It Was Everyone’s Sport. Then MAGA Hijacked It. It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way.

Politics

For a MAGA favorite, mixed martial arts sure has a lot of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

June 14, 2026 5:40 AM

Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Samuel Corum/Getty Images and Getty Images Plus.

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.

I did not ask to be born with the aesthetic preferences of a 12-year-old on 4chan, and yet, here we are. My favorite movie is Fight Club . My apartment walls feature not one, but two pieces of Berserk manga fan art. I’m a gun owner, I love German industrial music, and when it comes to video games, I almost exclusively play Eastern European survival horror. How I long for a single interest or hobby that doesn’t instantly generate that record-scratch noise at well-heeled liberal networking events: to watch soccer without falling asleep, to shazaam NPR music without shrugging, to get literally anything out of bird-watching.

It’s not that I’m ashamed of my tastes. It’s just that, at a time when we’ve decided every facet of daily life has to be blue-coded or red-coded, it all gets a bit lonely to be the only leftist I know who’s looking forward to watching mixed martial arts combatants beat the shit out of each other tonight outside the White House. (Or, as it’s officially known, “UFC Freedom 250.”)

Let’s get one thing clear from the jump: What’s happening this weekend—Donald Trump throwing himself a birthday party under the guise of celebrating America—is an obscenity. Thanks to Trump, we’re marking our nation’s 250 th anniversary with literal bread and circuses like some kind of Temu Rome. The cheesiest gladiatorial pit in history should not be killing all the grass on the White House lawn. It’s The Onion made flesh, the kind of absurdity that would cause any 2014 time-traveler to instantly smell burnt toast. The biggest tragedy here is for our country, full stop.

But permit me, as a lifelong MMA fan, to grieve a bit for my favorite sport: the only one I’ve ever truly loved. When the fighters step onto the lawn tonight, it’ll be the culmination of two ugly trends: Trump’s MAGA movement trying to claim MMA for its own, and the business empire that controls the UFC—and, increasingly, MMA itself—giving itself a Trumpy makeover.

I get why, to the uninitiated, MMA and MAGA seem like a natural match. It’s a blood sport whose fan base includes many young men—some of them quite angry. And I understand why people dislike it, even at its best. But mixed martial arts have always been deeply misunderstood. It is not WWE, which is high-level athletic theater; it’s a contest between two fighters, often with wildly different skill sets. It’s not “human cockfighting,” as John McCain termed it in 1996 while pushing for a ban on the sport—preliminary research suggests that both football and boxing cause more brain damage than MMA. It’s not (just) freak-show violence porn for atavistic freaks.

Until these last few years, however, it had little to do with politics. And any political framing one put on it would have to reckon with the fact that it had (MAGA trigger warning here) a lot of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

This sport transcends race, class, nationality, language, and religion. Aside from soccer, it’s the only truly global sport: Fans around the world watch as people from around the world practice martial arts from around the world. Amanda Nunes, the greatest female MMA fighter of all time, is an out lesbian from Brazil. Islam Makhachev, the current No. 1 pound-for-pound ranked fighter, is a devout Muslim from Dagestan. Francis Ngannou dropped out of school to work in a sand quarry at 10 years old and illegally migrated from Cameroon to France to pursue boxing, and went from homeless to heavyweight champion.

MMA breaks down gender stereotypes every time a woman steps into the octagon. We endure endless screeds from the manosphere about the fundamental differences between men and women: men as strong providers, women as nurturers who belong in the home. MMA takes that assumption and sets it on fire. Women fighters are ferocious. They train hard, they go hard, they fight spectacularly. Go ahead. Try to constrain Ronda Rousey to the kitchen. See how that goes for you.

And, in its own bloody way, MMA can be beautiful: humans in extremis, rising to the occasion, pushing past their own boundaries to accomplish the impossible under the most adverse of conditions. MMA is everything Trump and his puffed-up sycophantic goon squad can never be: a contest of skill and discipline grounded in respect, in which appearance counts for nothing and genuine strength—physical, mental, and psychological—means everything. Or at least, that’s what it can be.

Thanks to the UFC executive suite’s decision to court MAGA and collaborate with the Trump administration, however, that potential is getting harder and harder to see.

I go to far-right events for a living. By 2024, my hobby was starting to fee…