How Trump lost at Fight Club

As much as Donald Trump intends to make the World Cup and the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028 all about him, neither global sporting event comes close to firing him up like the night of cage fights that will be held at the White House on Sunday.

To understand this president – and, crucially, how his second term is misfiring – you have to grasp the extraordinary, unprecedented and grotesque significance of “UFC Freedom 250”. Even if you have never heard of the Ultimate Fighting Championship franchise, or watched a mixed martial arts fight, you need to know about this combat spectacular.

Since May 25, the south lawn of the White House – where Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat shook hands in 1993 and Barack Obama welcomed Pope Francis in 2015 – has become a monstrous building site, as a colossal 600-ton lighting fixture known as “The Claw” has been constructed to tower over the octagon where the brutal bouts will be held.

In a city of awe-inspiring monuments, military memorials and neoclassical statuary, this ugly spectacle has already been nicknamed “the trailer park on Pennsylvania Avenue.” There is also horror that the weigh-ins are set to be held at the Lincoln Memorial (on the steps of which Martin Luther King Jr delivered his “I Have A Dream” speech in 1963).

As you might expect, this recoil has only encouraged Trump, who, on June 2, ambitiously compared the Claw to the Eiffel Tower: “[it’s] quite attractive to a lot of people… maybe we’ll never ever take it down.” The words “quite attractive” really are doing a lot of work there, aren’t they?

His excitement has doubtless been stoked by the fact that the big night – its seven-fight, all-male main card headlined by a world lightweight title bout between current champion Ilia “El Matador” Topuria and Justin “The Highlight” Gaethje – is a significant birthday celebration.

Notionally, of course, the birthday in question is the nation’s, and the event, as its neon-lettered title indicates, is supposed to be the grand launch of the festivities to mark the 250^th anniversary of American independence. In another patriotic flourish, June 14 is also Flag Day, honouring the resolution adopted by the Second Continental Congress in 1777 to approve the design of the Stars and Stripes.

But if the 4,000-strong crowd does not sing “Happy Birthday” to Trump himself, who just happens to turn 80 on Sunday, I will eat someone’s MAGA hat.

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For White, The Ultimate Fighter, which started life on Spike TV, became a break-out hit and a game-changer for the UFC, introducing millions to the sport. For Trump, 14 seasons as host of NBC’s The Apprentice were the true basis of his presidential candidacy – much more so than his chequered business career.

In their different ways, prospective politician and ambitious fight promoter understood two things: first, that the gravitational force of the entertainment industry, global and digitised, was now irresistible and would swallow up politics, sport and everything else.

Second, they spotted a huge and growing market among restless young men who believed they were being sidelined by the alleged “feminisation” of mainstream culture and sought a return to the old rites of masculinity. According to Cage Kings (2023), Michael Thomsen’s definitive history of the UFC, McGregor, at the height of his powers, was simply baffled by anti-Trump protests, “as strange as seeing people boo the hero in a theater at the end of a movie.”

Though I am sure neither the president nor White has read Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1996), both have turned on its head the novel’s warning that unfettered male aggression leads to fascistic disaster.

“We are the middle children of history,” says the charismatic men’s cult leader Tyler Durden, “raised by television to believe that someday we’ll be millionaires and movie stars and rock stars, but we won’t. And we’re just learning this fact…So don’t fuck with us.”

Palahniuk meant this as a warning. What Trump and White have done is to channel this fury as the rocket fuel of power and profit. Which is why Sunday’s fight night is an absolutely authentic spectacle of where MAGA has led us.

TKO, the parent company of UFC, is spending $60 million on the event and expects to lose at least $30 million. Not to worry: the global streaming of the event on Paramount+ (a subsidiary of Paramount Sundance, chaired by close Trump ally David Ellison) will more than make up for it in “earned media” – publicity that isn’t paid advertising (for those interested: in the UK, the event will be shown live on TNT Sports, then available on HBO Max).

So, assuming the night goes off without a hitch, White and the UFC (now valued at around $23 billion) will be just fine. For Trump, the omens are different.

For a start, Rogan – already strongly critical of the war with Iran – has offered only lukewarm support for the White House extravaganza. In a podcast posted on March 20, he said that the whole thing was “kind of a gimmick… I’ll be there, but I’m not thrilled about it. It just doesn’t seem like a wise idea.”

Meanwhile, well-known fighters have very publicly denounced UFC Freedom 250 in a way that would have been unthinkable only a year ago. Over the weekend, bantamweight Bryce “Thug Nasty” Mitchell said that “it’s literally world war III, we’re bombing innocent children in another country. And instead of focusing on that and the gas price is doubling… ‘Oh, we’re gonna have a birthday party for Donald Trump.’”

Reigning UFC middleweight champion Sean Strickland claims he has been banned from the event because of what he has said about Israel’s government and the Epstein scandal. “Apparently, I’m not American enough to go to Freedom 250,” he said in an Instagram clip last week. “I still got my ticket, so maybe we’ll just go, I’ll bring the belt, and we’ll just stand outside the gate.”

Plenty of UFC fighters still support Trump, of course, and will demonstrate as much on the big night. But this level of outspoken dissent in their ranks marks a new and significant fissure. It also maps onto the collapse of support for the president among younger men in general.

True, his approval ratings have dropped in most demographic groups. But the young male voters – of all ethnicities – who helped get him across the line in 2024 are now seriously disillusioned.

In the presidential contest, 56% of men aged 18-29 voted for him. In February, 61% of them said that he was not fulfilling his “America First” promises; 58% believed he had negatively affected their financial situation; overall, he was 34% underwater with the very group that embraced his shtick most enthusiastically.

The 2024 election was one of the most acutely gendered in history: Trump’s lead among men was 10-12 points. All those bros who bought what he was selling: they hated woke; they were done being told to apologise for who they were; they wanted to be and act like guys again.

And what has happened? More wars in the Middle East, gas at $6 a gallon, and a president who sneers at the word “affordability”.

They haven’t become Gavin Newsom liberals or Zohran Mamdani stans. They’re more like disappointed customers who expected empowerment and a better life and ended up getting more of the same.

In 19 months, we have gone from the Fight Club election to the collapse of the coalition that made Trump’s victory possible. “Don’t fuck with us,” warned Tyler Durden – but he did anyway.

In the end, it was always going to be Trump who beat Trump. The Democrats still don’t have a clue how to deal with him, much less the electoral forces that have twice delivered the presidency.

But his boredom is now so obvious, his indifference to the economic plight of ordinary Americans barely concealed, his leadership of the “Epstein class” toxic, his family’s kleptocratic corruption utterly brazen. His genius for the demotic has faded.

As every fight promoter knows, when it’s over, it’s over. Some fighters realise that in time, but most don’t.

Trump still has more than two and a half years left in office. But you can see that the hunger, the political agility, the ring smarts are deserting him.

So he’ll get his big fight night birthday celebration and go on to claim it was a historic occasion. But, under the floodlights, with the right kind of eyes, he might look into the octagon and see two versions of himself: one, with a perfectly timed combo, knocking the other out.