UFC White House = Peak Dana White?
Will Donald Trump's 80th be the Apex of Dana's career?
The cover of TIME Magazine may not be the mighty cultural monolith that it was 30 years ago, but this is still pretty iconic for UFC CEO Dana White.
Dana’s TIME feature is part of a media blitz Dana is doing that also included a chat with NPR host Steve Inskeep, a Rolling Stone feature interview, and an appearance on The New Yorker’s politics podcast.
It’s interesting to watch the WME Group Flywheel in action, even if, in this instance, it’s a pretty routine “big star does major MSM outlets to promote a high-profile event” media tour rather than something more subtle.
Ironically, talking to MSM reporters who are new to the UFC beat is always a gimme for Dana. He has about as much chance of getting a tough question from NPR as he does from the Nelk Boys.
There’s no better platform for a repeat of the Zuffa Myth (or the new “Donald Trump was the guardian angel of the early UFC” myth) than a large audience MSM platform hosted by a credulous talking head who wants to do a puff piece and move on down the road.
When the MSM gets tough, Dana gets uncomfortable
This doesn’t always work, though, as we saw when Dana guested on The Breakfast Club with Charlamagne tha God and got serious pushback for “glazing” President Trump:
And it got even worse for Dana when Charlamagne asked him about the infamous New Year’s Eve 2022 brawl between Dana and his wife that got captured on video and released by TMZ:
Charlamagne: If a UFC fighter was caught on camera.
Dana White: It's happened.
Charlamagne: Oh, it's happened?
Oh, God. And that's why you- I wonder would they have been treated the same way.
Dana: You know what's funny is that, it's not funny, but I used to say that you don't recover from those. Those are ones you don't recover from.
Charlamagne: But you did.
Dana: I did.
Charlamagne: Do you think being the boss protected you from consequences that employees or athletes-
Dana: No, definitely not.
Charlamagne: No, definitely, Dana, come on.
Dana: Listen, there's a board of directors. There's other people that are involved that could have pushed for (Dana to step aside). But yeah, I think that, and obviously they think too, it would have hurt the company more if I did step away.
Oof. I’m sure whoever booked that interview for Dana got to hear about this one later.
Dana working for POTUS Trump
But let’s get to the TIME Magazine piece. The whole thing is a must-read for Dana White watchers, but the only quotes from the story that are essential for our purposes are these very revealing bits about how Dana White successfully works over US President Donald Trump on behalf of TKO sponsors:
After the UFC announced it had signed a sponsorship deal with Bud Light that fall, critics on the right hammered White. At the time, many conservatives were rebelling against Bud Light for partnering with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney on a customized beer can. White appealed to Trump, making the case that Anheuser-Busch wasn’t some woke company, but in fact a staunch supporter of first responders, military families, and farmers. In a February 2024 Truth Social post, Trump parroted many of White’s talking points. “Anheuser-Busch is a Great American Brand that perhaps deserves a Second Chance?” Trump wrote. The blowback subsided. “I think I’d support him for anything,” says Trump now. “Smart guy, very smart guy, and he’s going to do the right thing.”
And also the parts about how Dana worked for Trump’s second election in 2024:
Going into the 2024 election, White helped broker appearances for Trump on shows popular with young men, connecting him with the Nelk Boys; Will Compton and Taylor Lewan of Bussin’ With the Boys; Adin Ross; Theo Von.
…
Then White caught the big kahuna. For eight years, he had been asking Joe Rogan, who’s been calling UFC bouts since 2002, to have Trump guest on his wildly influential podcast. Finally, Rogan relented: Trump spent three hours with Rogan in October 2024, a conversation that now has more than 62 million views on YouTube.
While on a flight to Mar-a-Lago the day before the election, White says he was “blowing up” Rogan’s phone, trying to get him to publicly endorse Trump. “I was grinding on that thing right down to the last minute,” he says. That night, at a rally in Pittsburgh, Trump announced the news: Rogan had backed him. During his election-night victory celebration, Trump called White to the podium. “Dana! Dana! Dana!” Trump’s supporters yelled.
And finally, some key details on the upcoming UFC White House event in a couple of weeks:
UFC staffers have made more than a dozen planning visits to D.C. in the past three months; the organization is installing temporary seats on the South Lawn and will have to foot the bill for damaged grass. The UFC will bring in an 87-ft. canopy to light the Octagon, more than double the height of a typical UFC grid. White insisted on the extra room to ensure that nothing obstructs the White House TV shot.
White says the UFC will lose approximately $30 million on the event.
It will be interesting to see if the bosses of TKO come to regard UFC White House as another one of Dana’s expensive follies, like the Fall 2024 UFC 306 event held at the Las Vegas Sphere, which went $20 million over its production budget, leading TKO to bring in Turki Alalshikh to drop 8 figures for a Riyadh Season sponsorship of the card.
I’m also curious if anyone in the TKO or WME C-Suites are reading Trump’s current polling numbers with younger voters — i.e., the UFC fanbase — because I’m not sure a savvy trader would go $30 million long on a guy who is polling at 30% with the key customer demo.
But it seems like they’re all-in with Trump, as we can see from Dana’s aggressive pushing of a new Zuffa myth that Trump was a key early ally of the UFC when Dana and the Fertittas first took it over.
Luke Thomas recently put that spin on blast, but that hasn’t stopped many others from credulously repeating it ad nauseam.
The “Trump was a huge early backer of the UFC” myth is used as the explanation for Dana White’s abandoning the UFC’s long-held policy of political neutrality in 2016.
Former UFC PR head Ant Evans rebutted those claims on X:
Former head of UFC PR here.
Trump's name didn't appear in a single press release, one-sheet briefing, talking point, UFC-produced document, book, or piece of content before 2016.
The only time I recall his name being mentioned within my own earshot was execs laughing about his involvement with the money-pit that was Affliction MMA.
This narrative is simply false.
Is the UFC monopoly a necessary and good thing?
And speaking of false narratives, this embedded video below has been getting quite a bit of play online, and I really need to say something about it. It’s a smart mark MMA fan doing a car blog, lecturing other fans for being ungrateful about UFC’s current contributions to our favorite sport.
Some key quotes:
I Am Saturday: The MMA industry period would not exist or at least not have the success that it does without the UFC (monopolizing the sport) point blank period.
As a sport, MMA would be right now boxing, which is an utter shitshow, an utter shitshow, if they did not wipe out all competition and create a unified league feel, which they’ve done.
There needed to be some sort of monopoly in order to grow the sport to the point where it’s at right now this is the same thing as blaming the NFL for quote-unquote monopolizing football or the MLB for monopolizing baseball baseball or the NBA or any other major promotion or association or league.
Let’s not harp on the idea that the UFC is the villain here. They’re not. They’re the reason the sport exists.
First off, the UFC leapt into the American mainstream via the success of The Ultimate Fighter on Spike TV in 2005.
That was long before Zuffa monopolized the sport.
In 2005, the UFC wasn’t even the top MMA promotion in the world.
That honor belonged to PRIDE and its main competitors in Japan (as in the US, MMA’s peak in that country occurred when multiple successful promoters were competing).
For several successive years in the 2000s, Pride, K-1 Dynamite, and Antonio Inoki all put on massively successful cards that were broadcast on Japanese network television and drew millions of viewers, including a record 54 million viewers for Bob Sapp vs. Sumo legend Akebono Tarō on K-1’s 2003 Dynamite card.
Sadly, corruption allegations linking MMA promoters to Japan’s criminal yakuza organizations brought the golden age of Japanese MMA to an end in 2007 when the promoters lost their network TV deals, and PRIDE sold out to Zuffa.
MMA Weekly recently paid tribute to the 19th anniversary of the infamous Roppongi Hills press conference with Dana White & Lorenzo Fertitta in Japan:
In the U.S., the UFC’s years of most rapid growth (2005-2010) occurred in an atmosphere of fierce competition that saw Elite XC draw millions of eyeballs on CBS with star attractions Kimbo Slice and Gina Carano while the UFC was doing banner business on PPV and Spike TV.
After Affliction MMA and Elite XC collapsed, the UFC’s 2011 purchase of Strikeforce ended the era of competitive MMA in the U.S.
All of the major TV viewership records set by the UFC on Spike TV (10 million viewers for The Ultimate Fighter episode featuring Kimbo Slice vs Roy Nelson) or Elite XC on CBS stood unmatched by the UFC until this year, when the sport returned to CBS.
The UFC’s pay-per-view numbers indeed peaked in the 2014-2016 Conor McGregor/Ronda Rousey era, but the sport of MMA was plenty mainstream and successful in the US between 2005 and 2010, long before Zuffa attained a monopsony on MMA talent for the UFC in 2011.
Sorry for the long history lesson, but the point is, no, MMA is not better because the UFC monopolized it.
MMA had plenty of big box office attractions and business before the UFC monopolized the sport after PRIDE’s death.
UFC has made billions of dollars while distributing less than 20% of revenues to fighters. The vast majority of the profit went right into the pockets of our favorite casino owners and the Kings of Hollywood. Today’s sport, in the cage or outside of it, doesn’t capture the same emotion or drama that it once used to.
Which means you are left arguing about commercial success. Lots of people know what UFC is. That awareness is a mile wide and an inch deep. It does not mean the sport is in a better place.
Adam Kovacs recently argued that we are in the beginning stages of a combat sports boom, thanks to institutional financial support of TKO and the rise of influencer promotions.
In this so-called “attention economy,” maybe MMA is currently successful. But that completely ignores the previous record-breaking ratings that MMA drew a generation ago on broadcast TV.
The most irritating part about This Is Saturday’s case for fans to support the UFC monopoly on MMA is the way he conflates the UFC with leagues like the NFL, NBA, and MLB.
First off, all of those sports leagues present players with over a dozen billion-dollar entities that could potentially bid for their services. The NFL is a cartel with many owners, the UFC is a promotion with a single owner.
The major sports leagues got antitrust exemptions from the U.S. government in part for this reason, but also because their athletes are unionized and protected by collective bargaining provisions in their contracts.
That’s why the TKO is lobbying for the Muhammad Ali American Boxing Revival Act to act as a quasi antitrust exemption when paired with arbitration and class action waivers.
Having seen the quality of the UFC product decline relentlessly after a decade of WME/TKO ownership, I see no reason for fans to do Dana White’s job for him.
That’s not only because he hasn’t been a good steward for the sport, but more importantly, it’s because Dana allows himself to be used as a rodeo clown for the TKO brass.
Dana White out there soaking up media attention takes some political heat off of Donald Trump, and also, Dana taking the spotlight means his boss Ari Emanuel can keep his distance from MAGA while remaining close to the President.
That relationship comes in mighty handy when Ari needs to lobby Trump on behalf of Ticket Master or help out a friend like David Ellison get Trump’s support for the creation of the Paramount-WBD media empire.
And Dana White might be a bit of a bumbling and hapless spokesman (check him out trying to use ChatGPT to bust Eddie Hearn’s chops, but falling prey to the hallucination-prone AI machine instead), but with the WME/TKO flywheel running, that’s fine.
Meanwhile, the MSM is only too happy to engage in a Great Pretending that Dana is the sole mastermind behind the UFC. Sure, he’s involved, but the UFC machine runs without him. Yet we are presented with article after article pretending that Dana White is the sole driver of the UFC machine. It’s the worst kind of Pravda narrative imaginable.
And if Trump’s incompetence and corruption lead to a dramatic collapse in his support, the TKO brass can always dump Dana and find a new clown to put in front of the circus.
Nate Wilcox is the Editor-in-Chief of The MMA Draw. He founded Bloody Elbow in 2007 and sold it in 2024.