Turning historic grounds into a pay-per-view arena signals a final collapse of political decorum

There are certain things that naturally go together. Peanut butter and jelly, for instance. Bacon and eggs. Pen and paper. Shoes and socks. Bat and ball.

You get the idea.

There are also things that don’t naturally go together. One of them would have certainly been mixed martial arts and politics. It would have been impossible to draw a straight line between these two diametrically opposed disciplines.

Up until recently, that is.

U.S. President Donald Trump announced on July 3, 2025 that the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) would hold a mixed martial arts event at the White House the following year. “Does anybody watch UFC?” Trump asked at a rally at the Iowa State Fairgrounds. “The great Dana White. We’re going to have a UFC fight on the grounds of the White House. We have a lot of land there. Dana’s going to do it. Dana’s great, one of a kind. We’re going to have a UFC fight, a championship fight, like full fight, 20, 25,000 people and we’re going to do that as part of 250 also.”

It’s well known that Trump enjoys the UFC. He hosted UFC 31 at the Trump Taj Mahal on May 4, 2001. He became the first sitting President to attend one of its events, UFC 244, at Madison Square Garden on Nov. 2, 2019. He has a long-standing business relationship and friendship with White, UFC’s President and CEO.

Nevertheless, how was this going to be pulled off?

The White House holds regular events each year. There’s the annual Easter Egg Roll, which began in 1878 under then-President Rutherford B. Hayes. The National Park Service noted that this tradition began after Congress had passed a law in 1876 “forbidding the Capitol grounds to be used as a children’s playground.” The National Christmas Tree Lighting Ceremony began in 1923 when then-President Calvin Coolidge “lit a 48-foot Balsam Fir from Vermont decorated with 2,500 red, white, and green electric bulbs.” The White House Grounds, which are “the oldest continually maintained landscape in the United States,” hold garden tours in the spring and fall.

There have been some unusual one-off events, too.

Then-President Andrew Jackson’s public reception after his inauguration on March 4, 1829, for instance, turned into a chaotic affair with Washington elites and commoners occupying the same space. “Just as the house was not large enough to accommodate the unexpected multitude,” the White House Historical Association noted, “Washington society was not discerning enough to understand the ordinary people who composed it. So it went with its noisy hubbub, fractured manners, spilled punch, and at least one comic scene in which a Georgia congressman and his wife escaped the clamor by climbing out a window.”

There was also the time when then-President Woodrow Wilson brought in a flock of Shropshire sheep that grazed the North and South Lawns from 1918 to 1920. “During shearing season, the White House auctioned off 2 pounds of White House-sanctioned wool to all 48 states,” Laura Studarus wrote for History.com, “raising nearly $52,823 for the American Red Cross war relief efforts in the process.”

The Trump-inspired MMA event was different. There had been instances of recreational sports and demonstrations in the past, including “Hoover-ball” (then-President Herbert Hoover’s “sport of choice,” according to NBC News), horseshoes, tennis, basketball and more. UFC Freedom 250, as it was ultimately called, became the first professional sporting event ever held at the White House.

The MMA spectacle was held on the South Lawn on June 14. This was just before America’s 250th birthday on July 4 and coincided with Trump’s birthday and Flag Day. The capacity was reportedly kept around 4,300 due to potential security concerns, with an estimated 1,200 tickets allocated to active members of the U.S. military. The card aired on Paramount+, with various clips shown on social media. The cost to UFC’s parent company, TKO Group Holdings, was estimated by Puck News to be “as much as $60 million,” but that hasn’t been confirmed. The assumption was UFC Freedom 250 wouldn’t make a profit, but TKO would make some of the money back through partnerships and the like.

It’s worth noting that the Public Integrity Project launched a last-minute federal lawsuit that sought an emergency temporary restraining order over the “profound misuse of sacred national monuments for private gain.” This organization has already filed several lawsuits against Trump, including an attempt to stop the Anti-Weaponization Fund on behalf of two police officers who were at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. It didn’t work this time, however. Judge Amit P. Mehta, to his credit, rejected the Project’s frivolous challenge.

How did the UFC–White House event go? It appears to have been a real success from a marketing and communications perspective. Images of Trump and White walking out of the White House were intriguing. The flyover during the national anthem performed by country singer Zac Brown was rather impressive. Justin Gaethje scored a stunning upset over previously undefeated Ilia Topuria to win the UFC Lightweight Championship. Josh Hokit made some controversial remarks about former First Lady Michelle Obama, which were immediately condemned by White. Most interestingly, UFC Freedom 250 was a history-making event in that all of the matches ended with a knockout or TKO.

End result? The unusual combination of MMA and politics worked out rather well. Maybe they do naturally go together, after all.

Michael Taube is a political commentator, Troy Media syndicated columnist and former speechwriter for Prime Minister Stephen Harper. He holds a master’s degree in comparative politics from the London School of Economics, lending academic rigour to his political insights.