{"id":3567,"date":"2026-06-13T13:07:55","date_gmt":"2026-06-13T13:07:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/movinginsiderusa.com\/?p=3567"},"modified":"2026-06-13T13:07:55","modified_gmt":"2026-06-13T13:07:55","slug":"how-trumps-friendship-with-ufcs-dana-white-led-to-a-white-house-cage-match","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/movinginsiderusa.com\/?p=3567","title":{"rendered":"How Trump\u2019s friendship with UFC\u2019s Dana White led to a White House cage match"},"content":{"rendered":"

The president and the UFC boss say they\u2019ve been leaning on each other for 25 years. Now comes the fun part: a slate of fights on the South Lawn.<\/strong><\/p>

Read more Scotland midfielder Ryan Christie extends Bournemouth contract by 3 years<\/a><\/p>\n

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UFC chief executive Dana White at the White House this week. (Louie Palu\/Panos Pictures\/FTWP)<\/figcaption>\n<\/figure>\n

It\u2019s the picture of the pen that stops him.<\/p>\n

Dana White is walking through the White House Rose Garden one recent morning when he sees the Presidential Walk of Fame, the gallery that the current president installed to honor previous ones. White points out Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, lauding their turns at the helm, and acknowledges that Jimmy Carter, while flawed, \u201cdid a lot of good.\u201d<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s one portrait that White, the irrepressible chief executive of Ultimate Fighting Championship, can\u2019t get enough of: that of an autopen signing former president Joe Biden\u2019s name, hung by President Donald Trump in place of a headshot of Biden himself.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou see this, with the autopen?\u201d White says, pointing and chortling. \u201cHow funny is that?\u201d<\/p>\n

At 56, White is the reigning king of combat sports, having authored perhaps this century\u2019s greatest sports business story by satiating the country\u2019s appetite for intimate displays of violence. Over the course of two decades, he has turned the once unprofitable UFC \u2014 famously described by then-Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona) as \u201chuman cockfighting\u201d \u2014 into a global mixed-martial-arts machine valued at roughly $15 billion.<\/p>\n

Through it all, White has proved himself unbeatable, surviving criticism over underpaying fighters and circumnavigating covid-19 restrictions, and skirting scandals such as the video of him slapping his wife, Anne, at a nightclub in 2023, an act for which he has<\/a> repeatedly apologized. He is not just his sport\u2019s most recognizable and relentless figure but its living embodiment.<\/p>\n

\u201cI look at the UFC as this battleship,\u201d White says. \u201cAs long as I\u2019m here, we all f—ing go down together, or none of us go down.\u201d<\/p>\n

He is also arguably the most powerful man at the intersection of sports and American politics, a status he unlocked in 2016, when he became among the first public figures to endorse Trump\u2019s candidacy. Since then, White, who says he identifies as \u201can \u201980s Democrat,\u201d has spoken at three Republican National Conventions and played a critical role in turning out young, male voters for Trump, including convincing podcaster and UFC broadcaster Joe Rogan to endorse him in 2024. If the \u201cmanosphere\u201d has a spiritual leader, it may be White.<\/p>\n

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White speaks next to President Donald Trump in West Palm Beach, Florida, in November 2024. (Brendan McDermid\/Reuters)<\/figcaption>\n<\/figure>\n

Now, wandering the White House grounds, he is days away from what could be his magnum opus: UFC\u2019s Freedom 250, a slate of mixed-martial-arts brawls to be staged on the White House\u2019s South Lawn, in celebration of the nation\u2019s 250th anniversary. It will air on Paramount+ on Sunday, the 80th birthday of the president who suggested it.<\/p>\n

The makeshift arena will hold 4,000 invited guests, and a watch party on the Ellipse, the park adjacent to the White House, can hold 85,000 more. Critics have sued the Trump administration<\/a>, alleging the event is unlawful. The event was initially expected to cost $60 million, covered by UFC, but those costs have risen, UFC executives have said, and it is expected to lose $30 million.<\/p>\n

For White, though, the event marks the culmination of a 25-year stretch during which UFC \u2014 with assists from Trump \u2014 put a chokehold on American culture. Costs, criticism, lawsuits: It\u2019s all worth it.<\/p>\n

\u201cEverybody talks about me doing this event with Trump,\u201d he says. \u201cBut you think if any of these other presidents had reached out and said, \u2018We want to do a fight on the White House lawn,\u2019 I wouldn\u2019t do it?\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s how White, on a weekday morning 11 days before his event, is moving around the White House grounds like he works there. After the garden, he spends a few minutes in the Roosevelt Room <\/b>before walking to the Oval Office. The president sees him and smiles.<\/p>\n

\u201cI hate to say it, but I don\u2019t know if he\u2019s a replaceable person,\u201d Trump says of White, sitting across the Resolute Desk from his friend of 25 years.<\/p>\n

\u201cI sort of think everyone\u2019s replaceable. Of course, I\u2019m<\/i> not replaceable as president,\u201d he continued.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut I\u2019m not sure that Dana is replaceable.\u201d<\/p>\n

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White separates Nate Diaz, left, and Conor McGregor during a 2016 weigh-in event in Las Vegas. (Ethan Miller\/Getty Images)<\/figcaption>\n<\/figure>\n

White\u2019s brand of masculinity is reflected in the barroom next to his office at UFC Headquarters in Las Vegas: Air Jordans spread out across the bar, a box of Cuban cigars, two sports Emmys, a glass case with two handguns gifted by Kid Rock and a framed photo of Steve Jobs.<\/p>\n

Sitting there one day in May, he is laughing about a video of Trevor Noah<\/a>, the comedian and former host of \u201cThe Daily Show,\u201d reflecting on the importance of male vulnerability. The video was the topic of discussion in his group chat that morning. He shakes his head and mutters, \u201cThis is the craziest thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe world is a mean, nasty, ugly place; it is. \u2026 You can\u2019t be weak,\u201d White says, leaning forward in his chair. \u201cEvery day, we\u2019re competing. Somebody wants what you got, and they\u2019re f—ing coming for you, so you have to deliver.\u201d<\/p>\n

In trying to explain how he got here, White prefers not to psychoanalyze the early days of his life \u2014 whether it\u2019s his dad\u2019s drinking, or his public falling-out with his mother, or getting expelled from his Las Vegas high school for kicking open a classroom door, nearly injuring a nun.<\/p>\n

Instead, he points to a night in the late 1980s. He was working as a bouncer at the Black Rose, a popular Irish pub in Boston, a city where he twice attended and quickly dropped out of college. A customer wouldn\u2019t stop trash-talking; he walloped the guy twice in the face. The resulting police report led to him getting fired, he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cI had gotten into all these fights for this bar, and this one thing happens to me, and you fire me?\u201d he recalls. \u201cI\u2019m like, \u2018I will never, ever give this much of myself to somebody else again.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Fighting is in his DNA, he says. (Actually, he says it\u2019s in everyone\u2019s.) Around the same time, when White was about 19, Peter Welch, a boxing trainer in Southie, hit White with the hardest punches in Welch\u2019s life, Welch says. It\u2019s White\u2019s greatest strength as a fighter, the trainer says: taking a punch. The more Welch talked to him, the more he felt White\u2019s relentless ambition. White routinely said he wanted to take what he learned at McDonough Gym and make it global.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe wanted to take over the world,\u201d Welch says.<\/p>\n

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White with fighter Chuck Liddell in 2008. (Eric Jamison\/AP)<\/figcaption>\n<\/figure>\n

By the late 1990s, White was training mixed-martial-arts fighters, including early stars Chuck Liddell and Tito Ortiz. But UFC was on life support. After McCain compared the sport to \u201chuman cockfighting\u201d in 1996 and sent letters to state governors asking them to ban mixed martial arts, the American Medical Association said it supported a moratorium. A nationwide ban never happened, but UFC was $44 million in debt and struggling to get on pay-per-view, its mix of brutality and unseriousness pegged as a freak show rather than sport.<\/p>\n

In stepped White. He convinced his high school classmate Lorenzo Fertitta and Fertitta\u2019s brother Frank III, who co-founded Station Casinos, to purchase the downtrodden circuit for $2 million, handing White a 10 percent stake.<\/p>\n

\u201cPart of his success was that he had a very intimate knowledge of what the product needed to be,\u201d says Lorenzo Fertitta, UFC\u2019s CEO until 2016. \u201cWe needed a fighter who knew the fight game and knew what the fans wanted.\u201d<\/p>\n

The first event under his direction was UFC 30, in Atlantic City in 2001. Venues were squeamish after McCain\u2019s verbal takedown. No one took them seriously \u2014 except the Trump Taj Mahal.<\/p>\n

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White presents an award to Matt Hughes in 2003. (Ed Mulholland\/WireImage)<\/figcaption>\n<\/figure>\n

Trump didn\u2019t know White, and he planned on leaving after the first fight or two. But he couldn\u2019t turn away, he says, from \u201cone of the most incredible things, because I had never seen anything like that before.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI said, \u2018You got to be kidding,\u2019\u201d Trump recalls in the Oval Office. \u201cIt was a level of excitement that you don\u2019t see. It was crazy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Over the next decade, fueled by the success of Spike TV\u2019s reality-competition show \u201cThe Ultimate Fighter,\u201d stars such as Conor McGregor, Ronda Rousey and Jon Jones became household names. UFC\u2019s media rights deals skyrocketed, from $35 million to $100 million to $3 billion, eventually leading to Hollywood mogul Ari Emanuel\u2019s WME-IMG agency \u2014 which later became Endeavor and then TKO \u2014 buying the organization for more than $4 billion in 2016.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt took one night of fights to get us hooked,\u201d says Mark Shapiro, the president and chief operating officer of TKO, the parent company of UFC.<\/p>\n

Through it all, the friendship between White and Trump grew, with Trump often sending handwritten congratulatory notes in the margins of newspaper clippings.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou have people that you know are rooting for you, and he was always that guy,\u201d White says of Trump. \u201cThis was before the world hated Donald Trump.\u201d<\/p>

Read more New Zealand adds Will Young to test squad after Kane Williamson retires from international duty<\/a><\/p>\n

When the world changed, Trump had a favor to ask his friend in 2016.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you don\u2019t want to do this, I completely understand,\u201d White recalled Trump saying to him, \u201cbut I would be honored if you would speak for me at the Republican convention.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cEverybody told me not to do it,\u201d White says now. \u201cWhy would I not do it?\u201d<\/p>\n

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The UFC octagon on the White House’s South Lawn. (Maxine Wallace\/The Washington Post)<\/figcaption>\n<\/figure>\n

Inside Trump\u2019s gold-trimmed, <\/b>still-ivy-less<\/a> Oval Office, there is no shortage of distractions. When you don\u2019t hear the construction crews working on the UFC\u2019s 92-foot-tall, stars-and-stripes-and-steel venue on the South Lawn, a symphony of hammers, saws and jackhammers booms from Trump\u2019s $400 million ballroom.<\/p>\n

Trump had suggested the fight. They were at a UFC event at Madison Square Garden in November 2024 when the newly reelected Trump leaned into White and suggested they put on a fight at the White House.<\/p>\n

\u201cI kind of laughed it off, to be honest with you,\u201d recalls Craig Borsari, the chief content officer of UFC, \u201cand then, I noticed Dana wasn\u2019t laughing.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the Oval Office, Trump gleefully talks about a call he says he had with Amazon executive chairman Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post, about Bezos maybe coming to the fight. (Bezos\u2019s spokesman declined to comment). Later, Trump muses about his customized Sharpies and brags about the size of the renovated, \u201cindustrial-strength\u201d Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool<\/a>, telling an aide to bring a laptop to show off a graphic that reads, \u201cOur Pool is Bigger than Skyscrapers.\u201d<\/p>\n

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White, Trump and UFC executive Hunter Campbell appear on screens at an April event in Miami. (Tasos Katopodis\/Getty Images)<\/figcaption>\n<\/figure>\n
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Trump and White at the Miami event. (Tasos Katopodis\/Pool\/AP)<\/figcaption>\n<\/figure>\n

Trump says he has White and the UFC fans to thank, in part, for being back in the Oval Office. If not for the adulation he received from UFC crowds \u2014 which he calls \u201cMAGA all the way\u201d \u2014 he might not have made another run at the White House, he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wouldn\u2019t say I was the flavor of the day,\u201d he says of that era, which he describes, oddly, as the \u201cNever-Never Land\u201d stage of his political career. \u201cI went to a fight and still did my walk-in with [White,] and the place went crazy.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was sort of the reason I said, \u2018Well, I didn\u2019t lose,\u2019\u201d he adds, casually floating his baseless stolen-election theory regarding the 2020 vote. \u201cI guess I got to try it a third time, right?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

From Trump\u2019s view, loyalty is the defining, nonnegotiable pillar of both his and White\u2019s governing styles. That superpower helped fuel one of White\u2019s most lucrative business decisions: to keep holding events through the pandemic. He had the barren sports landscape mostly to himself, and UFC\u2019s popularity surged.<\/p>\n

\u201cI would rather f—ing die of covid than hide in my house and f—ing wipe out half my staff,\u201d he said later.<\/p>\n

White counts a lot of influential men as dear friends. The surfer Kelly Slater and Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, where White is a board member, both marveled in interviews at White\u2019s ability to power through outside criticism.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt wasn\u2019t always accepted,\u201d Zuckerberg says, \u201cbut he had the fortitude\u201d to build it into something \u201cbeloved\u201d \u2014 including by Zuckerberg himself, who built an octagon in his yard.<\/p>\n

White and Trump have repeatedly leaned on each other at critical moments. In 2023, amid a conservative backlash to Bud Light<\/a>, a UFC sponsor, promoting transgender actress Dylan Mulvaney, White convinced Trump to urge people to give Bud Light a second chance.<\/p>\n

The next year, with Trump fighting to return to the White House, White called in a favor that may have helped swing the election.<\/p>\n

Before Rogan was America\u2019s most popular podcaster, he was \u2014 well, a lot of things, but none inspired more of his passion than UFC commentator. He\u2019s been close with White for as long as Trump has, and White knew a Rogan endorsement would help. He says he worked for six years to convince Rogan.<\/p>\n

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White and UFC commentator Joe Rogan in 2006. (Frazer Harrison\/Getty Images for Spike TV)<\/figcaption>\n<\/figure>\n

\u201cFor all the heat he gets, Rogan is a liberal,\u201d White says. \u201cJoe Rogan was going to vote for f—ing Bernie Sanders!\u201d<\/p>\n

Then, on the eve of the 2024 election, after Trump went on Rogan\u2019s show for three hours and Vice President Kamala Harris did not<\/a>, Rogan finally endorsed Trump.<\/p>\n

Through a spokesperson, Rogan declined an interview request. He has been critical of Trump in his second term, especially around Iran, and of the idea of an outdoor fight, calling the White House event \u201codd,\u201d despite being on the broadcast.<\/p>\n

Even as Trump\u2019s popularity has fallen to all-time lows<\/a>, White has stood by him. He was at the White House correspondents\u2019 dinner when a gunman stormed it in April<\/a>, catching criticism for calling the experience \u201cawesome.\u201d A month later, though, he doubles down, noting he would have felt differently if anyone ended up being hurt: \u201cIt was pretty incredible.\u201d<\/p>\n

He argued to the New Yorker last month that Trump can\u2019t be racist, given his past friendship with Michael Jackson. He also bristled at the suggestion, from Charlamagne tha God on \u201cThe Breakfast Club\u201d <\/b>radio show, that White was \u201ca glazer\u201d and \u201ca yes-man\u201d who couldn\u2019t tell his friend how he was failing the American people.<\/p>\n

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White poses for a photo with a fan near the White House on Friday. (Brendan Smialowski\/AFP\/Getty Images)<\/figcaption>\n<\/figure>\n
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The UFC boss points to a Metro bus Friday bearing a UFC Freedom 250 advertisement in D.C. (Brendan Smialowski\/AFP\/Getty Images)<\/figcaption>\n<\/figure>\n

\u201cFor anybody to think that I would ever go to the Oval Office and talk to him about Iran, it\u2019s just crazy talk,\u201d White says in Las Vegas, adding, \u201cI don\u2019t glaze.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI live in my UFC bubble over here,\u201d he goes on. \u201cI run my business, and I have all my own f—ing problems.\u201d<\/p>\n

White has repeatedly stated he wants nothing more to do with politics once Trump is out of office. But when asked what he would say if Vice President JD Vance or Secretary of State Marco Rubio \u2014 considered the two early potential GOP front-runners for 2028 \u2014 asked him for help to win the presidency, White suggested he might not be totally out.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe problem is, I have a really good relationship with Rubio. We\u2019re actually friends, too,\u201d White says, laughing. \u201cI don\u2019t know. I don\u2019t know. That\u2019s [assuming] they would even come to me. Who knows? But I am<\/i> very close to Rubio.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the Oval Office, Trump ponders how much bigger White can get after Sunday\u2019s spectacle.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019ll never have anything like this again,\u201d Trump says of Sunday\u2019s fight. When he suggests one of the only ways White could go higher is if he follows in his footsteps and runs for office, the UFC president grins and shakes his head.<\/p>\n

\u201cDana, this is the bad part,\u201d Trump jokes. \u201cYou can only go down from here.\u201d<\/p>\n

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White under “the Claw” on the White House lawn. (Louie Palu\/Panos Pictures\/For The Washington Post)<\/figcaption>\n<\/figure>\n

White is 40 feet above the White House lawn, atop the stands of what is temporarily the most famous sports site in America.<\/p>\n

At this point in early June, there\u2019s still work to be done. The octagon won\u2019t be constructed until right before the event, and seats have not yet been installed. Pest control could be an issue: Ever since having dinner at the Rose Garden last month, White has been consumed thinking about the clusters of gnats, a fixture of D.C. summers, that could make the fights more of a technical and logistical nightmare than they already are. Also: The forecast calls for thunderstorms.<\/p>\n

The response on the lawn Sunday night should be strong, though Trump\u2019s stranglehold on the culture has cracked of late. A judge has ruled his name should be stripped from the Kennedy Center<\/a>. After several musical performers slated for the Great American State Fair on the National Mall canceled, Trump made himself the headliner. When he appeared on the Jumbotron at Madison Square Garden, where he was cheering on his hometown Knicks during the NBA Finals, he was loudly booed<\/a>.<\/p>\n

That was the NBA. This is UFC, in Trump\u2019s actual<\/i> backyard, where White is, for the first time all day, suddenly almost speechless. He looks out on the Mall, then turns around to marvel at what he and his friend built.<\/p>

Read more Adam Scott reaches 100 straight majors. Some greats never made it that far<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cWhat do you think?\u201d he asks. \u201cPretty crazy, huh?\u201d<\/p>\n

\n
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The arena glows outside the White House on Thursday. (Alex Brandon\/AP)<\/figcaption>\n<\/figure>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The president and the UFC boss say they\u2019ve been leaning on each other for 25 years. 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