My horrible, no good weekend at the UFC White House fight

If January 6th was violent projectile vomit then the Ultimate Fighting Championship's Freedom 250 event on the south White House lawn this weekend was the miserable subsequent spew of diarrhea from our sick electoral body. 

I spent the weekend ambling around the grounds that sit in the shadow of the Washington Monument, watching as it was transmogrified into a grotesque mishmash of a NASCAR rally and the Gathering of the Juggalos. America's vast, sunburnt underbelly of sunglassed men with names that end in -ayden and their vacant-eyed girlfriends descended on DC to, at least in theory, celebrate President Donald Trump's birthday and watch dudes beat the shit out of each other in a ring sponsored by crypto casinos, the now-unwoke Bud Light, and Saudi real estate, soundtracked by Godsmack and Diddy. The winning fighters received a special red, white, and blue raspberry "liberty juice" from Monster Energy to drink on camera and $425,000 worth of Trump's crypto tokens for their trouble.

I went into this weekend with a fairly open mind. There is something actually endearing about opening up the White House grounds to the public for a fun event that families can go to. But after 48 hours throwing back some of the most disgusting $30 margaritas I've ever had the misfortune of suffering through, my conclusion is that UFC's Freedom 250 could have only been dreamed up by a president and a fighting league that fucking loathes their own supporters. 

I haven't experienced this level of profound pity for the average person attending an event since I used to report on crypto conventions. Which is appropriate, seeing as how Crypto.com was one of the high-level sponsors this weekend. At events like Ethereum Denver and Bitcoin Miami I met the same nice, normal-ish people looking for a good time, dropped seemingly unaware into a system designed to drain every last dollar out of them. If you are a UFC fan and you are reading this, please listen to me. I have now seen the machine up close. UFC CEO Dana White hates you. He doesn't even think you're a human being.

Panic World producer Grant Irving and I won free lottery tickets to the two-day watch party, held on the Ellipse, the area just south of the White House lawn where Trump held his Save America rally right before the insurrection in 2021, incidentally. Behind the giant stage and screens, we could just make out the tip of the UFC's Octagon. Based on the stories we heard from fans we interviewed, I doubt the watch party was sold out. People told us they applied last minute and got accepted. UFC announcers on Sunday claimed there were 85,000 people there. I'd estimate maybe, if we're being extremely generous, there was about half of that.

On Saturday, we showed up early and still waited in line for nearly an hour in the blistering sun before we could get into the park. It got so bad that organizers started half-heartedly throwing water bottles at us. I joked that maybe the delays were because the TSA was running the security, only for my jaw to drop when we reached the gate and discover that, in fact, yes, the TSA was manning the metal detectors. Every guest also had to be searched by a Secret Service agent.

UFC reportedly paid $60 million to hold the fight at the White House. White, in a press conference on Sunday, said they would never do it again because of how expensive it was (they made about half the cost back in sponsorships). But it's unclear if they also paid for all the different law enforcement agencies to work the event. Aside from TSA and Secret Service, I spotted Homeland Security officers, US Park Police, DEA officers, the National Guard, and a whole bunch of local law enforcement. I am the last person to whine about the sanctity of law enforcement, but even I found it monstrous and depressing that our various law enforcement agencies were reduced to festival security.

Once we got into the Ellipse, there was shockingly little to do. You could take a photo in front of a WWE championship belt (both the UFC and the WWE are owned by the TKO Group), drink the aforementioned expensive alcohol, eat at a handful of food stands, take a photo with Monster Energy Drink booth babes, watch a guy rev a car in place at the RAM pop up, visit Meta AI's VR exhibit, and mindlessly stand in the field and watch Turning Point USA commercials play on a loop all day — complete with a Charlie Kirk voiceover. On the second day, they at least added a mechanical bull.

Beyond the TPUSA ads on the big screens, there was very little in the way of actual programming. On Saturday, there were some brief interviews with UFC fighters no one watched, the official weigh-in, which was bungled in ways we'll discuss in a sec, and a performance by the Zac Brown Band, where I watched what was quite possibly the worst guitar solo I've ever heard in my entire life. The night ended with, I'm not kidding, one single firework.

On Sunday, before the fight, there was a live taping of Logan Paul's Impaulsive podcast, which featured the Kick streamer Ninadrama, real name Nina Marie Daniele. The men in the crowd around me all started asking each other who she was. I'm not a prude and I am very aware that the entire weekend was based around a sport where men beat each other to a bloody pulp, but I, again, felt a bottomless pit of despair in my stomach looking around at all the families watching Paul and Daniele talk about how she should sell feet pics and why her Instagram followers keep making jokes about fingering her. Is this the best we can do? Is what we are? If Logan Paul's podcast is the result of 250 years of the American experiment then it was a failed experiment.

Even if the weekend programming had been good, it wouldn't have mattered much. The team running the visuals and sound clearly had no idea what they were doing. During the weigh-in, the wrong graphics and video packages kept playing, and very little of what was happening on stage was filmed. Joe Rogan has never looked smaller than he did on Saturday, flanked by giant men, and even bigger, completely dark screens that someone forgot to turn on.

Though I'm not sure the complete lack of amenities — and places to sit (I guess chairs are woke) — mattered to the UFC diehards that traveled from all over the world to watch the fight on Sunday night. I spoke to fans from across the US, Canada, and even further, none of whom seemed to be thinking particularly deeply about any of this. For what it's worth, they were all fairly nice. And the majority of them didn't even realize the event was connected to Trump's birthday until I reminded them. The big focus, instead, was gambling. Based on my own personal survey of attendees, it was split fairly evenly between FanDuel and DraftKings. And it seems like even the Trumps were trying to get in on the action.

UFC announcer Daniel Cormier is wrapped up in a bizarre controversy at the moment. Right before the match, he posted screenshots to X that were purportedly DMs he had received from Eric Trump, asking if the fights were fixed and who he should bet on. Cormier deleted the post and claimed he was hacked, saying, “I got hacked or something, who believes stuff like this?” But his account did post them, the replies still exist. And Trump posted and deleted a claim that the messages were AI. Here are screenshots of the whole saga if you care.

By the time the fights started on Sunday night, the crowd was drunk and bored. Fights — between eventgoers — broke out across the field. Watch party host Laura Sanko, in between rounds of the professional fights, threw out "$100 cards," which she quickly reminded the crowd were "only good online." Lightning and thunder cracked behind the Octagon, where, inside, the people who actually matter to Trump and White oscillated between open corruption and psychotic jingoism, all of it drenched in such a radioactive level of toxic masculinity that it would, in a sane world, qualify as a mental illness. Between rounds — and naps — the president marveled at the shirtless, bloody brawlers marching through the Oval Office, all of them honored at the chance to subject themselves to traumatic brain injuries in front of the whole country. That is, except for one.

UFC fighter Sean Strickland was chased away by law enforcement at both the press conference on Friday night and the watch party on Sunday and has said that he's banned from the White House. He's been vocal about Trump's ties to Jeffrey Epstein and the bombing of Iran. But Strickland is not the norm. The norm for UFC is Josh Hokit.

Hokit celebrated his victory last night by yelling, "Michelle Obama is a man" into the microphone. The Washington Post reported some in the crowd were booing. Maybe, who knows. The crowd was also booing Hokit all weekend because he plays a heel and riles up fans. I've also seen some pundits on X contort themselves into a pretzel trying to argue that the attendees in DC this weekend were salt-of-the-earth types who just wanted to finally have a good time. That they even deserved a White House fight night after so many years of liberal elites celebrating poetry or art or whatever. You can believe that if you like, but I was standing in that field with them all weekend and I can't play along with the noble savage reimagining of the vape store class. Every single fan I spoke to identified as Republican, but they weren't even enthusiastic ones. It was a sea of people who are conservative in the same way a fish is wet.

I've also seen pundits make some anemic argument that this whole thing was good because this — the gaudy, trashy ugliness — is actually what America looks like. And that our nation's capital should reflect that. Well, fine, ok, if this is what America looks like, I don't want to fucking live here anymore.

It wasn't just the question of "what is America" that loomed over the whole weekend for me, though. I also wondered whether this was all even worth it. Not just White's $60 million investment, but, also, Trump's continued endorsement of hypermasculine gutter culture. Can you feed a political movement with jalapeño vodka slams, Monster Energy Drinks, and potato chip skewers? The modern Republican Party has always been a coalition of vampiric aristocrats and a roving tailgate of redneck dopes, but at least the party of Reagan and Bush was smart enough to LARP as some mythic cowboy archetype. Do the JD Vance's and Marco Rubio's of the world think there is a path forward after Trump if they can capture the "guy who wears an Affliction T-shirt in the pool" vote?

As annoying as this weekend was, however, I actually think it's made me more optimistic about American politics than I've felt in a decade. I have seen what the combined power of Trump's oligarch cronies and their money can do. How weak and lazy it all is. How little impact and support $60 million buys them. A barren field, a sporting event that you had to buy Paramount+ to even watch, a bunch of "celebrities" no one's ever heard of, an undersold free event full of people who literally forgot it was Trump's birthday party! 

And on Saturday night, after filing out of the Zac Brown Band concert, I got back to my hotel, opened up my phone, and saw videos of New Yorkers celebrating not just The Knicks' NBA Finals win, but the city itself. Watch parties so large they spilled out onto the streets around them. An actual community that came together that didn’t need to be bribed with gift cards and crypto giveaways. Which is why I've never been more convinced that this hideous, obnoxious, idiotic era of politics is coming to end. The only people engaging with it are the people who don't give enough of a shit to notice it’s even happening. The fever is breaking.

(I do think they should do like a free summer concert series on the White House Lawn though. I think that'd be neat tbh.)

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