As of this week, the gigantic, star-spangled ribcage of a half-born UFC octagon now occupies the White House lawn. It is nearly as ugly as the many, many sins of the company responsible for its existence. I am in favor of it.
Somehow an intensely stupid plan—first announced by Donald Trump last summer as what many assumed to be a byproduct of one of his brain lobes melting—is actually coming to fruition: On June 14, there will be a UFC event outside the White House to celebrate Trump’s birthday. They’re calling it UFC Freedom 250, because of America (and not Donald Trump’s) age, even though there was already a separate event named UFC 250 that took place over half a decade ago and had nothing to do with any of this.
For months, figures in and around the UFC suggested that Freedom 250 would positively bristle with title fights and marquee matchups. Meanwhile, fighters, equal parts sympathetic and sycophantic to right-wing causes, begged for a spot on the White House card when they weren’t prostrating themselves before Trump himself during one of his many fawned-over UFC appearances. UFC president Dana White and Trump have been close allies for a decade, with White first stumping for Trump at the Republican National Convention back in 2016, and they continue to scratch one another’s backs. White is currently trying to upend another sport, boxing, by supporting amendments to a reform act that would make it significantly easier for organizations, like White’s own Zuffa Boxing, to exploit fighters. Now more than ever, White has every reason to play politics.
The actual Freedom 250 lineup, however, isn’t too far removed from that of a standard UFC card, albeit with slightly more starpower. This has led fans to brand it a letdown, especially considering that one of the two title fights on the card, Alex Pereira vs Cyril Gane, is for an interim heavyweight championship—not the real thing, which currently resides around the waist of Tom Aspinall, who Gane fouled so egregiously during their short-lived fight that Aspinall had to get eye surgery about it. Then there’s the main event, Ilia Topuria vs Justin Gaethje, which has all the makings of a squash match due to a significant age discrepancy between the two fighters. As a result, pre-fight discussion has mostly centered around a proposed showdown between Topuria, the UFC’s lightweight champion, and Islam Makhachev, the champion one weight class up, which the UFC failed to book.
But that pretty much sums up the UFC in general these days: a gaudy, shambolic traveling circus so married to short-changing fighters that it’s become incapable of giving anyone, except its own money-grubbing execs, what they actually want. There is a shamelessness to the operation exemplified by its weekly cascade of inconsequential events—many of which are run out of a near-empty warehouse in Las Vegas—and even White’s seeming inability to care about them. It’s content for content’s sake, which the UFC has nonetheless convinced Paramount, the organization’s latest suitor, to wildly overpay for. The UFC is a well-oiled machine with exactly one purpose: to collect a paycheck.
In this way, the UFC pairs perfectly with the current US presidential administration, both ideologically and in terms of naked desire to swindle everyone in its path, but loyalists most of all. So as far as symbolism goes, you can’t really beat the UFC vomiting the guts of its infernal contraption onto the lawn while the White House devours itself from the inside out both figuratively and, of course, with Trump’s big, beautiful ballroom. It’s yet another pus-spewing pockmark on the back of an empire in collapse, but at least it’s funny.
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Nathan Grayson
