The Politics of the Ultimate Fighting Championship

UFC, Donald Trump, and the Right

On October 6, 2018, the Ultimate Fighting Championship held its 229th flagship event with Conor McGregor, once the biggest name in the sport, headlining the main card again Lightweight champion Khabib Nurmagomedov. One of the fights within the main card was a heavyweight match between the American fighter Derrick Lewis and the tall Russian Alexander Volkov. With seconds to go before the final round was over, and as he was about to lose, Lewis knocked out an exhausted Volkov, before giving out the most cocksure interviews you could ever find in sport.

There were two memorable moments from that interview. The first, when Joe Rogan, a color commentator for the UFC asks Lewis “Why did you take his pants off?” to which Lewis replied “My balls were hot”. Rogan, looking down, responded “I understand.” The second moment is where Lewis said, “Donald Trump called me, and told me I gotta knock this Russian motherfucker out, ‘cause they’re making him look bad at the news.” Whether or not Lewis’s claim was true, the moment was undeniably hilarious. UFC 229 was one of the highest pay-per-view buys in combat sports history, and remains the most-bought in the organization. But this mic interview within this card is just a taste of its flamboyant image, revealing a new alignment in American politics.

Compared to other professional sporting leagues, the UFC is one of the few cultural institutions that many can safely describe as right-coded, carrying a devil-may-care approach that has conservative influencers and Republican politicians frequently attending their events and its most notable figures unabashedly professing their support for Trump. On June 14, the date of President Trump’s birthday, their upcoming flagship event will be held at the White House, where Ilia Topuria and Justin Gaethje will be fighting for the lightweight title, and Alex Pereira, a former champion who won two titles, debuting in the heavyweight division hoping to add the title to his already well decorated belt against the highly ranked Ciryl Gane.

As the most well-known mixed martial arts promotion, the UFC carries on as the modern incarnation of a type of sport with a rich history rooted across the globe. In ancient China, lei tais hosted no-barred contests where one person fights numerous individuals, and continues until there are no more challengers, with the winner being the last one standing. It was a sport competed at the Ancient Olympics as pankration, which integrates wrestling and boxing techniques, and was commonly used by the Greek armies, where most people died. The Roman Emperor Theodosis I then banned the Olympic Games, which involved pankration.

Mixed martial arts was revived in the 20th century, adding more combat sports into the mixture including jiu-jitsu, judo, and Muay Thai. The UFC’s first event in 1993 was an open experiment that followed the format of the lei tai, but addressed numerous questions about the participating fighters, such as whether a karate artist could beat a boxer or how a sumo wrestler fights a kickboxer.

The UFC is often perceived as counter-cultural when compared to boxing and wrestling. It has earned contempt from people, even among some conservatives who have at times expressed disgust at the real-time brutal violence. Senator John McCain famously (and initially) described MMA as “human cockfighting” and sent letters to governors to ban the organization. The columnist George Will has also called it “degenerative prizefighting”. Nevertheless there were some who gave the UFC instrumental support, shaping its reputation along the way.

The first of these is John Milius, whose credits include writing the screenplay for Apocalypse Now and directing Conan the Barbarian and Red Dawn. Milius was a fan of martial arts and a student of the Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu grandmaster Rorian Gracie. Milius and Gracie initially conceived what would become the UFC, along with businessman Art Davie, who proposed an eight-man elimination tournament as well as its famous Octagon design. Gracie was part of a family well known for bringing Brazilian Jui-Jitsu to the American mainland, as his father Helio and his uncle Carlos are often noted as the developers of the martial art during the 1920s. Another family member and practitioner of BJJ, Royce Gracie, became one of the UFC’s first champions.

The second person who supported the UFC was Donald Trump. Trump has attended numerous events before, during, and after his presidency. Like Milius, Trump embraced combat sports wholeheartedly, having participated in the WWE and promoted numerous fights including an 1988 match between Mike Tyson and the Olympic gold medalist Michael Spinks hosted at Trump Plaza. Before he entered politics, Trump held UFC events in 2001 at the Taj Mahal Casino. Dana White, who President of the Ultimate Fighting Championship organization since 2001 and is now a close friend of Donald Trump, credits Trump for supporting the UFC at a time when the sport was very niche. White spoke at the Republican National Conventions in 2016 and 2024.

One could argue that the two men’s relationship with violence is shaped by a warrior ethos of courage and honor, which Compact Magazine’s Stuart Doyle wrote informs the sport’s “minimal artificiality and abstraction.” Therefore, the violence there is more confronting than what is staged in professional wrestling, but it is as vital as passing a football or hitting a baseball. Winning a title would mean being the greatest fighter of all and conquering all barriers burdened by technical and strategic complexities.

Both Trump and Milius are conservatives (Milius once claimed in 1992 that he got blacklisted by Hollywood for his conservative and libertarian viewpoints), but the UFC would have exploded regardless of the direct influence of their politics. Zuffa, a business partnership between Dana White and brothers Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta, bought the UFC in 2001 and have focused on shaping the sports image to be more palatable to casual viewers by introducing new weight classes, time limits, a set number of rounds, and a list of illegal fouls to make sure the match goes smoothly. Soon followed a migration of boxing fans who had grown dissatisfied with organized boxing amid frequent accusations of corruption, poor pay, and match-fixing. UFC’s expansion was kick-started by its reality show, The Ultimate Fighter, a reality show about MMA, which began with a fight between Stephen Bonnar and Forrest Griffin. It is widely considered one of the greatest fights in MMA and was credited with saving the UFC from bankruptcy. Its popularity has increased exponentially by striking deals with ESPN and Paramount to stream their sports live. There are fewer matches in boxing that get promoted, but the UFC holds more than 40 events each year, with one being broadcast per week.

However, the media mogul Andrew Breitbart has famously said that “politics is downstream of culture”, implying that when culture shifts, so does its politics. And in the years since Trump ascended into the White House, the culture of the UFC and its relationship with MAGA politics deepened.

To understand the culture of the UFC, one must know that MMA and combat sports are mainly centered on the individual. Unlike most sports, where participants represent a place or a nation, it’s secondary for fighters as their personality and their abilities to attack or defend themselves matter more. That’s how they are hand-picked by White as the face of the organization, attracting large amounts of PPVs and tickets.

The personalities of MMA fighters are as loud and boisterous as they come, and they get more publicity. One example is Sean Strickland, who reclaimed the Middleweight Title by split decision over Khamzat Chimaev in May 2026. There was anticipation for this title fight, primarily because the two threw back-and-forth insults during the press conference. Strickland’s persona involves equal opportunity insults and would sometimes throw conspiracies to get a rise out of his critics. Strickland’s support for Trump is notable, but the boisterousness from the contracted players matches seamlessly with Trump’s pugilistic persona and plays a larger part in his appeal as an American redneck hero. (Ironically, Strickland missed out on being included in the Freedom 250’s main card, but says that he would have rejected it, because he would have mouthed off about the Epstein files.)

Attending UFC events, Donald Trump receives standing ovations in a way he would be unlikely to at other sporting events like wrestling or baseball. Fighters like Derrick Lewis, Colby Covington, and Paulo Costa have gone out of their way to shake the President’s hands following their wins at the Octagon. Covington, who is a former Interim Welterweight Champion, has vocally expressed strong support for Trump and has spoken about it at the Turning Point USA conference in 2023.

It became clear that the UFC was close to Trump’s 2024 Presidential campaign, and it had unlocked a cohort that every conservative party in the Anglosphere could never think of gaining: young men. According to a 2022 study, the majority of UFC’s audience is young men, aged 18-44, from a wide range of ethnicities. It has over 300 million fans worldwide, three-quarters of whom are male.

Part of the appeal of MMA is the spontaneous spectacle that every fight hopes to bring. If the 2010s were what journalist Derek Thompson described as the “guilt jubilee”, where making your identity central to the guilt being felt about one’s privileges - feminism, anti-racism, and LGBT+ rights - and using that to police others, then the UFC plays a significant counterweight to that phenomenon by embracing every politically incorrect vice under the sun. As male millennials and zoomers feel that they don’t own capital compared to previous generations, check out of higher education, and evade starting relationships with women, for them perhaps the sport feels like a relief from institutions that often demonize masculinity as toxic. As we are more desensitized and tolerant to violence compared to the recent past, watching MMA may feel easier.

In the aftermath of the 2024 Presidential election, political pundits waxed about the campaign’s engagement with the manosphere (often referred to as the ‘bro strategy’), where Trump appeared on podcasts and livestreams usually engaged by young men, from Joe Rogan to Theo Von and Adin Ross. Rogan’s interview of Donald Trump, which was watched by 56 million viewers on YouTube, proved that the digital landscape is where politics should be targeted. More importantly, it gave the idea that young men were convinced that Trump isn’t just a conviction politician who cares about the plight of Western Civilization, but rather a down-to-earth, often hilarious person who shared their interests, one of which is MMA.

The relationship between male malaise and the election of an aspirational figure is nothing new in American politics. In National Review, the historian Steven Watts compared the uncertainty faced in the Trump era to the shift leading up to the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960. The anxiety felt by men back then was that more women were moving away from their traditional duties as mothers and wives by being more active in the workforce. Kennedy was a throwback, combining his honorable duties as a World War II veteran with astute intellectualism, and he shaped a new image of a politician. Contrarily, Trump was more brash, reactive, and low-brow, often orbiting not just combat sports, but also embracing hip-hop and television for its virility.

But Watts wrote:

[...] perhaps the most subtle, yet powerful, cultural appeal of Kennedy and Trump came from their skillful deployment of a masculine mystique. These two candidates, in their own way, projected a strong male persona that resonated with underlying cultural concerns in America. Each moved center stage as an assertive masculine figure who appealed to mainstream Americans yearning for leadership by such a man. Their manly image, as much as their words, promised to allay deep-seated anxieties about masculine effectiveness in the modern world.

Trump’s political emergence and reemergence reflect a newer sense of masculinity, reflecting a reactive and populist anger towards institutions that could be found online and offline, particularly in a post-COVID era where trust in them has significantly lowered. As a result, Trump won both the electoral and popular vote, with some exit polls showing that men aged 18-29 moved 30 points to the right.

Of course, to say that the politicization of the UFC has not made everybody happy would be an understatement. Its fiercest critics often target its deregulatory nature, which has been in contention for a decade, and its perception as having made a direct contribution to Trump’s reelection has made their criticisms louder.

They often point out that under TKO and Zuffa, which owns UFC and the WWE, it has a monopoly on all combat sports, including MMA and boxing, and this could breach antitrust laws by getting rid of competition. In 2024, the UFC agreed to a $375 million settlement in a class action lawsuit, led by former fighters Cung Le and Nathan Quarry, after they were found to have violated antitrust laws that harmed players.

Another bone of contention is that under the UFC compensation of fighters can be very low, especially when compared with other sports. According to the settled lawsuit mentioned above, fighters receive 18% of the UFC’s shared revenue. All fighters serve as independent contractors rather than employees so, unlike in other sports like football or baseball, athletes have no expectation of and do not receive employer benefits such as subsidized healthcare insurance. White often defends the allocation by saying that players only deserve higher pay if they bring a higher return on investment in the fight. Only when the fighters win, or if the fight is declared the best of the night, are they eligible for bonuses.

There have been plans to overhaul the Muhammad Ali Act, which protects boxers from exploitation and coercion by their managers and promoters, with the Revival Act which would mandate more protections like covering health insurance and higher pay for low-ranked fighters. It has already passed through Congress and has been referred to the Senate Commerce Committee. The bill has been criticized for protecting TKO Holdings’s monopoly, meaning that the UFC would then have a more direct influence in increasing any coercion.

For some fans, all of these issues can be waved away, so long as the UFC offers a good product. But the promotion is frequently criticized for the fights done by poor mismatching, where it is given excessive promotion that does not meet expectations, often revealing a massive gap in skill, size, and experience. One good example is the main event between former Welterweight champion Jack Della Maddalena and the no.1 ranked pound-for-pound fighter, Islam Makhachev, the latter dominantly wrestling Maddalena on hold for five consecutive rounds.

When Dana White announced the Freedom 250 fans reacted with dismay at the main card, because there were fewer title fights than expected (Trump promised that there would be eight to nine announced, but there were only two). Bigger stars such as Jon Jones and Conor McGregor were omitted, with the most polarizing fighter of the night being Sean O’Malley, due to his acerbic personality. As a result, you get a lineup of fighters that could not match the outsized ambitions of Dana White and President Trump, or the demands of the fans.

This also needs to account for the current mood around Trump. The conflict with Iran and a stagnating economy have made the President more unpopular, and his brash persona is made more insufferable. Young men who overlap with UFC’s majority demographics are also turning their back on Trump at sharp levels, with a Third Way poll showing that 66% of men aged 18-29 disapprove of his presidency for these reasons.

One of the UFC’s biggest critics is MMA analyst Luke Thomas, who takes every opportunity to criticize MMA fighters who don’t share his far-left politics. Thomas argues that it is now the sports arm of the second Trump administration, arguing that no other league is equivalent to doing this.

The real question isn’t whether other sports waste a lot of energy being political, but whether sports should even touch politics at all. Throughout history, sports have often been used to enhance showmanship among authoritarian leaders. Commodus didn’t simply watch gladiator fights at the Colosseum when he was Roman Emperor, he also fought against gladiators as well. Adolf Hitler used the 1936 Berlin Olympics to enhance the regime. Both of which are examples of the “bread and circuses” argument, where politicians use entertainment to distract from daily socioeconomic anxiety.

But even if that wasn’t the case, why shouldn’t there be a sport allowed to be right-coded? Pop culture is now polarized, with actors, comedians, and artists frequently bringing left-wing narratives to their work. Conservatives have often argued that sport needs to be isolated from politics, but what does it say, however, that they now use the capital to promote themselves more than to highlight the real strengths of the sport.

People spectate the UFC, not for its politics or its leaders, but for the fights and the individuals participating in it. Sport is ultimately communal and a great fight, as with Sean Strickland and Khamzat Chimaev, can bring people together across all political strands and leave aside their differences. Beyond that, whatever happens at the Freedom 250 promises a future direction of where the UFC is going. And whether or not it’s politically captured, it has already proved that it can be a human sport with a ton of depth. Some of the most recent fights have been very rewarding, from the Flyweight Title Bout between Joshua Van and Tatsuro Taira (Van won by knockout after five rounds) and a Heavyweight bout between Curtis Blaydes and Josh Hokit, the latter of whom won and is included in the Freedom 250’s main card.

The late Senator McCain had already been convinced by MMA’s legitimacy, saying that his younger self, who loved boxing and wrestling, would have devoted himself to MMA. The UFC has proven it won over converts, but it needs to know that if it continues to be a political organ, it shouldn’t hollow out its soul over any political leader and chase them until the chickens come home to roost. It cannot let go of what it has already gained.