Some people steal valor. President Donald Trump steals machismo. Notice how he constantly positions himself alongside athletes, most especially mixed-martial-arts combatants and professional wrestlers. Like those purveyors of the “hammer fist” and the “rear naked choke,” Trump styles himself as an “Ultimate Fighter,” a crotch-kicker in chief who will stop at little to force his opponents to submit.
Ten months into Trump’s second term, he’s made 10 appearances at major sporting events, such as the Super Bowl and the NCAA-wrestling championships, and he’s carried his brawling culture war into all of them. At the Daytona 500, he did a ceremonial lap in his armored limo; told the drivers, “This is your favorite president”; and declared that he loves fender-bumping stock-car racers because they have “guts.” Last month, he scolded the NFL for its new kickoff rule, which is calculated to limit concussions, complaining on his social-media site: “‘Sissy’ football is bad for America, and bad for the NFL!” And recently, Trump announced that on June 14, as part of the buildup to festivities celebrating America’s 250th anniversary of independence, he will host a blood-speckling Ultimate Fighting Championship cage fight on the White House grounds. There will reportedly be weigh-ins at the Lincoln Memorial and stalls with punching bags for tourists.
More is going on here than bread and circuses, distractions to blot out tariff pain or the attempted prosecutions of political opponents. Trump’s pervasive presence in stadiums is rooted in his understanding of the basic power of sports-audience psychology: Fans feel the wins and losses of their favorite teams and athletes as personal successes and failures. Their allegiances come with an emotional sense of direct participation—even “smugness,” one study suggests—as anyone who has seen a municipal trophy parade can attest. Trump and his UFC partnership take this neurotic desire to identify with winners to snarling new heights, given the organization’s kill-or-die ethos.
The only sport that Trump actually plays well is golf—and he cheats at it, according to a 2015 Washington Post investigation, various playing partners, and a viral video from last summer that showed a caddy surreptitiously dropping a ball in a playable lie for him. (Trump denies it: “I don’t need to,” he told the Post.) But the sport that has mattered most to Trump politically is MMA, the leg-chopping, carotid-artery-squeezing combat spectacle that combines jiu-jitsu, boxing, Muay Thai, wrestling, and grappling, and commands the attention of millions of young men, and which he used in the 2024 election to register and win their votes. His administration is full of people with direct connections to the UFC, the most popular of the MMA organizations. The White House communications director Steven Cheung at one point worked for the UFC. Education Secretary Linda McMahon and her estranged husband, Vince, were UFC business partners through their ownership of World Wrestling Entertainment, and she remains a shareholder. Trump’s FBI director, Kash Patel, has said that he wants to partner with the UFC to develop training programs for federal agents.
Trump’s taste for combat sports dates to the 1980s, after his reported failed bid to buy the Baltimore Colts. In 1988, he turned to boxing promotion to support his Atlantic City casino venture, paying a then-record $11 million to host a Mike Tyson–Michael Spinks heavyweight bout, a terrible mismatch and an event I covered. Before the fight, Trump’s then-wife, Ivana, told me with satisfaction, “There is a smell of blood in the air.” Trump sent a flock of helicopters to bring in celebrities for the night, including Paul Simon, Warren Beatty, Billy Crystal, Rob Reiner, and Jack Nicholson, and corralled them at a VIP cocktail party that turned into a chaotic klieg-lit media crush with Trump forcing his way through the crowd to their table. Simon retreated behind a pair of sunglasses, and Nicholson snapped resentfully, “Shut off the damn lights!” The fight, an utter farce, lasted 91 seconds, but Trump formed a lasting relationship with the ferocious Tyson. That same year, Trump hosted his first WrestleMania event, eventually entering the WWE Hall of Fame.
The UFC made boxing and pro wrestling seem like straw throwing. One of its initial marketing slogans was “No Rules,” and the contestants on the inaugural 1993 event card promised to fight until “knockout, submission, doctor’s intervention, or death.” The only tactics barred were eye gouging, groin strikes, and biting, none of which was especially policed. The first UFC champion, Royce Gracie, recalled that, indeed, “There were no rules. ‘Do I need boxing gloves?’ Nope. ‘Do I need shin pads?’ Nope. ‘Everything goes?’ Yep. ‘But what if I kick him in the nuts?’ It’s okay.” Republican Senator John McCain called it “human cockfighting” and tried to have it banned altogether, but Trump hosted events at his New Jersey casino when it was still illegal in many states. As the UFC president Dana White said of Trump in 2016 in a speech on his behalf at the Republican National Convention, “Donald was the first guy that recognized the potential that we saw in the UFC and encouraged us to build our business.” White added, “He got in the trenches with us.” By 2011, the UFC was such a booming enterprise that an estimated 30 million Americans considered themselves avid fans.
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It’s hard to overstate the visceral shock of this “sport” the first time you encounter it, no matter how its proponents try to philosophize it, or loan it form, or impose ethics upon it. Groin kicks have been barred, but it’s still perfectly legal to choke an opponent to the point of blackout, or to beat their face into sirloin while they’re already on the ground. In fact, the UFC’s rules, which were not unified until 2001, suggest just how much savagery has been practiced over its brief history: No kicking a floored opponent in the head; no “spiking” them to the ground on their head or neck; no fingers may be clawed into orifices or open wounds. Then there is this: No “timidity.”
More and more, Trump has borrowed his political style from the UFC. As his wife, Melania Trump, said when campaigning for him in 2016, “As you may know by now, when you attack him, he will punch back 10 times harder.” In 2024, just two days after Trump’s criminal conviction for paying hush money, he chose to attend a UFC event in Newark, and the crowd serenaded him rhythmically with “Fuck Joe Biden, Fuck Joe Biden!” That guttural, braying sensibility seems to be seeping into every sports forum he visits. This year’s Ryder Cup golf galleries at the Bethpage Black course, already rowdy, were whipped up by an Air Force One flyover and Trump’s appearance on the first tee; they hurled constant obscenities at the Northern Irish golfer Rory McIlroy and a beer at his wife. An emcee led the crowd in a synchronized “Fuck you, Ror-eeee,” chants pulled straight from a UFC cage match.
There is plenty of coarseness in American arenas totally unrelated to MAGA or Trumpism, of course. But the MAGA-fication of sports is a noticeable step up in brutishness, and it’s not just about influencing voters. It’s aimed at weakening our collective, across-the-board sense of boundaries, the mutual adherence to limits that sports are supposed to teach. President George H. W. Bush used the South Lawn to play horseshoes. Trump wants to stage a blood sport on the same ground.
Cage fighters don’t just paralyze opponents with mistrust and anxiety as to what bare-fistedness they’re capable of next. They present opponents and audiences alike with a dilemma. Do you abandon your old practices and enter the fray on their terms? Or adhere to your own values, at peril of being mauled? How do you parry, without losing yourself, your honor, your conception of who you want to be in the contest?
Trump understands better than perhaps any competitor in recent history how to turn a bout into a brawl, and he knows that no one cares to listen to the bloodied losers when they complain about broken rules. The UFC’s source of primal power is that it’s essentially a rule-breaking experience for the exultant audience, a vicarious chance to deliver a chin kick. Trump has recognized that and played hard to it, and to the American audience’s dread of the losing side, persuading them to accept ever more vicious deployments of force, if that’s what it takes to win.
