History is a hype reel
On UFC Freedom 250
Fml
For a few hours, it looked like a toss-up whether “UFC Freedom 250,” a combat sports spectacle held on the South Lawn of the White House on the occasion of Donald Trump’s eightieth birthday, would actually happen. Severe thunderstorms were blowing in from West Virginia — where I live, and where I briefly lost power. The swamp heaved with humidity; mosquitos swarmed. On Polymarket, one of UFC Freedom 250’s sponsors, odds of a weather delay or cancellation were at 78.5 percent half an hour before the scheduled start time. In the comments, one user was panicking. Apparently the bot they were using to place bets was malfunctioning, and it had bought 2500 shares of Yes. “Omg I can’t cancel my buys fml,” they wrote.
I had heard about the plan to hold an Ultimate Fighting Championship event at the White House — the fruit of Trump’s friendship with combat-sports carnival barker Dana White — but I forgot all about it until I saw a post on X from Jack Posobiec, the former unofficial Game of Thrones blogger and current unofficial government negotiator. The post showed a video from the preshow “Fan Fest,” in which motorcycles tumbled through the air over the White House’s South Fountain. Looming overhead was the metal arc of The Claw, an arena specially built for the occasion, framing the whole scene. “The Left has no response to this,” Posobiec wrote. This is the clenched anhedonia we’re used to seeing from conservative commentators in the second Trump term. All this blood sport, all these pyrotechnics, and the only thing that can get them off, apparently, is making up a guy and imagining him getting really mad at them.
The left was owned! Now the pre-show was getting underway. Roll highlights. A falconer releasing a bald eagle. The Zac Brown Band playing what seemed to be only the patriotic final verse of “Chicken Fried,” the one about saluting the troops. And then after a slight delay, the clouds parted, miraculously skirting the city — the mandate of heaven. There were mats all over the White House, and MMA guys were milling around. It was a strange imbrication of different orders of reality. The prerecorded introductory sequence ratcheted up the incongruity: it depicted footage of classic UFC moments projected onto the surfaces of the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, the Reflecting Pool. How is the UFC like the National Mall? Ron Perlman’s voiceover narration sweated to make the connection: “The monuments remain. Because greatness isn’t measured only in the moment, but how long the world remembers.”
Culminary
Men in the world’s tightest suits sat in the White House. They hulked in their chairs, jittering with jock-in-history-class energy. One couldn’t stop tapping his foot. “I cannot believe where I am right now!” one said. “This is the culminary of any athlete’s life,” I thought I heard another say. Culminary: a beautiful non-word. It should be a word. The culmination, but culinary; so close you can taste it. Like a corollary, but flavorful; a palate cleanser or a dessert. Echoes of pulmonary, intimating the collapsed lungs suffered by some UFC fighters after especially brutal fights — but zestful.
Walkout
The juxtaposition of the UFC with the iconography of executive pomp and circumstance has revealed something: “Hail to the Chief” is a walkout song. When Trump and Dana White started making their way to the South Lawn, however, it was preceded by an ominous extended introduction. As the camera began to track their progress from the front, West Wing-style, a lone funereal bell sounded. It reminded me of the music that plays when you fight Rayquaza in Pokémon Emerald.
There was no presidential speech. Someone yelled “HAPPY BIRTHDAY!” Then Zac Brown sang the national anthem, and the Blue Angels and the Air Force Thunderbirds soared overhead. Joe Rogan revealed himself, taking a break from his job as an ideological pipeline-greaser to resume his original gig, commentating on fights. Bud Light was announced as a sponsor, finally back in MAGA’s good graces after a multi-year campaign to win back conservatives. At a press conference last month, the heavyweight heel Josh Hokit had delivered a WWE-style taunt to fellow fighter Alex Pereira: “I’m gonna give Pereira a golden shower!” Now perhaps we were all getting one. In a promotional graphic, foamy Bud Light was sloshing across the screen, Andres Serrano yellow.
Riyadh Season
The commercials and sponsor shout-outs were a roll call of MAGA’s corporate constituents, with a little bit of military recruitment sprinkled in. There was sports betting: Bet365, Sleeper, Polymarket, Prizepicks, DraftKings, Kalshi. There was crypto: Exodus Pay, NinjaTrader, Trump Coins. There was hard defense tech — Anduril, with an ad that evoked Call of Duty, and Starlink — and soft, with Meta AI announcing that they would be donating wearables to blind veterans. There was something called “Riyadh Season,” a mega-event in the Saudi capital that lasts for six months. The now-familiar genre of MAGA TV had a big showing too, with ads for shows with names like Lioness, Dutton Ranch, and The Agency. One ad for the Navy’s special forces, organized around the Cheneyan theme of real heroes working “in the shadows,” played incessantly.
Many of the commercials featured either Joe Rogan or Dana White, and I had a hard time telling them apart. One of them starred in a Ram commercial that started with what looked like A.I. video of Paul Revere’s ride and ended with the bald man, Joe/Dana, in some kind of culvert, advancing on the camera. The tagline was “In Loud We Trust.”
UFC Freedom 250 was streamed on Paramount Plus — one of the lesser Plusses, but one for which I recently discovered I had been paying without realizing it. The Trump-allied Ellison family took over Paramount last year, and they wasted no time applying their ideological animus to their new holdings. They tapped Bari Weiss to bring her anti-woke crusade to CBS News. Now it seems the DOJ has cleared the last obstacle to their acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, another vast media conglomerate that houses, among other properties, CNN. The whole evening was a spectacle of consolidation: entertainment moguls, crypto bros, polymarketeers, A.I. killbot merchants, and Saudi blood money, all united to kiss the ring. It came out in the lead-up to the event that the Trump Organization even owns part of TKO Group, the UFC’s parent company. Call it a public-private partnership.
Aura
The portion of UFC Freedom 250 that wasn’t devoted to commercials mostly consisted of prerecorded highlight reels — each fighter’s “hype edits and aura moments,” as the writer Eli Schoop aptly put it. These reels had a music-video quality. The majority of them were set to what we now call “butt rock”: Godsmack, Skillet, two separate Kid Rock songs. Josh Hokit’s walkout music dipped into butt rock’s prehistory; it was probably the first time, but maybe not the last time, the Marine Band played a song by Rick Derringer. During one live interlude, the British fighter Tyson Fury emerged to a clunky mashup of “American Pie” (played by the Marine Band) and “Sex on Fire” (prerecorded). He wore a hat that said DONALD TRUMP FOR PRIME MINISTER.
Ronald Reagan’s fertile soil was subjected to vigorous aura farming. Halfway through the proceedings, we were treated to one of his Flag Day speeches, set to grainy footage of the Gipper at Camp David, which then gave way to a sub-Grok A.I. video rendering of Francis Scott Key’s experience as a captive aboard a British ship during the War of 1812. Reagan presided over it all, through the power of montage, in his tipped cap and yellow polo. History is a hype reel from which we are trying to swipe away.
The fights
There were seven fights. The main event came last: a twenty-minute slugout in which the American Justin Gaethje upset the lightweight favorite Ilia Topuria, leaving his face a bloody slush. The preceding fights were less brutal, though they all ended by either KO or TKO. I found my unrefined notes were truer to the experience than a smooth paragraph:
SECOND FIGHT: BO NICKAL VS KYLE DAUKAUS
Daukaus looks like Ryan Gosling Ken
NICKAL takes him down in like 10 seconds. It’s a grapple. So intimate wriggling. Do they whisper in each other’s ears?
POLYMARKET
NICKAL delivers swift beatdown. GODSMACK plays
Then YMCA
Zuckerberg daps him up ringside.
The winner of each fight got the opportunity to be interviewed by Joe Rogan. The Brazilian fighter Maurício Ruffy, a lithe technical striker, used the occasion to propose to his girlfriend. Hokit used it to say, “MICHELLE OBAMA IS A MAN.” Rogan responded to both stunts with perfunctory congratulations and the same blank grin. Damn, you could almost hear him thinking, that’s crazy.
Roman Empire
Was all of this bread and circuses? A sop to the hooting masses while the empire flails? On TV, a former DHS chief of staff under the previous Trump administration bewailed “America’s Roman moment.” Others took a different tack: it’s a Roman moment, and that’s good actually. One such post on X read, “I love that we’re the new Rome. Peace with Persia in the afternoon and a gladiator fight in the evening, all on the Emperor’s birthday. Another 1,000 years.” And another: “whoever said bread and circuses were bad neglected to consider what if the circuses were really fucking cool.”
What if bread and circuses were epic and based? What if Zac Brown was there? What if the unsustainability, the sheer futility, of your vision of the good life was exactly what made that vision so attractive? Sure, this was a sleight of hand especially well-timed with what looks like an all-time diplomatic defeat in Iran. And sure, the Trump family may make money off UFC Freedom 250 in the short term. But the event was also profligate, wasteful for the sake of waste: one last potlatch to own the libs. The thousand-year reich isn’t the right chronotope. The right one is — to quote a ubiquitous bit of A.I. slop advertising fake concert tours by legacy artists, especially endemic to Facebook — one last ride. One last squeeze of the profit machine, one last push for data centers before the whole thing combusts, one last chance to expel or exterminate the immigrants, one last shot at total hemispheric dominance through shock and awe.
After the event, the FBI announced that it had foiled a plot to attack some of the VIP attendees from the air with explosive drones. The alleged would-be attackers need not have bothered. UFC Freedom 250 was above all a spectacle of self-annihilation. Its ultimate message, as Daniel Kolitz wrote of gooning last year, was kill yourself. Hold the coin until it’s worthless. Wrap yourself in a tissue of hallucination until the real world can no longer make you feel anything. Take the punches, take the kicks, spit out some teeth and take some more, until you are pulverized meat — and enjoy!
Mitch Therieau is a writer and English professor living in West Virginia. His latest piece for The Drift, Issue Seventeen’s “Into the Right-Wing Dreamworld,” examined the Trump administration’s visual imagination.
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The Hungerous Gourmand Games.
Potlatch is such a good term for the spectacle. The good were flesh and blood.