Fight Night at the White House
After his parents are murdered by a cult, the titular protagonist of John Milius’s 1982 lurid fantasy epic, “Conan the Barbarian,” is forced into slavery, and made to work the Wheel of Pain, a grain-grinding contraption. Pushing a spoke for years on end transforms Conan (played by a young Arnold Schwarzenegger) into a hulking physical specimen. His torso and thighs grow eye-poppingly muscular beneath their skimpy fur-and-leather togs—a development that does not go unnoticed by a warrior named Red Hair, who plucks the young hunk from his post and tosses him into the prime time of the gladiator pit. Roaring and grunting, his body sleek with blood and sweat, Conan tussles and grapples with a series of opponents, dominating them all, while an audience of torch-wielding vulgarians shouts and howls at the pit’s lip. Later, as our hero sits down to sup with his admiring cohort, a warlord poses a question to the group: What is the best that life can offer? A triumphant Conan responds, “To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women.”
Milius—who co-wrote, with Francis Ford Coppola, the screenplay for “Apocalypse Now,” garnering an Academy Award nomination—not only wrote and directed “Conan” but also had a hand in getting the Ultimate Fighting Championship off the ground, in 1993. An ardent fan of combat sports and a student of Brazilian jujitsu, Milius was approached by the U.F.C.’s original Svengali, an event promoter named Art Davie, to assist in the creative direction of the mixed-martial-arts tournament, and was, at least by some accounts, the one to come up with its defining characteristic: a cage structure called the Octagon, in which the sport’s vicious and swift full-contact fights take place.
Unlike Conan’s pit, the Octagon isn’t sunken. And yet, in its cartoonish hunger to crush one’s enemies, the spirit of the Barbarian endures in the U.F.C., which has become, in the past three decades, a multibillion-dollar business. In the words of Dana White, the organization’s C.E.O., who attempted to explain U.F.C.’s popularity in a recent interview with David Remnick, “We’re all human beings, and fighting’s in our D.N.A. We get it, and we like it.” It also wouldn’t be a stretch to identify this perspective as classic Trump. In 2002, long before he was, God help us, the leader of the free world, he told an interviewer, “I love to remember my enemies and I love to get my enemies whenever I can.” This attitude—vindictive, brutal, bellicose—has only grown more pronounced, and its implications more globally consequential, since he’s ascended to the Presidency. When speaking about Iran, in March, Trump told reporters: “Oh, I think we won . . . . We’ve knocked out everything.” He added, “We’ve defeated the enemy, and they are an enemy.”
White and Trump have been aligned for quite some time. In his interview with Remnick, White called the President “one of my very, very good friends,” and commended him as a “Day One fan” of the U.F.C., who played an instrumental role in legitimatizing the sport. (Trump began hosting U.F.C. fights at the Taj Mahal in Atlantic City in 2001, the same year that White came on as a part owner; the organization has since been sold to Ari Emanuel’s TKO Group Holdings.) Some reports have questioned this narrative, suggesting that the relationship between the two men turned truly cozy only after Trump became President, for purely transactional reasons. But, whatever the case, the association has been notable for long enough that when Trump announced last summer that, to commemorate America’s two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary, the U.F.C. would hold a fight card on the White House’s South Lawn, it shouldn’t have been much of a surprise.
It shouldn’t have been, and yet, I’ll admit, it was, and my astonishment intensified as the preparations for the UFC Freedom 250 event began. (Originally meant to take place on the Fourth of July, it was later pushed up to June 14th, to coincide with Trump’s eightieth birthday.) It started with the enormous stars-and-stripes-adorned structure called the Claw, all but dwarfing the White House, under which thousands of punters lucky enough to watch the card play out in the Octagon would convene. Then, on Friday night, there was a press conference at the Lincoln Memorial, where the fourteen fighters competing in the card’s seven fights shit-talked one another—with a remarkable unanimity of metaphor—under the watchful eye of Honest Abe and several Crypto.com banners. (“I’m gonna take his lights out in the first round,” Ilia Topuria, the trim-bearded Georgian Spanish lightweight, said of his opponent. “I gotta put his lights out—that’s as simple as that,” the pink-haired, face-tatted American bantamweight Sean O’Malley said, of his foe.) This was followed by the official weigh-in for media outlets on Saturday morning, in which the American heavyweight Josh Hokit, who’s known for taking on a variety of clownish personas, spit up what looked like vomit all over his large chest-piece tattoo as he stepped onstage. (“So what, maybe I was drinking last night,” he mumbled.) And on Saturday night came another, more ceremonial, weigh-in, hosted by the podcaster Joe Rogan—“We’ve got a banging card for you, ladies and gentlemen, at the White House!”—who, with his bald pate, explosively worked-out muscles, and affinity for tight T-shirts, could pass for White’s twin. (This is far from the pair’s only link. As White told Remnick, he was the one to persuade Rogan to endorse Trump on his show in the lead-up to the 2024 Presidential election.)
All this chest-thumping and showboating was so over the top that when I sat down to watch the actual event, which streamed live on Paramount Plus on Sunday night, I wasn’t sure how much more I could take. But as it turned out, there was a lot yet to come. The fights were slightly delayed because of inclement weather, and so we were treated, first, to a quartet of chattering analysts wearing natty, snug suits. As Guns N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child O’ Mine” played vaguely in the distance, the M.M.A. champ Chris Weidman remarked, “As an American, I haven’t felt that type of patriotism in my life.” The U.F.C. is something of an international affair—Brazilians, Irishmen, Georgians, Dagestanis—but the analyst Brendan Fitzgerald took care to assure us, before the action got under way, that nearly every fight on the Freedom 250 card would feature at least one American.
As the event finally got off the ground, what I felt, more than American pride, though, was a kind of overwhelming dislocation, as if I’d suddenly fallen into a K-hole. The pace of the proceedings was hypercharged, and so many random things were happening at such a fast clip that I could only sit back, dazed. There was Trump, stone-faced in a navy suit, greeting the crowd from the White House balcony with White, who was wearing a pair of black-and-white sneakers; there was a military flyover; there was the Joint Armed Forces Color Guard, dressed in their ceremonial dark-blue uniforms; there was the country singer Zac Brown, of the Zac Brown Band, stuffed into a boldly pin-striped suit, singing the National Anthem inside the Octagon, with the red-coated United States Marine Band accompanying him; there were the crowd’s occasional but enthusiastic chants of “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!”; there were Mark Zuckerberg and David Ellison and Ari Emanuel (and his wife, the designer Sarah Staudinger, in an animal-print dress), and the comedians Tony Hinchcliffe and Shane Gillis, not to mention Melania and Barron, Ivanka and Jared, and Donald Trump, Jr., with his new bride, Bettina; there was Joe Rogan, in a shiny, wide gray tie, marvelling forcefully at the “energy” in the air; there were Medal of Honor recipients, at least a couple of them in wheelchairs, who were invited as a show of thanks for their service, and who flanked the fighters as they did their walk-ons; there was a clip of President Reagan talking about Flag Day; there were Octagon Girls, dressed in form-fitting stars-and-stripes-themed outfits, and the Octagon and the Claw’s blinking and flashing lights and screens, and a whole bunch of background music, from a cover version of AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck” to Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water,” Hulk Hogan’s theme song, and Drake’s “Started from the Bottom” (there was one Canadian fighter). And there was advertising, so much advertising, both popping up constantly on my laptop screen at home, as the event streamed, and also appearing on every available surface of the Octagon itself. Ads for Monster Energy drink (“The Beast Unleashed”) and Starlink internet and Meta and Jose Cuervo tequila and Bud Light and Polymarket betting and, again, crypto.com—the slew of increasingly indispensable garbage that we, as Americans, now depend on for work and leisure and, sometimes, vice. It was jarring and depressing to see the White House looming there, in such proximity to all of it, especially since the products being hawked included Trump Coins and Truth Social (“the real voice of President Trump”).
And, amid all this, there were the fights. Men grappling and kicking, throwing elbows and punching, giving one another bloody noses, black eyes, and—surely, occasionally—concussions. Several of them paid tribute to Trump. (One of them, that puking jokester Hokit, not only thanked Trump for having the “balls to put some shit like this” in the White House but, after winning his fight, roared, “Michelle Obama is a man, am I right, America?” to the sound of some cheers.) And while the President, for his part, didn’t appear to fall asleep, as he did last week at the Knicks game, he seemed, at least from what I could see on the stream, a bit bored and tired. Wearing a white cap with the legend “USA” on it, he sometimes mustered a “Great fight” to one or another of the competitors. He had, after all, just turned eighty, and it was late. But, on a Department of War ad that débuted during the event, his words were loud and clear. “Our friends will respect us, our enemies will fear us, and the whole world will admire the unrivalled greatness of the United States military,” he said, in voice-over, over footage of explosions. “If you attack the United States of America, we will hunt you down, and we will find you.” ♦