What Donald Trump could learn from the UFC

And so it has come to pass, here in the end times for satire, that on his birthday, June 14th, Donald Trump plans to preside over the brutal hand-to-hand combat of the Ultimate Fighting Championship on the south lawn of the White House. Those aghast at the prospect of such a gladiatorial spectacle at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue have reason to be upset. Yet they are wrong about whose image is in danger. The White House, and America, will be OK. It is the UFC that risks being dragged down.

After all, who can argue with a straight face that this president lives up to the standards the UFC demands of its fighters, let alone the qualities the fighters respect in each other? Yes, Mr Trump has repeatedly shown he can take a political punch. He has displayed admirable resilience. But true UFC champions are supposed to stand for much more than that.

In advance of a much-hyped middleweight championship fight in Newark, New Jersey, on May 9th, Sean Strickland, the challenger and an infamous trash talker, dumped abuse on the undefeated champion, Khamzat Chimaev. The harshest thing Mr Strickland said—or at least the accusation that the UFC, with its acute sense of its fans’ sensitivities, chose to emphasise in its marketing—was that Mr Chimaev was a bully who loved to train by fighting the “smallest, lowest-level pro” he could find. As president, Mr Trump has shown he is willing to use all the power at his disposal—including some the constitution does not allow him—to crush perceived adversaries. Yet the weaker the adversary, the more aggressive this president has proved to be. When Mr Trump has been surprised to find himself picking on someone approximating his own size, he has quickly backed down.

Mr Trump’s 145% tariffs on China did not survive China’s reciprocal rates and its embargo on the export of rare earths, and he fell mute about seizing Greenland after it turned out the Europeans he so disdained could band together against him. Even in the case of Iran, when a feeble opponent managed to trap Mr Trump in the kind of smothering fighters’ clinch that Mr Chimaev has perfected, the president’s response has been, so far, to suspend what the UFC would call “high-volume striking” (Mr Strickland’s stock-in-trade) and instead sue for peace.

And is there anyone who thinks Mr Trump, like the UFC, believes in a fair fight? It is true that in its early days in the 1990s, the league was so permissive that fighters had to reach a gentlemen’s agreement not to pull each other’s hair. That was back when Senator John McCain, a Republican from Arizona, crusaded against the sport as “human cockfighting”. It was banned in some 36 states and even on pay-per-view television, unlike pornography. But as the league cleaned up its act, it forbade not just hair-pulling but eye-gouging, head-butting, “groin attacks of any kind” and “stomping a grounded opponent”. You might cavil that it is only at the level of metaphor that, for this president, these are all classic moves. But he has a real-world record of other UFC violations, such as disregarding a referee’s instructions and “using abusive language in the fighting area”. So great is his contempt for rules that he kept trying to overturn the citizens’ electoral decision in 2020 even after dozens of courts concluded the contest was fair.

Mr Trump is a true fan of combat sports. He played an important role in legitimising the UFC, hosting fights at his Taj Mahal casino in 2001 as the league was struggling for regulatory approval. The UFC also enhances what has always been Mr Trump’s own most effective mixed-martial-arts move, borrowed from judo: turning the weight of the establishment against itself. To the extent elite tastemakers disgorge their piety upon his White House fights, they will serve his populist politics.

The league’s president, Dana White, has campaigned for Mr Trump and embraced his transgressive politics. The UFC code of conduct bans “insulting language”, including with regard to religion and gender, and in 2013 the league suspended a fighter for transphobic remarks. But Mr White now calls hate speech “probably the most important free speech to protect”. He did not penalise Mr Strickland for any of his trash talk, such as disparaging Mr Chimaev, a Muslim from Chechnya, as a terrorist. (Some have noted that, as with Mr Trump, Mr White’s celebration of free speech does not extend to criticism of his own enterprise.)

But the league’s alignment with Mr Trump can only go so far. The audience for the UFC is mostly male and, compared with other American sports, enviably young. Yet like the fighters the fans are diverse in other respects, and that pluralist reality sits uneasily with lockstep devotion to any politics. So does the ethos of the sport, which places real weight, in the end, on character. Mr Chimaev and Mr Strickland battered each other for the full five rounds. But when the fight was done, before the decision was announced, the two exhausted, bloodied men embraced. “Hey Chimaev,” Mr Strickland gasped, as their foreheads rested together, “whatever happens, I wanna apologise.”

When the narrow split decision went the challenger’s way, Mr Chimaev did not denounce the judges or claim the fight was rigged. He kissed Mr Strickland’s shaved head and then fastened the championship belt he had just lost around the victor’s waist. Joe Rogan, the popular podcaster, stepped up to interview Mr Strickland before the crowd. When asked how happy the outcome made him, Mr Strickland did not boast or preen. He repeated his apology to the entire arena. “I respect all you guys,” he said. His divisive behaviour was meant to help sell the fight, he explained, but he had gone too far. And then Mr Strickland voiced a sentiment that every American leader should try repeating each morning in the mirror: “I should be a better fuckin’ example,” he said. ■