Walking around the White House South Lawn these days, you notice a few things. There is the tiered platform with mics and music stands. There are the many folding seats, situated in a theater in the round, each stamped with: “WARNING: PLEASE DO NOT STAND ON CHAIR.” There are the stairs branded with crypto.com. And then, above it all, there is “The Claw”: the hulking, four-legged, makeshift canopy hovering 92 feet aloft, finished in red, white, and blue.
There are selfies.
The Trump administration on Thursday provided the press pool a preview of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) Freedom 250 event that will take place on Sunday night, when an international cast will duke it out for various titles. There was no formal briefing. But the White House did set us loose to mill around for about half an hour and drink in the spectacle. Several minutes in, I passed attendees who had crowded around the centerpiece—the octagon—for self-portraits. One woman tried to mount the ring; the attempt, courtesy of an official standing nearby, was short-lived.
UFC Freedom 250 has, depending on whom you ask, become the crown jewel of America’s semiquincentennial. A series of cage matches is an unusual choice to celebrate the history of the Founding. But it is arguably the perfect event to capture this moment in history.
The story of mixed martial arts is itself a microcosm of the progression. It would have been difficult to believe the sport would have a substantial audience just a few decades ago when it was banned in 36 states, as well as on pay-per-view, which swore off cage fighting while allowing porn.
Yet now it will have an audience at the White House. Its inclusion is a snapshot not just of the sport’s surprising trajectory but of how political sport has evolved in parallel. The influencer most known for spreading the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory is now a credentialed member of the White House press corps, taking selfies with a fighting arena on the South Lawn. It is no longer a place where outsiders are unwelcome by the establishment. It is a place where outsiders have become the establishment.
This is not just a cultural phenomenon anymore. “There are only a handful of things that bring people together in one place at one time, united by their interest in one thing,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in announcing a public-private partnership between the federal government and UFC. “We need more of those. We need more of those forms and those settings in which we can bring people together to enjoy something together and find something in common, and if you’ve been to UFC fights…the crowd is as diverse as you can imagine.”
There is an irony in claiming that a sport centered around beating your rival to a pulp—and whose audience skews heavily male and heavily young—is broadly unifying. Yet Rubio is still right that it is representative of where we are.
You need not look far. The country’s birthday party was originally helmed by America250, an initiative established 10 years ago with heavy bipartisan support. President Donald Trump countered with his own group, Freedom 250, setting off a tug of war between the two that has been its own kind of blood sport. A celebration that transgressed partisan lines to venerate the Founding principles and the freedoms that make America unique would have been ideal. It also would have been an act, as politicians talk out of both sides of their mouths about the need to come together while seizing virtually every opportunity to trash their opponents. That acrimony is obviously not limited to fights around the U.S. semiquincentennial. What epitomizes our current moment better than blood flying?
A strange choice for lifting up American exceptionalism, maybe. But what it misses in commemorating history, it makes up in marking it. After all, UFC Freedom 250 doesn’t just kick off celebrations for the Founding, whose anniversary is still a few weeks away. It more precisely coincides with a different milestone: June 14, 1946, when Trump was born.
