourself with the tough-guy sport.
“And, I mean, to some extent people do like violence as mass entertainment. But I also think there’s a real difference between a product that serves the public or is aimed at the public, versus a product that is aimed at the elite and happens to have a mass consumption angle.”
For instance, Wyman points out, look at what we know of the guest list for this UFC event. Some tickets will reportedly be given to U.S. military members, but plenty are reserved for VIPs chosen by the Trump administration or the UFC and its parent company, TKO. Trump has boasted that VIP slots for the event are “the hottest ticket that I’ve ever seen.”
It seems likely that, while some attendees may be genuine fight fans, others will go to see and be seen — which is also not without historical precedent.
“I think it’s really a stage-managed spectacle for elites, and you don’t just have to go to Rome to find parallels for this,” Wyman says. “I think you’d make the same argument about boxing and the Saudis these days. Traditionally, I think that’s been a really common thing in combat sports. You think about some of the old-timey boxing fights where it’s like, this rich guy really wants to see his guy fight another guy, so they bankroll the thing.”
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