Donald Trump’s U.F.C. Victory Party| (Yes, The New Yorker Wrote This)1/2
By Sam EaganNovember 19, 2024
A little more than a week before the Presidential election, Donald Trump hosted a rally at Madison Square Garden thatsome speculated would be the death knell of his campaign. Eleven days after his victory, he returned to the Garden for an Ultimate Fighting Championship event, walking onto the arena floor to Kid Rock’s “American Bad Ass.”Trump was flanked by his longtime friend Dana White, the C.E.O. of the U.F.C., who, perhaps more than anyone else, helped Trump mobilize young men to the polls. Behind the two men were key members of the next Trump era: Elon Musk; Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.; the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson; Tulsi Gabbard; and Vivek Ramaswamy.
“It’s always loud when he comes here, but now that he’s won? Now that he’s the President again? Oh, my God,” Joe Rogan, a longtime U.F.C. commentator, announced from the floor. Trump closed in on the octagon and pulled Rogan into a long embrace, as the crowd roared. Then, for around twenty minutes, Trump and his allies continued to stand just outside the cage. Every now and then, someone in the audience would start up a chant of “U.S.A.” There was a boom of applause when Trump danced to “Y.M.C.A.”
The headline fight was between two heavyweight champions, Jon Jones and Stipe Miocic, but much of the audience had come to see the President-elect, who had suggested, during an appearance on Rogan’s podcast in October,that he would be in attendance. (“I’ll either go as President, or I’ll be depressed and I won’t bother going,” he said.)
“We heard Donnie Trump was coming through and couldn’t miss that,” a twenty-four-year-old man named Robert, from suburban New Jersey, told me. His friend Keith added,“It just makes it seem like he wants to be part of what all the regular people do.” A twenty-year-old fan named Tiny Boadu, who=wore a MAGA hat and a Trump shirt, similarly describedTrump as a “person of the people.” Boadu said thatTrump’s love of U.F.C. was a major part of his appeal. “Presidents don’t usually come out to events like this==,” he told me.
The U.F.C., valued at more than twelve billion dollars, is the world’s largest mixed-martial-arts organization. “As the U.F.C. has grown, there’s been a lot of people that have jumped on the bandwagon and became fans,” White told me.“Trump was there from the beginning.” When the U.F.C. first launched, in 1993, it was marketed as a blood sport with no gloves, no time limits, and almost no rules. This led to nationwide controversy, with John McCain famously referring to the sport as “human cockfighting.” In 2001, when Dana White and Lorenzo and Frank Fertitta stepped in and bought the company, the U.F.C. had been nearly regulated out of existence.
White was tasked with cleaning up the sport’s image and working with regulators to ease restrictions.That year, Trump helped save the fledgling sport by hosting multiple events at the Trump Taj Mahal, his casino in Atlantic City. The Taj Mahal was in ruinous debt and would later go bust, but the U.F.C.—and Trump’s friendship with White—thrived. When Trump launched his first Presidential campaign, in 2015, White was one of the first public figures to endorse him. And during and after his first term,Trump was able to look to the U.F.C. as a sort of safe space. In October, 2019, Trump was roundly booed at a World Series game in Washington, D.C. The next week, he went to a U.F.C. event at M.S.G. “Every time when he was getting hammered at his worst, we’d walk into that arena and the place erupts and goes crazy,” White told me. “It shows other people, Oh, wait. Everybody doesn’t hate Donald Trump like the media is telling us.”
White credits the U.F.C.’s recent spike in popularity to the COVID-19 pandemic. When other major sports leagues went on pause, the U.F.C., which largely utilizes its own production team, continued to hold and promote events during lockdown. This madeWhite something of a hero among conservatives, as he circumnavigated COVID-19 restrictionsperceived as draconian by many on the right. It also attracted bored young men to the sport. Jonathan Charbonneau, a sixteen-year-old at the M.S.G. event, told me, “The sport was there for me to watch in COVID and stuff like that, when I had nothing else to do. It gave me something to look forward to, something to do when I couldn’t even leave my house.”…
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