There’s a cage going up on the South Lawn of the White House. An octagon, wrapped in wire mesh, encircled by a red, white and blue stage under a giant star-spangled arch, with seating for thousands and screens for the overflow crowd down at the Ellipse. The pictures this week confirmed that what some of us had assumed, or at least hoped, must be a joke is, in fact, all too real.
A Historic First: UFC at the White House
On 14 June, the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) will stage ‘Freedom 250’ on the lawn of the president’s house. It will be the first professional sporting event ever held on White House grounds. The president, as he so often does on fight night, will sit cageside while some of the most dangerous people on the planet grapple, wrestle and pummel one another with fists, feet, elbows and knees.
Dana White, the UFC boss and a long-time Trump ally who insists the night isn’t political, despite being one of the president’s loudest backers, has spared no expense. The show is estimated to cost around £44 million, with the UFC braced to lose roughly half of that on the day.
The Official Reason: 250th Anniversary and Trump’s Birthday
The official reason for this gaudy bread-and-circus occasion is the 250th anniversary of America’s founding. (It also happens to be Donald Trump’s 80th birthday.) It’s been two and a half centuries since a group of colonists decided they’d had enough of being ruled by the whims of one man. The current president, who is not above calling himself a king, wants to mark the moment by booking himself a cage fight for his birthday – sorry, independence party.
In the same week photos of the UFC stage emerged, with the ruins of the demolished East Wing clearly visible as a sign of Trump’s chaotic cultural vandalism, the White House posted a tribute to Harambe. If you’re struggling, Haramba was the gorilla shot dead at Cincinnati Zoo in 2016 and became the internet’s favourite running joke. Ten years on, the most powerful office on earth used its global platform to call a dead gorilla ‘a true patriot’ and ‘a symbol of loyalty, strength, chaos, unity’. It’s small fry by the standards of this president’s lies, but it’s worth noting that the same Donald Trump said in 2016 that the zoo ‘probably had no choice’ but to shoot him.
The UFC’s Journey from Outlaw to Mainstream
The UFC is a slick, regulated, multi-billion-dollar sport these days. But it was not always so. In the early 90s, it was closer to a bar fight with a gate. No weight classes and almost no rules. Fighters at one early event reportedly agreed not to pull hair. It was so absurd that the sport’s big mainstream moment was immortalised in an episode of Friends. Monica’s tech-millionaire boyfriend decides to become a cage fighter and gets battered. ‘You are the worst ultimate fighter ever,’ she tells him. It was the joke.
It was also bloody enough that the late John McCain, a man Trump would spend years insulting, called it ‘human cockfighting’ and wrote to all fifty governors demanding it be banned. The sport was outlawed in dozens of states and dropped by the big pay-per-view companies. And who stepped in to give it a home? In 2001, when no serious arena in America would touch it, a property developer with a casino to fill invited the UFC to stage two events at the Trump Taj Mahal. So this is not Trump discovering the UFC. He is Trump completing it.
Trump’s Long History with the UFC
The sport McCain tried to strangle and the one Trump resuscitated in a crumbling casino is now getting the red carpet treatment on the president’s lawn. I spent 2024 working on the campaign that tried to beat him, and I can tell you the lesson we learned too late. You cannot win a match when you are fighting under Queensberry Rules and your opponent thinks low blows are fair game. We were arguing policy. He was running a circus.
None of this is a glitch. We are not watching a serious man stumble into an unserious week. He has not been accidentally swept up in the pageantry and perhaps taking the kitsch of a party a bit too far. Dana White is acknowledged, even by his enemies, as one of the great promoters in sport or entertainment, mentioned in the same breath as Vince McMahon of the WWE. That pairing is no accident: the UFC and the WWE now sit under the same corporate roof, TKO Group Holdings. But as a promoter, the man putting his name on this one outshines them both. Trump has done his own time in the ring, a WWE Hall of Famer who once climbed in to shave McMahon’s head on live television. He didn’t learn showmanship in office. He learned it ringside. For a man who plays to win and fights dirty, the world is his cage, which explains why the octagon is being erected on Pennsylvania Avenue.
The Controversy Behind the Scenes
An incident over M&S changing rooms proves anti-trans women need to get a life. Is the UK heatwave 'too hot'? Readers weigh in. 'Why do these disgusting crimes keep happening?' Readers' outrage on alleged MAFS rapes. Hannah Spencer: I challenged MPs' drinking habits - they just groaned. And that brings us back to the man building it. You may remember Dana White as the man who was filmed slapping his wife in a Mexican nightclub, an incident he admitted and called horrible, is no bystander. He’s the president’s closest friend in sport and the promoter who dragged a banned blood sport into the mainstream.
So no, the cage on the lawn is not a metaphor for the circus of this presidency. Reach for ‘metaphor’, and you’ve already lost. It is the thing itself, finally done pretending to be anything else. 250 years ago, a country fought a war to stop living inside one man’s performance. Next month, it’s throwing him a birthday party in a cage.
Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing Ross.Mccafferty@metro.co.uk. Share your views in the comments below.
