How MMA defines the Trump administration
It's a movement of insecure men trying to show how manly they are.
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Plans for the extended celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence are still coming together, but it will have all the crowd-pleasing glitz the Trump administration can muster.
There will be a military parade and fireworks, of course. There will be something called the Patriot Games, in which a boy and girl from each state will come to the capital for what we are assured is a friendly athletic competition and not a Hunger Games-style deathmatch. There will be an Indy-car race through the streets of Washington, because as any local could testify, you definitely want to stand out in the hot sun for a couple of hours in the summer in DC.
But the event President Trump is most excited about is a mixed martial arts showdown sponsored by the Ultimate Fighting Championship, the CEO of which is Trump’s good friend Dana White. Held in an octagon erected on the South Lawn of the White House, Freedom Fights 250 will feature six contests in which UFC pros pay tribute to American liberty by exchanging fierce blows and bodily fluids. A stadium with seating for 5,000 fans will be built for the festivities, while Trump claims that 100,000 more will watch on giant screens from the Ellipse outside.
Not only does Trump himself have a long history with the UFC, at a time when conservatives have literally declared their opposition to empathy, MMA is a perfect expression of the world as they want it to be: brutal, exploitative, and built on the nexus between masculinity and violence.
This administration and the entire right-wing movement is full of pasty edgelords looking for other men through whom they can achieve a vicarious experience of masculinity. And the performance of manhood to which they are most attracted is violence, whether it’s in the ring or perpetrated by a masked ICE goon giving a beat-down to a peaceful protester. So it’s no surprise that the administration has turned itself into a promotion machine for MMA, and in particular the UFC.
FBI Director Kash Patel recently announced that UFC fighters will be coming to Quantico to train FBI agents in MMA techniques. Because while it’s true that the bureau has cracked a lot of important cases in its history — the Oklahoma City bombing, the 9/11 attacks, taking down criminals like Al Capone and the Unabomber — just imagine what it would have been able to accomplish if agents had known how to perform a triangle choke or an arm bar. Who knows, with a little more practice in ground-and-pound, maybe they would have found Savannah Guthrie’s mom by now.
Meanwhile, Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Homeland Security after Kristi Noem’s defenestration, Sen. Markwayne Mullin, is regularly described as a “former professional MMA fighter.” In truth, it appears his “career” consisted of a few fights in what is best described as a local semi-pro league in Tulsa, but Trump is clearly attracted to the idea that Mullin is a tough guy, the kind of preening lunkhead who once challenged a witness in a congressional hearing to a brawl (until Bernie Sanders put him in his place).
Everywhere you look in the Republican Party today, you see insecure men trying to show how manly they are.
Sen. Josh Hawley posts a video of himself doing pushups in a Senate hallway. Pete Hegseth posts videos of himself working out with troops. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. posts a video of himself doing a bizarre and deeply homoerotic workout with Kid Rock. Kennedy even posted an AI video in which an even more jacked version of himself (shirtless and in jeans, naturally) manhandles a Twinkie in a professional wrestling match.
From WWE to UFC
Professional wrestling is the older, campy cousin of MMA, and Trump has a long affiliation there too. For years he made appearances at WWE events, not just waving from the crowd but performing as part of the show. But MMA is the truer expression of the MAGA spirit — darker, more violent, where the brutality is not simulated.
Trump’s association with the UFC goes back to its earliest days, when it was still considered vulgar and disreputable (the late Sen. John McCain, a big boxing fan, famously called MMA “human cockfighting”). After White and his partners acquired the then-tiny UFC, their first major event took place at Trump’s Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, at a time when MMA was banned in many states. The sport clearly appealed to Trump, a man who imagines himself brave, strong, and personally capable of violence, despite being none of those things in real life.
These days, not only does Trump regularly attend UFC events, he brings cabinet members along, and is likely to run into other try-hard right-wingers looking to show how manly they are, like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. In the last few years, MMA has become more right-coded than any major sport, even NASCAR. It’s one of the only sporting events Trump knows he can attend without getting booed.
This was not an accident. Trump and Dana White, who spoke at the 2024 Republican convention, have collaborated to make the UFC an integral part of the MAGA movement. In so doing, they pushed out MMA fans who weren’t comfortable with Trumpism.
“They homogenized the fan base,” says Luke Thomas, a prominent left-leaning combat sports journalist who has been outspoken about the consequences of the UFC’s alliance with Trump. “The UFC has made MMA deeply unpopular and even radioactive to those not avowedly dedicated to MAGA causes,” Thomas has written. Neither Trump nor anyone in the movement seems unhappy at the UFC’s monopolistic, exploitative practices, which have been extensively documented (this video from More Perfect Union is a good explainer).
The right-wing enthusiasm for MMA is fed by the fact that most liberals and women find it repellent — one of the core attractions of Trumpism has always been that by embracing the worst parts of yourself, you could find liberation in horrifying the people you hate. While the sport is incredibly demanding and elite fighters are extraordinary athletes, the main reason people watch MMA is to feel the rush of adrenaline that can only come from witnessing two men trying to beat each other to death. The fact that we are so drawn to this spectacle — and have been ever since Og and Grog faced off outside the cave and all the other homo habilis gathered around to watch — makes it no more noble. Thrilling to violence is part of who we are, but some parts of who we are are ugly.
The atavistic attraction to MMA also makes it a place where men upset about social change can find a temporary haven in a world where just being a man doesn’t deliver the benefits they think it should. While Trump may purge women from the top ranks of the military, he can’t make it illegal for you to ever have a woman boss, or force hot ladies to date you. But when you turn on the UFC, you can revel in a world where physical strength and the capacity for violence rule. The liberals may run most of popular culture, but this is one corner they will never control.
More than any administration in modern history, the Trump administration portrays violence not as something regrettable but occasionally necessary, but as something to be celebrated and valorized. Watch Pete Hegseth at his press conferences, and you see a man almost bursting with sadistic glee at the thought of blowing people to pieces, whether it’s residents of Tehran or supposed drug smugglers on the high seas.
Meanwhile, Kash Patel wears custom-made sneakers with his “K$H” logo and a Punisher symbol, referencing the comic-book vigilante who kills bad guys by the hundreds.
But in the end, it’s all vicarious. The Trump administration is populated by whiny little boys who wanted nothing more than to prostrate themselves before the most pathetically corrupt poseur American politics has ever seen. They’re led by a paunchy 79-year-old who slathers on makeup every day, is obsessed with his hair, never exercises, would find the idea of demonstrating physical courage in the service of someone else to be absurd, and loves nothing more than dancing awkwardly to a song about gay men cruising for sex.
Trump’s version of manhood is a drag show, a veneer as thin and unconvincing as the layer of makeup covering up the bruises on his hands. If his followers see that, they’ll never admit it to themselves. They’ll cheer to the White House MMA fight, convinced that triggering the libs makes them the strong ones. But it will always be somebody else doing the fighting.
That’s it for today
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I struggle to recall any instances of these hard men with soft hands glorifying the violence that it took to establish the labor movement in this country. I instantly recall the pictures of hard-hatted men giving beat-downs to protesters on Wall St during the Vietnam War. There's a lot to unpack there but I'm afraid it's above my pay grade.
Your article made me curious about what research has been done on male focus of physical strength and the psychology behind it.
From around 2000-2015, there was an explosion of research into the obsession of male body image.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5675294/
I am surprised at how well the phenomenon is understood.