Dana White, Donald Trump and the rise of cage-match politics
Dana White’s diplomatic ambitions were clear, if complicated: Un-cancel Bud Light. He had some calls to make. As the CEO of the Las Vegasbased UFC, White was the arena-filling, Trump-loving, perpetually smirking public face of a multibillion-dollar sport.
But in completing a reported nine-figure deal last fall to make Bud Light the UFC’S official beer sponsor, White suddenly stood accused of selling out: Much of the political right — and, not incidentally, much of the UFC’S audience — had been pulverizing Bud Light for months over a promotion featuring a transgender influencer. The brand, which first worked with the UFC more than 15 years earlier, was plainly hoping that a renewed affiliation might help its cause.
Publicly, White appealed to friends across conservative media, defending Bud Light’s parent company in interviews with Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and Charlie Kirk.
“The fact that Anheuser-busch wants to be in business with me?” White said, arguing that this alone demonstrated the success of the backlash.
Privately, White presented the lucrative sponsorship as a matter of principle (“We don’t cancel people,” he told one confidant) and helped hasten a detente. During a fight night at Madison Square Garden in New York in November, Kid Rock — who had urged the Bud Light boycott — had “a great conversation” with Anheuser-busch’s CEO in White’s green room, the musician later said. The boycott was soon off.
When a final holdout, former President Donald Trump, continued hammering the company in February, White spoke to him by phone, according to people briefed on the conversation, and Trump was sheepish about causing any headaches.
Within days, Trump suggested on social media that Anheuser-busch deserved “a second chance,” ticking through talking points that sounded suspiciously like White’s.
Weeks later, before a sellout crowd in Miami, the two walked out together to rapturous applause, taking their seats cageside to watch White’s fighters bleed and rumble across the canvas’ unmissable Bud Light logo.
In a cultural era stocked with blusterers, wheeler-dealers and ideologically pliable political players, perhaps no one (with the possible exception of Trump) has been more ostentatiously effective at anticipating this American moment and harnessing it toward his ends.
Perched at the intersection of sports, business and the forever culture wars — while insisting, unpersuasively, that his is the rare sport unconcerned with such politics — White, 54, has steered his once-teetering cage-fighting enterprise to the carnivorous heart of the national mainstream.
He dines with Emirati royals and takes meetings beside a saber-toothed tiger skull in his Las Vegas office. He salutes and antagonizes the trained destroyers in his workforce, depending on the day.
He is the P.T. Barnum of people choking each other into submission, if P.T. Barnum also hawked a line of canned whiskey and cola and bet $100,000 per blackjack hand.
“He was born in the perfect time,” Mike Tyson, a close friend, said in an interview.
Yet beyond any feat of commerce in building his combat sport into a global juggernaut, White has emerged as a vital ally to the former (and maybe future) president, carefully tending a mutually invaluable friendship that stretches more than 20 years.
From the early 2000s, when Trump’s imprimatur helped buttress a down-and-out UFC, through his White House tenure as “Combatant in Chief” (as the UFC has hailed him), the two men have worked to enshrine mixed martial arts as the MAGA movement’s semiofficial sport.
In a statement provided by his campaign, Trump called White “a special person and a tremendous businessman,” praising the UFC and the “loyal friend” who leads it.
Like Don King and Vince Mcmahon before him, White has become Trump’s conduit to modern fight fans, whose demographics track neatly with an essential chunk of the remodeled Republican base: young, male, not steeped in back issues of National Review.
More than anything, the UFC has supplied Trump with a consistent safe harbor since he left office, buoying him through his political nadir after the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot and his gusher of legal problems.
Trump’s first major sporting event as a twice-impeached, quasi-radioactive civilian in 2021 was a UFC fight card. After Trump’s indictment in Manhattan last year, he turned up days later at another UFC event, to chants of “USA!”
Rarely an energetic campaigner in his 2024 Republican primary, Trump could accrue the benefits of a proper rally — including fawning coverage from favored outlets — simply by attending fights.
“Donald Trump Sends UFC 296 Crowd Into Utter Frenzy After Making His Entrance Like a Complete Boss,” The Daily Caller enthused in December.
“His base is Trump’s base,” Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s former White House counselor, said of White. “And Trump’s base is his base.”
If White and Trump see some of themselves in each other despite their disparate beginnings — White is a former Boston hotel bellman without a college degree — this is reasonable enough.
White, too, speaks with “believe me” bravado about the ways of the world: winners and losers, wusses and “killers.”
He loves a camera and hates the news media — or at least makes a show of his disdain — giving fans ample content for Youtube sizzle reels of White dismissing critics, reporters, COVID. (White, through the UFC, declined to be interviewed.)
He has survived scandals that might have felled most contemporaries, suffering little consequence last year after he was videotaped slapping his wife at a nightclub.
He takes a long view of publicity (“You have to embrace the negativity, too,” White has said) but dwells more than occasionally on those who have underestimated him.
“Bet against me,” he is fond of saying.
Such is the creed of the rampaging optimist.
“He’s America, man,” said Ari Emanuel, the CEO of Endeavor, a key business partner since a $4 billion acquisition in 2016 that left White in charge.
At minimum, those who know White say, he seems to understand his times.
In interviews with allies, associates and rivals through the decades, many were quickest to flag his abiding pre-trump foresight about where his life, and everyone’s, seemed to be headed.
Did he fill a need or create one? Did he anticipate America circa 2024 — the collective stomach for a certain kind of gruesome spectacle, the period of national combat beyond the cage — or did he help make it so?
The answers are yes, friends say, and White’s explanation is simple.
“America has become so soft,” he said in a television interview last year, pinching his fingers together. “If you even have this much savage in you, everything out there right now is for the taking.”
White’s most-hyped recent pursuit, a slap-fighting operation known as Power Slap, has doubled as a kind of referendum on his persuasive powers: Is there any limit to what White can sell?
“It’s like a Youtuber,” said Eddie Hearn, a boxing promoter who is friendly with him. “Once you build a profile, you have the ability to grow anything.”
As with the UFC, whose 300th pay-per-view event last weekend has been celebrated as a signal achievement, White insists that his slap league will be a phenomenon in due time. (In November, he claimed that the league, wherein competitors take turns whacking each other without being able to deflect the blows, was already a $450 million business.)
Reviews have been mixed. White’s slap-fighting venture also rhymed grimly with a dark turn in his personal life: Last year, a video emerged showing White and his wife, Anne, slapping each other during an argument at a New Year’s Eve party in Mexico.
White had once said that “putting your hands on a woman” was the “one thing that you never bounce back from.”
“Been that way in the UFC since we started,” he said in 2014.
While White has since apologized for making his children “see their dumb, drunk parents slapping each other on TMZ,” major business partners stayed largely silent.
An incorrigible name-dropper, White can make a spectacle of how interconnected his exclusive orbit has become:
“I lost 20 grand to Snoop on that game. …”
“I tell Brady this all the time. …” (That would be Tom.)
“@zuck,” White posted simply on Instagram after Mark Zuckerberg posed with him at a recent fight, displeasing some fans who view the Meta CEO as an enemy to conservatives. (“Bud Light now this?” one commenter wrote.)
Asked if more formal campaigns might await him, White has sworn he is not interested in entering politics.
“Hell no,” he told ESPN’S Pat Mcafee in February, to which Mcafee replied that White “kind of” already has.
At least one man likes White’s ambitions just as they are.
Speaking at a rally in Georgia last month, Trump told the crowd that he had big plans that evening: the UFC fights in Miami with friends.
“Dana White,” he said, naming only one of them. “He’s done a great job.”
Cheers went up instantly. The candidate noticed.
“Ooohhh,” Trump said. “I hope he doesn’t run for office against me.”