A little more than a week before the Presidential election, Donald Trump hosted a rally at Madison Square Garden that some 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 described Trump as a “person of the people.” Boadu said that Trump’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 made White something of a hero among conservatives, as he circumnavigated COVID-19 restrictions perceived 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.”
At the Garden, Trump and his entourage sat next to White. Seated nearby was Taylor Lewan, one of the hosts of Barstool Sports’s popular podcast “Bussin’ with the Boys.” During Trump’s 2024 campaign, White played a pivotal role in brokering relationships between Trump and certain hosts among the canon of “bro-casts”: Lewan and his co-host, Will Compton, Theo Von, Adin Ross, Andrew Schulz, the Nelk Boys, and, of course, Rogan. White explained that the goal was to mobilize members of the younger generation that typically don’t vote. Young men, one of the most unreliable demographics in politics, make up a large part of U.F.C.’s audience. “You’re getting conversations in these podcasts, and you yourself, as a young kid, get to really see who Donald Trump is,” White explained. “Not the bullshit you hear from the far-left media.” During Trump’s victory speech, he invited White onstage, and White specifically thanked Von, Ross, the Nelk Boys, and other podcasters for their help.
The penultimate fight of the night got underway: Michael Chandler, a muscle-bound Midwesterner, versus the Brazilian fighter Charles Oliveira. Chandler took a beating for the first four rounds, then tried to steal a victory in the closing seconds of the fight. As Oliveira clung to him like a backpack, Chandler rose to his feet and slammed his opponent on his back and head. Their bodies crashed into the canvas, and the crowd roared. Then Chandler did it again, rising to his feet and crashing once more into the floor, with Oliveira still on his back. Trump stared on, seemingly unmoved. “All I know how to do is throw American badass caution to the wind. Madison Square Garden, are you not entertained?” Chandler said, moments after losing the fight.
The evening closed with a fight between two legends. In one corner stood Jon Jones, considered by some to be the greatest U.F.C. fighter of all time—a massive, gangly man who had built a reputation for his run-ins with the law and for finishing his opponents with a violence notable even among cage fighters. In the other was two-time U.F.C. heavyweight champion Stipe Miocic, known for his indefatigable pace and unbreakable chin.
In a battle of two aging, creaky, sometimes lurching heavyweights, Jones finished Miocic with a spinning back-kick to the ribs in the second round. While Miocic writhed in pain, Jones celebrated in the middle of the ring with a dance mimicking Trump’s, pumping his arms into the air back and forth. (Outside the ring, Trump could be seen high-fiving Kid Rock.) In his post-fight interview, Jones thanked Trump for attending, then led the crowd in chants of “U.S.A.”
“I’m proud to be a great American champion,” Jones told the crowd. “I’m proud to be a Christian American champion.” He left the ring and gave Trump his championship belt. In that moment, Jones appeared as an almost-mythological figure, a living legend in a sport still being carved out of history. Standing eye to eye with him was Trump, who, in every way, was being presented by the U.F.C. as his spiritual equal.
