Planet UFC
Nic Johnson on bloodsport for the president’s birthday
Planet UFC
Nic Johnson
This article was originally published on June 13, 2026.
For decades it has been White House tradition to invite Ireland’s prime minister, the Taoiseach, to celebrate Saint Patrick’s Day with a ceremonial exchange of a bowl of shamrocks, symbolizing Irish-American friendship. But two months into Donald Trump’s return in 2025, a very different figure was marking the holiday with a very different kind of pageant. “Ireland and America, we are siblings. We consider America our big sibling,” the professional fighter Conor McGregor told the assembled White House reporters. “We wish to be taken care of by the big bro; the United States should look after its little bro.”
Replacing the prime minister—who had visited the previous week—with “The Notorious” McGregor was a curious choice. McGregor has long been one of the public faces of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), the promotion company that since the 1990s has been almost synonymous with mixed martial arts (MMA). Since he last fought—in 2021, losing two fights to the lightweight Dustin Poirier—he had drawn public attention mostly for drunken nightclub brawls, an NBA mid-game skit during which he hospitalized a mascot, and, above all, a 2024 civil case in Irish court that found him liable for a brutal sexual assault in 2018. He had come to D.C. seeking approval from Trump and connection with an audience of more than 30 million Irish Americans who might somehow support him in his bid for the Irish presidency, which he planned to contest on a nationalist platform. “Our money is being spent on overseas issues that have nothing to do with the Irish people,” he said. “The illegal immigration racket is running ravage [sic] on the country.”
McGregor’s was only one of the stranger expressions of a convergence between the UFC and MAGA politics that has been building for years. The first major public manifestation was UFC president Dana White’s speech at the 2016 Republican National Convention, where he praised the party’s nominee for supporting the fledgling UFC back when “it was basically considered a bloodsport” in polite society: “Nobody took us seriously. Nobody. Except Donald Trump.” In 2020 former two-division champ Henry Cejudo campaigned at Eric Trump’s “Latinos for Trump” events, while Jorge Masvidal—an outspoken member of Miami’s Cuban diaspora—joined Don Jr. to headline the “Fighters Against Socialism” bus tour. The former champ Tito Ortiz acted as a Trump surrogate as early as 2016 before himself winning a 2020 city council race in California with the slogan “Make Huntington Beach Safe Again.” This hardly begins to exhaust the list of fighters who speak or post about their love for Trump in ways big and small—for instance, by organizing a media campaign to promote Kash Patel when it looked like moderate Republicans might not confirm him for FBI director—or the still larger PR and media apparatus of UFC-affiliated podcasts and personalities that have gravitated toward MAGA, from Joe Rogan (a color commentator on UFC broadcasts since 1997) to Andrew Tate.
Trump has reciprocated the attention. Since 2019 he has been a frequent guest at UFC events, where fighters often jump over the cage to kneel before him, bow to him, or shake his hand. “Thank you for doing what you’re doing,” the outspoken Bolsonarist fighter Paulo Costa said as he kneeled and shook hands with Trump this past April at UFC 327. In August 2025 the president assigned his daughter Ivanka the task of coordinating a UFC event on the White House lawn, ostensibly to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence but now scheduled for tomorrow—Trump’s birthday.
Trump isn’t the only nationalist politician who likes to associate with UFC fighters. Vladimir Putin, who holds the rank of black belt in judo (plus two honorary black belts in karate and one in taekwondo), relishes being photographed in his gi and subsidizes fighters from the most dominant region in mixed martial arts today, Dagestan. Neo-Nazis are using fight clubs as recruiting tools across Europe. Ramzan Kadyrov, the Chechen dictator, surrounds himself with MMA fighters—when Khamzat Chimaev won the UFC’s middleweight belt in August, he flew straight to Grozny to hand it over to Kadyrov—and has built MMA training centers for his military and security services, which are frequently visited by UFC champions. Jair Bolsonaro was awarded an honorary black belt from the family that invented the UFC, the Gracie clan. The Gulf monarchies’ strategy of “sportswashing” their international reputations has made them important players in the fight world. All this testifies to how thoroughly the UFC has become the lingua franca of a strange new twenty-first-century formation: the nationalist international.
As it moved from the underground to the relatively legitimate terrain of network TV, MMA became one of the principal vectors through which young men—the nationalist right’s central demographic—interact with politicized culture. Its appeal has multiple sources. The violence is simultaneously authentic and spectacular, so it can hold an audience’s attention while allowing them to connect with a real kind of physical peril that is, in many cases, increasingly absent from their daily lives. Combat in MMA depends as much on grappling—the use of momentum, balance, and leverage to wrestle an opponent to the ground, then force them to surrender via strangulation or joint manipulation—as it does on traditional striking with punches and kicks. This means that even the “little guys” can win fights, indeed dominate, if they master the techniques—a prospect that has special appeal for scrappy outsiders or anyone else with an inferiority complex.
The drama of individual fighters’ stories, enhanced by kayfabe and the reality TV show The Ultimate Fighter, gives men something to gossip about while retaining an aura of toughness. Fighters present themselves as symbols of national virility by physically dominating other men, humiliating “effeminate” ones, and parading wives and girlfriends in conspicuously subordinate roles. Through disciplined and stylized violence, the UFC audience learns to appreciate the emotional grammar of a post-liberal masculinity that is brutal, resentful of helplessness or fragility, and ravenous for recognition within an explicitly established hierarchy of prowess.
Ever since Trump announced his campaign in 2015, cultural commentators have found it useful to compare his political style to professional wrestling, pointing to his appearances on WWE programs and quoting literary authorities like Roland Barthes for analysis. In his famous Mythologies (1957) Barthes drew a philosophical contrast between boxing, which makes each fight into “a story which is constructed before the eyes of the spectator,” and wrestling, where “it is each moment which is intelligible, not the passage of time,” turning the sport as a whole into a “sum of spectacles.” To some extent this was apt for the first Trump administration, which was more successful at generating displays of cruelty and domination than achieving tangible results on signature issues like trade or immigration. Trump’s second term, however, is perhaps better compared to mixed martial arts: chaotic, unrestrained, effective at inflicting violence on enemies, with a nationalist machismo that circulates internationally. Viewing Trump in the mirror of the UFC, and vice versa, may help clarify why each has such a powerful place in the fantasy lives of millions of young men.
Read the full article on the Review’s website here.
