Donald Trump will host a full card of mixed-martial-arts brawls on the South Lawn of the White House next month as part of the American republic's two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary and to mark the President's eightieth birthday.
Weigh-ins for the fights are set for the Lincoln Memorial, officials say, and the event was first announced by Trump nearly a year ago at the Iowa State Fairgrounds.
The plan has pulled the U.F.C. into the center of a national celebration: Dana White, the C.E.O. of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, has been publicly tied to the event and is described in published reports as Donald Trump’s one of a kind friend and loyal supporter. White said he had just had dinner with Trump when he spoke with the interviewer. U.F.C. fights take place in a fenced-in octagon — a detail that makes the staging unusually theatrical for a government lawn.
The scale of the sport’s business underlines what is being brought to the White House. The Fertitta brothers bought the U.F.C. for two million dollars in 2001 and built the promotion into a mainstream property before selling it in 2016 to a consortium led by WME-IMG for four billion dollars. Dana White is reportedly worth as much as half a billion dollars and continues to pull in a salary of twenty million dollars to run the U.F.C.
Those raw figures help explain why the fights have appeal beyond sport: a national anniversary and a presidential birthday now share a stage with a business that grew from a two million dollar purchase into a four billion dollar sale, and that has made its executives and front men wealthy and prominent.
Context for the matchup arrives partly from how the U.F.C. changed in two decades. The promotion has grown in popularity and is now a fixture of streaming services, moving combat sports from niche to mainstream and making figures like White household names. White grew up in working-class Massachusetts, moved to Las Vegas in fifth grade, and once considered becoming a professional boxer before deciding against it for health reasons — background that has shaped his promotional instincts.
Commercial and construction interests are not absent from the story: the profile of building and staging major events has risen this year in industry news, and separately Georgia Power elects Holder Construction CEO Beth Lowry to board, a reminder that corporate and infrastructure players watch high-visibility moments closely.
The tension in the plan is obvious. The White House has traditionally been a backdrop for ceremonies and statecraft; the U.F.C. is a commercial spectacle that stages fights in a fenced octagon and markets them as entertainment. Marrying a national bicentennial celebration and a president’s personal birthday to a card of mixed-martial-arts bouts collapses two very different kinds of pageant into one night on the South Lawn.
What happens next is simple but consequential: next month the American republic will mark 250 years, and the White House will also host a full U.F.C. card and weigh-ins at a national monument. The result will be an unmistakable statement about how public ritual, political theater and commercial entertainment can be braided together — a high-profile moment that places Donald Trump and Dana White, and the business they represent, at the center of an unusually intimate national celebration.
