A UFC takeover: Donald Trump's dreams of a migrant fighting league are no joke

I said, 'Dana [referring to Dana White, CEO of UFC], I have an idea. Why don't you set up a migrant league of fighters and have your regular league of fighters. And then you have the champion of your league – these are the greatest fighters in the world – fight the champion of the migrants. I think the migrants’ guy might win, that’s how tough they are.

Donald Trump’s first public appearance after his recent felony conviction wasn’t a campaign rally or political fundraiser. It was an Ultimate Fighting Championship event. Earlier this month, the raucous, mostly male crowd gave the former president a hero’s welcome as he walked into the arena to the song “American Bad Ass” by Kid Rock. Then, they took up an anti-Biden chant. The choice of venue won’t surprise anyone who’s been paying attention to conservative masculinity lately. For Trump, a professional fight is a political space, and his appearance there is a strategic choice….

As a scholar who studies conservative media, I see the manosphere and its mainstream relatives as part of a new conservative culture war. Right-wing influencers are once again using social issues to distract working-class people from their economic struggles, just as Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck and other Fox News pundits did in the early 2000s with issues like gay marriage and the “War on Christmas.”

These efforts succeed because they speak to real feelings of hopelessness about the future, lack of opportunity, and alienation and loneliness that are common today, particularly among young men. Drawing on a well-worn conservative playbook, the manosphere culture war redirects blame away from economic elites and heightened inequality to feminism and “woke” culture.

Before I discuss the politics of the UFC, I want to say that I have been a lifelong fan since UFC 1, its first pay-per-view event in 1993. I was a standout wrestler in my Utah high school, and I still practice jiujitsu as an aging professor. In short, I am no stranger to the UFC and to the broader culture of mixed martial arts. But, much like my horror in watching how the Bush administration weaponized country music—a genre I love and grew up on—to support the Iraq invasion in 2003, it is even more disturbing to see how Trump is actively mobilizing the UFC fan base to support his second attempt to dismantle our democratic system.

In the 1968 presidential election, the notorious segregationist Alabama Governor George Wallace used the audience data of country music radio stations to plan the locations of his political rallies. Trump is doing something similar with the UFC. He is actively trying to convert a young, multiethnic (mostly male) audience of fight fans into a potentially powerful political constituency. Trump has attended numerous UFC pay view events in just the last year. This seems unprecedented. I can’t recall another candidate in recent political history who has attended this many major sports events in the heart of a presidential election, surely not combat sporting events.

One could say the UFC has exuded a conservative sensibility since its inception with its long ties to military recruitment and advertising and with its ring girls and Hooters sponsorship. But this conservative sensibility was also complicated by the sport’s global appeal and by the ethnic and international diversity of its fighters. Additionally, with Ronda Rousey’s rise to become the face of UFC in the early 2010s, the sport became an unlikely platform for women athletes, particularly those from the LGBTQ community, and for a while, the UFC’s branding even leaned into these seemingly progressive traits. But Dana White's appearance at the 2016 Republican National Convention changed everything. By doing this, White directly injected the UFC brand into the world of electoral politics.

The ties of Trump to the world of combat sports encompass both the real and the fake flavors. He's a crony of UFC's CEO Dana White, and of WWE's disgraced czar, Vince McMahon. The two companies now comprise the TKO Group under Endeavor Group Holdings, which is run by former Hollywood superagent Ari Emanuel, brother of former Chicago mayor and Bill Clinton aide Rahm Emanuel.

Mixed martial arts ties were part of the very first reports of Russian back channels in the Trump White House through fixer lawyer Michael Cohen and short-lived national security adviser Michael Flynn. The vessel was U.S. immigrant and former Ukrainian politician Andrii Artemenko, the only prominent Ukrainian figure known to have backed Trump's 2016 presidential candidacy. The arrangements went all the way back to Trump's fling at promoting legendary fighter Fedor Emelianenko in 2008-09. Emelianenko's manager talked about this relationship on RT, the Putin-puppet network that had Flynn on the payroll.

When Trump expresses a desire to watch migrants crossing the border to be forced to fight each other inside the MMA octagon and then have their champion face off against a hardened professional UFC fighter just to satiate the blood lust of Trump and his millions of UFC fans — then this serves as an official license for other fight fans to follow Trump’s example and desire the same. But it’s Trump’s enablers who reinforce Trump’s culture of cruelty.  During a Sunday edition of Fox & Friends, Rachel Campos-Duffy and her co-host expressed supreme delight at Trump's idea of forming a fighting league for migrants, insisting that Trump's proposal was a "brilliant" idea for his campaign.

While Trump’s disaffected followers are only too happy to join him in creating an Ultimate Fighting Championship culture based on taunts and personal attacks, often related to race and religion, and the thrill of crushing social justice warriors and ‘woke’ liberal elites, they are foot stomping on America’s long-admired empathy for immigrants and vulnerable populations. The UFC has evolved to where the term ‘savage’ and other exaggerated and domineeringly masculine adjectives are frequently used to complement fighters after they have knocked their opponents unconscious.

Young men who are cultivating their identities in such an environment are not doing society, or the martial arts community for that matter, any good. Trump supporters might be titillated by the gladiatorial atmosphere of the Roman arena, when gladiators were forced to fight each other to the death, and find it supremely amusing to imagine migrants—already labelled as rapists, murderers and vermin, as inmates escaped from insane asylums south of US-Mexico border who are poisoning the blood of the country — beat each other into oblivion.  But they need to understand that this says more about them than the migrants whom they relish in their derision.

When Trump suggests that undocumented immigrants are only good for providing amusement for real “legacy” Americans, he is not merely issuing an incendiary remark; as former president of the United States, his comments carry the potency of a demonic spell cast upon countless individuals who have risked life and limb to provide a better future for themselves and their families. We should not compare Trump’s comments to your drunken uncle embarrassing himself at Sunday dinner. This is a highly calculated strategy.  This is part of Trump’s ideological juggernaut and is what makes him the most self-assured and seemingly invincible candidate in the chronicles of American politics. It’s important to recognize how Trump’s demonizing of migrants has a ‘carry over effect’, fueling some of Trump’s most incendiary positions, contributing to the replication of specific associations—excitable affiliations—that young people are learning to make for all “outsiders” and “unwanted others.” Trump’s slanderous comments serve as elements of cultural transmission that will eventually settle into the sedimentary layers of America’s historical memory. In this sense Trump’s remarks are pedagogical. They are teaching young Americans whom to jeer and hate. They are also teaching us about ourselves.