For decades it has been White House tradition to invite Ireland’s prime minister, the Taoiseach, to celebrate Saint Patrick’s Day with a ceremonial exchange of a bowl of shamrocks, symbolizing Irish-American friendship. But two months into Donald Trump’s return in 2025, a very different figure was marking the holiday with a very different kind of pageant. “Ireland and America, we are siblings. We consider America our big sibling,” the professional fighter Conor McGregor told the assembled White House reporters. “We wish to be taken care of by the big bro; the United States should look after its little bro.”

Replacing the prime minister—who had visited the previous week—with “The Notorious” McGregor was a curious choice. McGregor has long been one of the public faces of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), the promotion company that since the 1990s has been almost synonymous with mixed martial arts (MMA). Since he last fought—in 2021, losing two fights to the lightweight Dustin Poirier—he had drawn public attention mostly for drunken nightclub brawls, an NBA mid-game skit during which he hospitalized a mascot, and, above all, a 2024 civil case in Irish court that found him liable for a brutal sexual assault in 2018. He had come to D.C. seeking approval from Trump and connection with an audience of more than 30 million Irish Americans who might somehow support him in his bid for the Irish presidency, which he planned to contest on a nationalist platform. “Our money is being spent on overseas issues that have nothing to do with the Irish people,” he said. “The illegal immigration racket is running ravage [sic] on the country.”

McGregor’s was only one of the stranger expressions of a convergence between the UFC and MAGA politics that has been building for years. The first major public manifestation was UFC president Dana White’s speech at the 2016 Republican National Convention, where he praised the party’s nominee for supporting the fledgling UFC back when “it was basically considered a bloodsport” in polite society: “Nobody took us seriously. Nobody. Except Donald Trump.” In 2020 former two-division champ Henry Cejudo campaigned at Eric Trump’s “Latinos for Trump” events, while Jorge Masvidal—an outspoken member of Miami’s Cuban diaspora—joined Don Jr. to headline the “Fighters Against Socialism” bus tour. The former champ Tito Ortiz acted as a Trump surrogate as early as 2016 before himself winning a 2020 city council race in California with the slogan “Make Huntington Beach Safe Again.” This hardly begins to exhaust the list of fighters who speak or post about their love for Trump in ways big and small—for instance, by organizing a media campaign to promote Kash Patel when it looked like moderate Republicans might not confirm him for FBI director—or the still larger PR and media apparatus of UFC-affiliated podcasts and personalities that have gravitated toward MAGA, from Joe Rogan (a color commentator on UFC broadcasts since 1997) to Andrew Tate.

Trump has reciprocated the attention. Since 2019 he has been a frequent guest at UFC events, where fighters often jump over the cage to kneel before him, bow to him, or shake his hand. “Thank you for doing what you’re doing,” the outspoken Bolsonarist fighter Paulo Costa said as he kneeled and shook hands with Trump this past April at UFC 327. In August 2025 the president assigned his daughter Ivanka the task of coordinating a UFC event on the White House lawn, ostensibly to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence but now scheduled for tomorrow—Trump’s birthday.

Trump isn’t the only nationalist politician who likes to associate with UFC fighters. Vladimir Putin, who holds the rank of black belt in judo (plus two honorary black belts in karate and one in taekwondo), relishes being photographed in his gi and subsidizes fighters from the most dominant region in mixed martial arts today, Dagestan. Neo-Nazis are using fight clubs as recruiting tools across Europe. Ramzan Kadyrov, the Chechen dictator, surrounds himself with MMA fighters—when Khamzat Chimaev won the UFC’s middleweight belt in August, he flew straight to Grozny to hand it over to Kadyrov—and has built MMA training centers for his military and security services, which are frequently visited by UFC champions. Jair Bolsonaro was awarded an honorary black belt from the family that invented the UFC, the Gracie clan. The Gulf monarchies’ strategy of “sportswashing” their international reputations has made them important players in the fight world. All this testifies to how thoroughly the UFC has become the lingua franca of a strange new twenty-first-century formation: the nationalist international.¹

As it moved from the underground to the relatively legitimate terrain of network TV, MMA became one of the principal vectors through which young men—the nationalist right’s central demographic—interact with politicized culture.² Its appeal has multiple sources. The violence is simultaneously authentic and spectacular, so it can hold an audience’s attention while allowing them to connect with a real kind of physical peril that is, in many cases, increasingly absent from their daily lives. Combat in MMA depends as much on grappling—the use of momentum, balance, and leverage to wrestle an opponent to the ground, then force them to surrender via strangulation or joint manipulation—as it does on traditional striking with punches and kicks. This means that even the “little guys” can win fights, indeed dominate, if they master the techniques—a prospect that has special appeal for scrappy outsiders or anyone else with an inferiority complex.

The drama of individual fighters’ stories, enhanced by kayfabe and the reality TV show The Ultimate Fighter, gives men something to gossip about while retaining an aura of toughness. Fighters present themselves as symbols of national virility by physically dominating other men, humiliating “effeminate” ones, and parading wives and girlfriends in conspicuously subordinate roles. Through disciplined and stylized violence, the UFC audience learns to appreciate the emotional grammar of a post-liberal masculinity that is brutal, resentful of helplessness or fragility, and ravenous for recognition within an explicitly established hierarchy of prowess.

Ever since Trump announced his campaign in 2015, cultural commentators have found it useful to compare his political style to professional wrestling, pointing to his appearances on WWE programs and quoting literary authorities like Roland Barthes for analysis. In his famous Mythologies (1957) Barthes drew a philosophical contrast between boxing, which makes each fight into “a story which is constructed before the eyes of the spectator,” and wrestling, where “it is each moment which is intelligible, not the passage of time,” turning the sport as a whole into a “sum of spectacles.” To some extent this was apt for the first Trump administration, which was more successful at generating displays of cruelty and domination than achieving tangible results on signature issues like trade or immigration. Trump’s second term, however, is perhaps better compared to mixed martial arts: chaotic, unrestrained, effective at inflicting violence on enemies, with a nationalist machismo that circulates internationally. Viewing Trump in the mirror of the UFC, and vice versa, may help clarify why each has such a powerful place in the fantasy lives of millions of young men.

The story of the UFC begins in early-twentieth-century Brazil, a country then attempting to modernize after the fall of the monarchy, the abolition of slavery, and the proclamation of a republic. When Japan’s military trounced Russia in 1905, it became the image of non-European modernization efforts. Public contests between representatives of capoeira, an Afro-Brazilian martial art, and judo were a way for fighters to work out which national tradition was superior.

Mayeda Mitsuyo, a fifth-degree black belt in the Kodokan school of judo, was one such fighter. Under the moniker “Count Koma,” he traveled the world between 1904 and 1915 putting on what the historian José Cairus calls “vaudeville-like presentations.”³ After passing through New York, London, Paris, Havana, and Mexico City, he brought the show to Belém, a cosmopolitan boom town on the Amazon frontier, where it caught the eye of Gastão Gracie (1872–1956), the owner of a local circus.

Gastão encouraged his son Carlos to learn modern fighting techniques from Mayeda. Brazilianizing judo by mixing it with local martial arts like vale tudo, the Gracies invented what they called Brazilian jiu-jitsu—BJJ. Another of Gastão’s sons, Hélio (1913–2009), is credited in particular with turning the quite athletic sport of Japanese judo into a system that even slow, skinny, or otherwise frail men could master for self-defense. “In the following decades,” Cairus explains, “the Gracies, supported by a nationalist regime, launched a comprehensive process of jiu-jitsu reinvention.”

The popularity of BJJ grew over the decades, and the Gracies started offering prizes to anyone who could defeat them in a fight. By the 1990s they were ready to promote their style on the world stage. The initial idea behind the UFC was that eight major martial arts traditions—sumo, boxing, kickboxing, savate, kenpo, taekwondo, karate, and BJJ—would compete to see which was the best in a single-elimination tournament, with Hélio’s son Royce representing BJJ. The entire eight-man tournament would take place in one night, meaning that the champion would fight three times—an exhausting ordeal. A fight would only stop if one fighter knocked out another, if a fighter tapped out, or if cornermen threw in the towel. Apart from biting and eye-gouging, there would be no limitations on the fighters, to make the combat as realistic as possible; the show’s tagline was “There Are No Rules!”

Thirty seconds into the first fight, the sumo charged the savateur, attempting to grab him while running at full speed. He missed, lost his balance, and was flung to the ground on all fours, where he promptly received a roundhouse kick to the face that sent some of his teeth flying into the audience. They landed under the judges’ table as the crowd audibly groaned. It’s no wonder that additional rules—such as no kicking the head of a downed opponent—were added to subsequent events, or that wholesome politicians tried to censor the sport.

Perceiving a threat, by the mid-2000s the boxing establishment was also criticizing MMA. Bob Arum, the legendary boxing promotor, said to an interviewer that “UFC fans are a bunch of skinhead white guys who are watching a bunch of people in the ring who look like skinhead white guys…guys rolling around like homosexuals on the ground.” Boxing, he said, was by comparison a “sweet science” with an international and multiethnic audience. In a debate with Joe Rogan, who had joined the UFC as a color commentator in 1997 in exchange for good seats at the matches, the boxing promoter Lou DiBella made similar points: the UFC was “human cockfighting” that would only survive if it could “keep getting white guys to watch.”

But in the years that followed it was Rogan’s retort that would prove more influential, especially with younger audiences. “How is that human cockfighting? You know what that is, that’s actual fighting,” he told DiBella. “You know what boxing is? Boxing is a very limited form of fighting…. What ultimate fighting is is the actual sport of fighting.” As Rogan explained to Conan O’Brien’s audience in 1998, “There’s always been questions in the martial arts like ‘what if a karate guy fought a judo guy.’ And what the UFC did is say: ‘Let’s find out.’”

The answer was unambiguous. BJJ’s almost total dominance in the early UFC was genuinely shocking to the martial arts world. Royce Gracie won three of the first four UFC tournaments and won his first match at the other before withdrawing due to exhaustion. He did this while being visibly smaller and less physically imposing than most of his opponents—a slim, somewhat disheveled kid in his mid-twenties against musclebound behemoths like Dan “The Beast” Severn. (In 2004 Gracie defeated a legitimate yokozuna, the highest rank in professional sumo.) Indeed, the first dozen UFC events were won by grapplers. Boxers who were taken down were essentially neutralized, laying on their backs with no way to move or punch.

The Gracies had originally organized the UFC as an agonistic struggle for distinction and glory between specific communities of artistic practice, with traditions going back in some cases hundreds of years. But as the athletes began to learn from one another, the sport transformed. Students of kungfu and taekwondo realized they had to learn how to wrestle, and in the process they became not just standard-bearers for a given tradition but individuals with unique, hybrid styles, fighting for their own name.

The particular partisan alignment of today’s fight world only emerged over the subsequent decades, and it was hardly obvious that it would develop the way it did. When Dana White convinced a pair of his high school friends to buy the UFC for the bargain-basement price of $2 million and appoint him its president in 2001, it was the Republican Party, especially John McCain, that was trying to ban the sport. They almost succeeded—thirty-six states had outlawed mixed martial arts by the early 2000s. The UFC was a small organization, and not particularly popular. White attributes their first “big break” to Trump, then a registered Democrat, who gave them a show at his Taj Mahal in New Jersey.

That recognition was enough to generate interest elsewhere, and soon the UFC was putting on events in Las Vegas, where White began hosting fundraising events for Harry Reid, the Democratic senator from Nevada. White’s entry into Republican politics only began with Trump’s in the 2010s. As late as 2020 the most popular voice in MMA and the manosphere generally, Joe Rogan, mused, “I think I’ll probably vote for Bernie.” Meanwhile, since 2016 the UFC has been owned by a company—first Endeavor and then TKO Group Holdings—whose CEO is none other than Ari Emanuel, the brother of both Rahm Emanuel (Obama’s chief of staff and the former Democratic mayor of Chicago) and Ezekiel Emanuel (a health policy advisor to the Obama and Biden administrations). If the prevailing cultural wind had been slightly different over the past two decades, it is not impossible to imagine this network drifting in a different direction, rather than lurching to the right.

MMA’s political trajectory was the result not only of shifts in the culture at large but also of developments underway within the sport itself. Over the years the UFC’s primary product became the individualist celebrity fighter and their personal story, often a narrative of trauma and redemption. But at the same time fighters also started drawing crowds based on their ability to appeal to nationalist, regional, and religious sentiments, as if the dissolution of the old martial traditions had created a vacuum that other forms of collective identity rushed to fill.

Personality matters more in MMA than in other sports because of the way fights are made. The official rankings don’t determine who will fight who when; the UFC reserves that prerogative for itself. Even if a fighter is low-ranked, or on a losing streak, if his fights have been spectacular and interesting to watch, or if fans are invested in his story for other reasons, then he is likely to be offered another fight soon. Fighters with charisma and a strong social media presence can therefore acquire opportunities regardless of their records.

This can take relatively innocent forms: costume, camp, social media performance. Consider, for example, Jiří Procházka, a Czech man who claims to follow the bushidō code, used to wear his hair in a topknot, and posts videos of himself training under waterfalls. Or Alex Pereira, a descendant of the indigenous Pataxó tribe who grew up in the favela of São Paulo, who wears traditional headdresses and war paint to weigh-ins, and took his first championship belt back to the reservation.

For others, provoking controversy is the path to glory. An American fighter named Chael Sonnen was the first to discover the value of professional wrestling-style trash talk. In 2012, in the leadup to his match against Brazilian fighter Anderson Silva, Sonnen “turned heel” and said outrageous things to get a rise out of Brazilians, goading them into rage-watching the fight. Bryce Mitchell, most famous to MMA fans for once ripping his scrotum with a power drill, briefly made mainstream headlines in 2025 when he said, “I honestly think that Hitler was a good guy based upon my own research, not my public education indoctrination.” Hitler simply “wanted to purify [Germany] by kicking the greedy Jews out that were destroying his country and turning them all into gays. They were gaying out the kids. They were queering out the women. They were queering out the dudes.” Although White called the comments “dumb, ignorant shit,” he did not cut ties with Mitchell or punish him in any way, citing his longstanding commitment to free speech and lamenting the fact that anyone can have a podcast these days. Instead, White’s solution was for more fans to buy UFC pay-per-views: “The beautiful thing about this business, for all of you who hate Bryce Mitchell, you get to see him hopefully get his ass whooped on global television.”

Besides Mitchell, the middleweight champion Sean Strickland is probably the most skilled at goading fans into watching his matches, and the closest thing the UFC has to a skinhead. After a few wins in the UFC, his incredibly foul mouth made him an instant fan favorite. He refers to anyone who works for a wage, including fighters, as “prostitutes,” mocks women who interview him for showing cleavage, and makes use of (almost) every racial stereotype in the book.

His bravado has always thinly masked a deep pain. On podcasts like The Joe Rogan Experience or Theo Von’s This Past Weekend, Strickland opened up about his youth in strikingly vulnerable terms. Through tears, he told the listeners of one MMA podcast about the night he hid under his parents’ bed as his father held his mother down, screaming “tonight’s the night you’re going to fucking die” as he strangled her: “My brain was made in such a way as to survive that encounter.” Like many Americans in the twenty-first century, his father eventually gave up booze for pills and went into “zombie mode,” but his grandfather was an equally pernicious influence, filling young Sean’s head with neo-Nazi rhetoric. Those ideas turned his anger outward: “It felt so good to fucking hate something, I would walk down the street with like a knife or a rock hoping to kill somebody.”

Those emotions left deep grooves. MMA “is clearly retarded,” Strickland says, “but I fucking love it…. I love being violent, I like hurting people.” He claims that he first realized what happiness was when he was fourteen and his mother brought him to train MMA. It was, he has said, like therapy: “The moment I started training I was like…I don’t hate anybody. Everyone’s cool. Then a lot of people who helped me out in my life—they weren’t white.” In the gym he found a “brotherhood” of Latinos, Asians, Africans, and Muslims. (When one of the fighters took him aside one day and said they couldn’t be friends if Strickland continued to make vulgar jokes about Islam, he agreed to “sell out” by giving Muslims a pass.)

When Strickland was eighteen, his rite of passage into manhood was finally standing up to his father for abusing his mother: “I fuckin’ headbutt him, break his nose, like he falls down like fucking crying. And I’ll never forget like the monster, like the boogyman in my life…it was almost disappointing. I expected so much more from him.” That feeling of emptiness when an enemy turns out not to be a worthy antagonist, so that victory over them is likewise hollow, is something of a leitmotif in MMA culture. The initial fantasy that draws in so many new fighters—that the small guy getting picked on can still win, that there is meaning in struggle and redemption in pain, that the respect gained through acts of physical courage is well-earned and therefore a stable foundation for self-respect—likewise often deflates on contact with reality, which is perhaps why fans found something sympathetic about Strickland’s combination of vulnerability and aggression. As Tom Aspinall, the current heavyweight champ, has said, “MMA fighters are generally quite lost and impressionable people.”

These personal stories of trauma and self-assertion are joined, in MMA’s mythology, to a macho-nationalist politics of grievance, principally but not exclusively expressed by taking “anti-woke” positions within the culture war. Colby Covington, the first active UFC fighter to become enthusiastically MAGA, told Fox News: “Democrats have spent years trying to neuter traditional masculinity.” The UFC has always been disproportionately popular among the police and military, and in the late 2010s it became a refuge for law-and-order constituencies looking for entertainment as athletes in other sports embraced causes like Black Lives Matter. “Exceptional military, law enforcement, and first responders” are honored at fight nights with belts and ceremonial tributes, while the UFC has a long-term commitment to formal partnerships with the NYPD and FBI, as well as several Police Athletic Leagues; White himself vociferously condemned “defund the police” protests in his 2020 RNC speech.

Another area of concern was Covid-era regulations, which gave the UFC an opportunity to indulge right-wing political stances on bodily autonomy. When other sports were complying with distancing regulations, White was appointed to Trump’s advisory council on reopening the country. In May 2020 UFC became the first major American professional sport to resume competition, and in April 2021 the UFC held the first sporting event to fill an indoor arena, both thanks to Governor Ron DeSantis’s lax policies in Florida.⁴ White took a strong and explicit line against vaccine mandates. “I would never tell another human being what to do with their body.”

Finally, of all sports MMA has perhaps the most thoroughgoing culture of policing traditional gender boundaries. Rogan, who often serves as something of an unofficial spokesman for the MMA worldview, has consistently indulged right-wing moral panic about transgender issues, including by accusing a clique of global investors—“the crazy people that are putting on the Last Supper with a bunch of transsexuals”—of pushing a pro-trans agenda. (“That’s one of the more sinister aspects of it, for me, is the way they’re encouraging hormone blockers and hormone transition for people that are going through puberty,” Rogan told the right-wing activist Matt Walsh in 2022.) In 2024, Strickland was characteristically still more straightforward: “Ten years ago, to be trans was a mental fucking illness. And now, all of a sudden, people like you have fucking weaseled your way into the world. You are an infection. You are the definition of weakness. Everything that is wrong with the world is because of fucking you.” Ultimately the horror that Strickland feels about the LGBT community seems to stem from his conviction that procreation is a test of strength that “real men” must pass: “You can’t be considered a man if you don’t have or want a family.”

Connecting all of these issues—the police, Covid and vaccines, gender roles—is the idea that the family is a source of order that must be actively protected and maintained, with violence if necessary, and that liberalism is an enervating force men must resist. The largest imaginable kinship unit, and the most concentrated source of violence, is, of course, the nation. And so it is around that idea that these protective passions naturally come to rest, allowing family values to work as a kind of ideological glue between otherwise disparate local contexts.

It was McGregor, the UFC’s first true global celebrity, who established a template for how fighters could channel nationalism in the cage. In 2014, early in his career, he inspired two thousand Irish fans to fly to the US to see him fight. By the end of 2015 more than half of a sixteen-thousand-person arena in Las Vegas was filled by the “Green Army” that followed him around the world as he charged to the featherweight championship with seven straight wins and a thirteen-second KO against the champ, José Aldo. These fans took over press conferences, singing limericks while intimidating McGregor’s opponents with trash talk, turning Las Vegas into a “Little Dublin” with green flags, chanting, and overwhelming presence.

McGregor was a working-class kid from Dublin, and fans saw his spirited Irish patriotism as an opportunity for a sense of national pride that had dimmed after the global financial crisis. In 2015 Sinéad O’Connor sang a live rendition of “The Foggy Dew” for McGregor’s walkout to fight Chad Mendes. By the end of the decade, however, sexual assault allegations were hounding “The Notorious” McGregor, as were other scandals (like a video showing him punching out a fifty-year-old man in a Dublin pub). His popularity in Ireland began to tank. At that point his public persona became noticeably more political. Ireland’s far-right activists embraced him, sharing his content on social media, and he reciprocated. “I stand with the people of the East Wall,” he tweeted, referring to protests against housing asylum seekers in an unused office building in Dublin. Over time he became more inflammatory, declaring “Ireland, we are at war,” before finally announcing his candidacy for the Irish presidency on an anti-EU, anti-immigration platform in 2025.

The nationalist template has been taken up in different forms by top MMA fighters in the Caucasus, the region that was dominating five of the UFC’s eight weight classes last fall. Four Dagestani fighters alone—the legendary lightweight Khabib Nurmagomedov, his cousin Umar Nurmagomedov, Islam Makhachev (recently lightweight champion, now reigning welterweight champion), and Magomed Ankalaev (recently light heavyweight champion)—have ninety-eight wins (and only four losses) between them. The Caucasus as a whole can claim another dozen top contenders, plus another three champions.⁵

No doubt the disciplines of Islamic life make some contribution to these fighters’ success: as a group, they are noticeably less publicly involved in activities like drinking or late-night partying. But the specific reason they boast so many champions is that grappling and combat sports are popular in the region because Caucusus governments promote them as wholesome after-school activities to prevent young men from getting involved in Islamist terrorist organizations. Instead of the universalist aspirations to a global caliphate, the humbler virtues of agonism and particularism are inculcated in wrestlers who represent their town, region, and country against other young boys.

Khabib Nurmagomedov’s rivalry with McGregor is the stuff of MMA legend. They fought at the height of McGregor’s fame, and after months of stoically seething through McGregor’s ruthless trash talk about his father, his religion, and his teammates, Nurmagomedov smashed him in the octagon. The microphones picked up Nurmagomedov saying, “What happened? Let’s talk now. Huh? Let’s talk now” as he rained elbows and hammer fists down on McGregor. When Nurmagomedov finally submitted him in round four via a neck crank, he wasn’t satisfied. As he later recounted:

I was preparing for war, and when I come here I didn’t find opponent. This is make me empty…. I was expecting more. When I catch his neck, and I choke him, like he tap [i.e. he submits] you know, and I think: hey, you bring like thousands people from Ireland here on different part of world. And you tap in front of them? And you talk about like warrior? How you can tap? Go sleep. Go sleep.

To compensate for the emptiness of not finding a worthy enemy, and to get revenge for the humiliations he suffered in the lead-up to the fight, Nurmagomedov jumped over the cage to attack McGregor’s team sitting ringside. Both teams attacked one another, and a melee broke out. By the time security got the situation under control, the Irish crowd was booing and throwing things into the cage; Nurmagomedov had to be escorted out of the arena so that he could receive his ceremonial championship belt. To this day, Nurmagomedov won’t say McGregor’s name, and chastises anyone who uses it in front of him: “He don’t deserve you say his name.”

The showdown between Nurmagomedov and McGregor was a clash between rival expressions of national pride. McGregor has made himself an avatar of an Irishness defined by blood and rebellion, while for Nurmagomedov and other Caucusus athletes, the right to national self-determination also means the right to reject liberal social norms around the family, gender, and sexuality—and the right to embrace strongmen like Putin and Kadyrov who fend off what they see as spiritually corrupting forces. Right-wing figures have returned the favor, embracing Nurmagomedov as a symbol of traditional masculinity; the Russian politician Vitaly Milonov, author of the country’s original “gay propaganda” law, has publicly proposed that Nurmagomedov be appointed to the Ministry of Culture of Dagestan in order to help “limit gayness” on the country’s screens. Nurmagomedov has famously refused to shake hands with female interviewers on the religious principle that unmarried bodies of opposite genders should not touch. “Every person in life has a mission,” he told a conference hosted by a Russian real estate firm in Thailand. “For a man, it’s to raise children, take care of the family, take care of loved ones. There are very few women who take on big responsibilities. It’s very hard for them.”

The fact that such attitudes about women recur across the nationalist international, from the US to the North Caucuses, has not prevented fighters from different nodes of this network from weaponizing gender politics for their own political ends. McGregor, in particular, has not let the divergence between Islamic fighters and Western norms go unexploited. When Makhachev disparaged the fight between Zhang Weili and Joanna Jędrzejczyk, saying that MMA was “not a woman’s sport,” McGregor attacked, complaining that Makhachev “talks down on one of the greatest exchanges of combat ever produced by our female combatants.” In response to some comments Nurmagomedov made about him in Moscow, McGregor posted a photo of Nurmagomedov’s wedding with the caption, “your wife is a towel mate.” If McGregor evidently thinks little of women, he seems to think even less of Muslims.

The fight world is a global stage on which rival nationalisms confront one another, but it also reveals the sometimes unexpected alignments that form between them—especially between those with similar histories of colonial domination. After Usman Nurmagomedov beat the Irishman Paul Hughes in Dubai in January 2025, in a fight promoted by Bellator (one of the UFC’s rivals) as Dagestan versus Ireland redux, Khabib Nurmagomedov stepped into the octagon to describe the way he saw the two nations as united by the bonds of common oppression: “Don’t forget, Ireland is the biggest supporter in the world of Palestine, don’t forget about this.” The audience, which was full of Irish fans who had traveled to see the fight, erupted in cheers and applause. “We love you guys—you, your government, everybody,” he continued. “We love you guys because you support our brothers in Palestine.”

When he was asked about this speech later in the year, on stage in front of a Muslim audience at an event hosted by the Miftaah Institute in Long Island, he explained the historical links he meant to strengthen. “Long time ago, couple hundred year ago, Ireland was starving and the Ottoman Empire, what it was including Palestine too, they was sending boat with food for them,” he told the crowd:

They was supporting Ireland when they was starving…and now Ireland give them back…and that’s why I say in Dubai “We love you guys”…. It’s mean not only for Ireland, for all countries who support our brothers in Gaza.

There’s nothing contradictory about Irish and Dagestani fighters and fans facing off over personal grudge matches and the culture war yet finding common ground in a vision of anticolonial solidarity. But it’s a reminder that the nationalist international takes its commitment to self-determining peoples seriously, if for no other reason than that its members want a world of worthy adversaries.

MMA is hardly the only sport to feature strong displays of nationalism within an international organization. FIFA and the Olympics are older than the UFC, and reach a wider population across the world. But what makes the MMA game distinct is precisely that it is not a game—it is violence. The athletes, and the spectators who identify with them, are oriented toward the serious moment of confrontation between two bodies in pain, risking catastrophic injury and struggling toward one goal: to inflict yet more pain. It is hardly an accident that Kadyrov and Kash Patel have both used MMA fighters to prepare officers for combat.

Fighters are training to be capable of taking street violence into their own hands, and sometimes they have: Cain Velasquez was sentenced to five years in prison for attempted murder after he shot multiple rounds at the man who allegedly molested his child; in 2023 Strickland’s home cameras recorded him confronting a man who invaded his house and holding him at gunpoint until the police arrived. MMA contenders motivate each other with the edgy motto, “If one man can hold you down, two can rape you.” Savage on its face, it is even darker in the context of the sexual violence against women that fighters have perpetrated outside the octagon.

Indeed, the sport’s stress on the reality of violence—and its potential to appear in everyday life—has much to do with its collective attitude regarding women, which tends to take one of two forms. The first is outright aggression. Two weeks prior to the Las Vegas launch of Dana White’s combat sports league Power Slap—in which participants take turns slapping each other, sometimes until one falls unconscious—White was caught on tape at a nightclub having an argument with his wife. As she tried to walk away, he grabbed her wrist, then she slapped him, at which point he responded by slapping her not once but twice, with force. Andrew Tate is not a mixed martial artist—he is a failed boxer whose last fight was a humiliating loss to a reality TV star in a minor promotion—but his misogynistic views also find a broad reception within the MMA community. When he attended UFC 313, he and his brother received a hug and a “Welcome to the States, boys” from White while the crowd cheered in the background.

Aggression against women remains controversial within the sport, however, and many MMA fans have reacted with a no less possessive kind of protectiveness. In a world where predators exist, the assumption goes, men have to actively guard or police women to prevent harm. Nurmagomedov defends excluding women from the sport altogether both on religious grounds and for the simpler reason that “a woman is weaker.” The nation has to be a band of brothers precisely because the rest of the family is seen as incapable of withstanding the violence that naturally lurks in the wider world.

As late as 2011, White was adamant about when women would compete in the UFC: “Never.” That same year, though, the UFC bought out Strikeforce, a smaller competitor, and inherited their roster of fighters, including their women’s division. Ronda Rousey was among the new assets. She was an Olympic judoka with an undefeated record in MMA; eleven of her first twelve fights finished in the first round. More important, she was charming, blonde, and conventionally attractive, with a classic MMA origin story. Her father committed suicide when she was young after his chronic back pain became unbearable, so she was raised by her mother, AnnMaria De Mars, the first American to win a World Judo Championship.

She was arrogant and willing to play the heel, and her charisma was lightning in a bottle. Along with McGregor, she became the face of the sport as it was going mainstream. Rousey was almost universally applauded—featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated under the title “World’s Most Dominant Athlete,” cast in The Expendables 3 (2014), Furious 7 (2015), and Entourage (2015), invited to host SNL. In a moment of enthusiasm, Rogan even mused that she would likely beat at least half of the men in her weight class: “Women just cannot take the same kind of punches that men can. That’s the only reason why I only give Ronda a chance at beating 50 percent of the men.” For the MMA faithful who value the sport precisely because it is not boxing, and appreciate the technical aspects of grappling, the women’s division is just as exciting as the men’s, if not more so, since the competitors have less outright knockout power and submissions are a larger proportion of finishes.

On the face of it, the very existence of women’s MMA might seem to challenge the macho-nationalist worldview. However, in practice it is consistently used to confirm the gender hierarchy. When Rousey inevitably lost, the MMA community was relieved that this apparent exception to the rule had finally been put back in her place. Rogan admitted, “I’m not happy that Ronda Rousey lost, but in a way, it makes things easier.” It allowed him to walk back his claim that Rousey could stand with the men: “No that’s definitely not true. I shouldn’t have said it at the time. Now, it’s definitely not true.”

The cage admits difference when it can profit from it, but it enforces hierarchy when difference threatens to invert it. Fighters thus periodically use their firsthand experience training with women and watching them compete in order to make claims about women’s natural inferiority. Again, Strickland is the most quotable: “You can take the weakest motherfucker in this room and they could beat [the champ Amanda] Nunes.” Apparently, technique can overcome size and strength differences between men, but does little to close the gap between men and women.

The UFC’s mainstream success represents the first time that the political culture of right-wing nationalism has been able to consistently generate its own self-referential content for a mass audience, rather than riffing resentfully on the cultural output of the liberal establishment. Every month, fighters do a series of press conferences and media events to promote their upcoming fights, providing opportunities for a sustained discourse saturated with the sport’s ideology. The UFC’s commentary, marketing, and various types of related social media form a larger right-populist cultural complex, which has expanded through Rogan and Theo Von out into interlocking comedy and podcasting milieu: Flagrant with Andrew Schulz and Akaash Singh, the NELK Boys. The most popular shows in this network are not exclusively about MMA or politics, but all them have hosted Dana White, and in the runup to the 2024 election each prominently featured Trump.

Watching and listening to fighters, perhaps even training like them, allows the audience to indulge in fantasies of pure competition and abstract individualism: no equipment, no teammates. Yet these fantasies, by necessity, also misconstrue the objective situation that gives rise to them—namely that the fighters have no more control over their fates than the audience does. The UFC is a business that exploits labor by suppressing wages and exercising monopoly power over fighter contracts.

Meanwhile the CEO has more or less admitted that some fighters have “Dana White privilege”: getting offered opportunities that their resumes don’t necessarily justify. Fighters work and get paid at his discretion. Because they understand themselves simultaneously as hyper-individualist entrepreneurs of the self who do not tolerate disrespect and as loyal soldiers who gratefully obey authorities, they are by and large too proud to admit that negotiating with the UFC individually is screwing them over. The idea that perhaps cooperation and collective bargaining could raise their incomes is simply not discussed, except by journalists exhorting the athletes to do better.

As a result, UFC fighters often receive less than 20 percent of the revenue they generate, compared to approximately 50 percent and sometimes more in sports like football, basketball, hockey, soccer, and even boxing. In February 2025 the UFC settled an antitrust lawsuit requiring the organization to pay out $375 million to over a thousand fighters due to its use of monopsony power over professional MMA athletes. In this sense, the UFC is emblematic of the evolution of capitalism across the last two generations, which has seen monopsony power in labor markets rise and labor share of income fall as a result.

Fighters new to the sport are in no place to make demands or lead a campaign for collective bargaining. Those who make it to the top are lavished with million-dollar contracts—still a pittance compared to any other sport, including boxing, but more than they have ever had in their lives—and promote the narrative of their early years “grinding” on no long-term health care and little pay. Future champions like Demetrious Johnson and Merab Dvalishvili started their MMA careers as a side hustle while maintaining full-time jobs as construction workers. The UFC is thus emblematic not only of capitalism’s ordinary functioning but also of its paradoxes: it is a transnational arena that manufactures nationalism, a Las Vegas-based monopsony that stages national virility as an export commodity.

The old pay-scale was “ten-and-ten”: $10,000 to show up to the fight, and another $10,000 to win. That has improved to twelve-and-twelve, but since most fighters fight at most a few times per year, these are world-class professional athletes making less than $100,000 annually, minus the cost of paying their own medical bills, coaches, and travel. This has generated a kind of fatalism in many athletes. “Even when you’re a UFC fighter you’re still broke, and you’re still a fucking loser,” Strickland has said. “All your friends, they’ve done something with their life.”

For the young men who want to see themselves in these fighters, the athletes’ financial hardship provides a canvas on which to project their own struggles. The picture they paint is one of aggression and deprivation rewarded, a way of coping that draws them deeper into the MAGA point of view. Unlike most Americans, many UFC fans are not temporarily embarrassed millionaires—even some of their favorite fighters don’t make that much. They are instead temporarily embarrassed world fighting champions.

“Meanwhile,” as Strickland put it, “other people get rich off it.” In April 2025 Trump and White were in Miami for UFC 314, where they were joined by Ari Emanuel and David Ellison—the owner of Skydance Media, which was looking to buy Paramount but experiencing bureaucratic pushback from the FCC. Skydance closed that deal in August. That same month the UFC announced they would no longer be streaming events on ESPN and instead had signed an exclusive multi-billion-dollar deal with Paramount, doubling the company’s yearly revenue. White himself has a net worth in the hundreds of millions.

In November 2024, just two weeks after the election, Trump and White were joined at Madison Square Garden for UFC 309 by Yasir al-Rumayyan, the governor of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF). He has been the financial mastermind behind an ambitious Saudi campaign of sports-centric PR, acquiring assets like the Newcastle United Football Club and Cristiano Ronaldo, and launching major partnerships with TKO Group Holdings, the holding company for both UFC and WWE. This authoritarian money can leave as easily as it comes—as the LIV Golf tour, another PIF investment, found out after the Saudis announced that 2026 would be the final year of funding—but White has been adept at maintaining the relationship. The PIF has paid exorbitant fees to have UFC events come to the peninsula, and—according to the veteran MMA reporter Ariel Helwani—put up cash to pay fighters to make big fights.

The Saudis are also backing White’s adventures beyond MMA. Turki Alalshikh, the chairman of the Saudi General Entertainment Authority, co-founded Zuffa Boxing with him in 2025, and together they plan to “fix” that sport the way the UFC fixed MMA. The Saudis are putting up all the capital to fund the venture, while White lobbies Trump and other Republicans to amend the Muhammad Ali Boxing Reform Act of 2000—a law that, among other things, prevents any one boxing promoter from monopolizing the sport and protects fighters by making bargaining over pay transparent. (One reason the UFC is synonymous with MMA is that no such legislation has ever regulated mixed martial arts.)

In 2025 the PIF led the largest leveraged buyout in history, of the video game company Electronic Arts. Brokered by Jared Kushner’s private equity firm Affinity Partners, the deal gave Saudi Arabia an unprecedented level of control over the sports video games popular with young men. The goal in all of this is to sportswash the Saudi reputation, moving away from its image as a monarchy that allegedly chops up journalists and toward one as a cosmopolitan playground for the wealthy who want flashy, prestigious forms of entertainment.

When the UFC hosts its event tomorrow on the White House lawn, the fusion of MMA and politics will have reached its zenith. White is visibly bored with the sport that made his fortune, focusing now more on other ventures like Power Slap and boxing; the day-to-day decision-making at the UFC has already passed to his chief business officer, Hunter Campbell, according to testimony at one of the UFC’s antitrust hearings. White’s personal friendship with Trump will in any case be less politically profitable than it has been over the last decade once Trump leaves office in 2029. Still, the octagon is likely to remain a space in which particularist ideologies from around the world can confront each other in a violent contest for recognition.

Originally pitched by Trump as a July 4 celebration, UFC Freedom 250 has instead become a birthday party for Trump and America alike. Fighters, having spent the past weeks cutting weight, will step on the scales in front of the Lincoln Memorial for weigh-ins. Then, in the scorching summer heat, they will take their places in the regulation octagon newly constructed on the South Lawn, with cameras placed to catch the White House behind one corner and the Washington Monument behind the other. More than four thousand spectators will crowd into the immediate arena; White and Emanuel will invite a few hundred guests each and Trump one thousand, with the rest of the tickets distributed to servicemen.

Outside that inner ring of the elect, a mass of as many as a hundred thousand fans will gather on the White House Ellipse to watch the spectacle from screens. America’s hopes are pinned to Justin “The Highlight” Gaethje, but most observers are counting the aging warrior out, both for the amount of damage he’s sustained over the years and because the undefeated Georgian fighter Ilia Topuria, who many consider to be the greatest mixed martial artist of all time, is his opponent in the main event. Another American, Derrick “The Black Beast” Lewis, was added at the last minute at Trump’s personal request. Meanwhile Alex Pereira, the pride of native Brazilians and a former middleweight and light heavyweight champion, will be looking to become the first fighter in UFC history to win a title in a third weight class, as a heavyweight. It is a fitting way for the republic to mark its two-hundred-and-fiftieth year: not with a parade or an oration but with a cage.