Maybe it was the “Let’s go, Brandon!” chant that broke out during one of the undercards, or the woman in line for concessions who kept yelling about how much she hated liberals. But at a certain point last November, while taking in the red-blooded spectacle of UFC 295 at Madison Square Garden, I felt like I had gone to a Donald Trump rally and a fight had broken out.
And this was all before Trump himself had arrived, making his usual hero’s entrance into the arena while flanked by Tucker Carlson, Kid Rock, and UFC president Dana White. The crowd of just over 19,000 erupted when Trump was shown on the jumbotron, making it a safe bet that at least some of those fans will be back at the Garden later this month when he holds a rally there.
UFC has long been a Trump-friendly ecosystem. Fans and fighters alike tend to skew MAGA, while White is one of the former president’s most boisterous supporters. And Trump, never one to shun an adoring crowd, has become a fixture at the events. In the spring, two days after a Manhattan jury found him guilty on 34 counts of falsifying business records, he found a support group of thousands at UFC 302 in New Jersey, where fans serenaded him with a “We love Trump” chant.
As Trump looks to run up large margins among male voters in the 2024 race, he boasts a full roster of sports figures on his side that includes UFC fighters such as Colby Covington, legendary former NFL quarterback Brett Favre, golfer John Daly, and, as of most recently, Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker. On Saturday, former Pittsburgh Steelers star Antonio Brown is expected to speak at Trump’s rally in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, according to a source familiar with the event.
The Republican nominee has also hit the sports-media circuit, appearing on Tuesday’s episode of Bussin’ With the Boys, a Barstool Sports podcast hosted by former NFL players Will Compton and Taylor Lewan. “We would not be here today without Dana White,” Lewan said, recalling having met Trump “at UFC a couple of times.”
“When you’re talking about Trump, it’s very on-brand for him to turn up at a UFC [event],” Timothy Naftali, a presidential historian and senior research scholar at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, told me. “It’s not something that started when he started playing around with the idea of running for president. That’s who he is, and that’s also a way of speaking directly to his base.”
All the fights and football track with Trump’s machismo-drenched political identity, which has given rise to his male-dominated coalition. Polls have consistently shown Trump maintaining a significant edge among men, while Vice President Kamala Harris holds a large lead among women voters. The gender gap has moved the final stretch of the campaign trail into the sporting arena, as Harris and running mate Tim Walz mount a late-inning rally to pick off male voters from Trump and JD Vance.
Last month the Democratic campaign announced Athletes for Harris, an initiative headlined by Magic Johnson, Billie Jean King, Steve Kerr, Dawn Staley, and more, with an explicit goal of connecting with young men. And while both campaigns have blanketed NFL, college football, and MLB-playoff broadcasts with ads, the Democrats took their message to the games themselves on Sunday, flying banners or skywriting above NFL stadiums in four battleground states. Harris’s campaign has also sought audiences on sports-centric platforms. The Democratic nominee appeared on All the Smoke, a podcast hosted by ex-NBA players Stephen Jackson and Matt Barnes, while first gentleman Doug Emhoff sat for an interview with longtime sports commentator Dan Le Batard that was posted online Tuesday.
