Empire of Blood

“What you guys [boxing fans] don’t understand is your sport is getting swallowed,” Rogan yelled at boxing promoter Lou DiBella on an early TV spot with ESPN. “It’s getting swallowed by a greater, more efficient, more spectacular sport. The famous people that you have right now are the only famous people who are going to exist in the future for boxing — the guys that were already famous before UFC came along. There will be no new ones. They will all go to MMA.”

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“I’M VERY CLOSE TO ROGAN AND TRUMP,” WHITE SAYS. “WE’RE ALL CONNECTED BY UFC.”

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Making of an Empire

O’Malley is a striker: Tall and graceful, he dances on his feet with darting punches and whipping kicks. But tonight, he looks slow. Dvalishvili is not a subtle fighter. He’s small and fast and very, very strong. Before O’Malley can establish a rhythm, Dvalishvili is on him. Overhand right, takedown, back control, side control, smashing O’Malley’s face into the mat and his body into the cage and sapping his energy and will. In each of the five rounds, when O’Malley starts to show even a spark of his usual creativity and threat, Dvalishvili stuffs him. The Suga-jerseyed fans in the crowd are silent or booing. The Georgians are ascendant. They get louder and louder until Dvalishvili is crowned the new champion by the judges’ unanimous decision. 

On the train home, I strike up a conversation with two guys named Kay and Gage who are sober but still buzzing from the energy of the fight. They’re in the Navy, visiting from San Diego, and have been following this sport for years. “It’s the underdog fights that really get you going,” Kay says, rattling off a list of past UFC upsets. Neither of these guys are wearing red hats. They’re not yelling about the Nelk Boys or Elon Musk. They came here and paid ,100 a ticket to see two guys beat the shit out of each other in a cage, because the underdog stories get them going. When the president-elect showed up, Gage says, “it was like confirmation that this is what the American people want.” 

Most fans don’t agree with the matchup at the Garden. Currently, the UFC’s heavyweight division has an interim champion, a polite but not gentle English giant named Tom Aspinall, who has been keeping the belt warm while Jones recovered from injuries. Ordinarily, an interim champ would get a shot at unifying the belts when the champion recovers — but instead, Jones has thus far ducked Aspinall in favor of fighting Stipe Miocic, a legendary-­but-aging heavyweight who hasn’t stepped into the cage in nearly four years. Even though Jones is 30 pounds heavier than in his prime, he’s still terrifying: a generationally talented athlete who fights with a shocking brutality. He’ll unleash that on the 42-year-old Miocic, who works outside the ring as a firefighter. This is not the fight fans want, but it’s the one Jones wants — and because he’s White’s guy, he gets his way.

It makes sense, of course, that White and Trump would be friends. White runs the UFC the same way Trump runs America: top-down, tight control, with a warm hand toward those who are loyal and a vicious streak toward naysayers and challengers to his authority. White is notorious for torching fighters, journalists, and judges during press conferences, and the UFC’s history is full of high-profile rifts between the CEO and some of his stars.

At the parking lot “fan experience,” I meet a group of Latino twentysomethings from the Pacific Northwest in line to hit a punch-power machine. They’re UFC die-hards, but the parking lot is as close as they’ll get to the main event. “We bought flights [to Vegas] as soon as Noche was announced,” one tells me. Only later did they realize that tickets to the event — which started at more than ,000 — would be way out of their budget. They plan to watch the fight from one of the many bars on the Strip. 

It’s hard for me to square this blunt, ruthless system with a sport that asks everything of its athletes. While the UFC has never had a death or serious injury in the ring, the damage a fighter takes over their career accumulates. A 2020 survey in The Athletic found that more than 55 percent of fighters expect their lives after retirement to be affected by injuries, and the specter of the progressive brain disorder CTE is seen almost as a given by everyone who makes a living with their fists. 

At the time, MMA was seen as a bloody sideshow — “human cockfighting,” per then-Sen. John McCain — and was being heavily regulated out of existence in many states. But Trump saw something in the sport — or in White — and allowed the CEO to host his first two UFC events at the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City. White had an aggressive business plan, restarting home-video releases of the shows and doubling down on live events. 

‘Nobody Gave Him Arenas’ 

“I’m like the middleman in this relationship,” White tells me. “I’m very close to Rogan and loyal to Rogan, and Rogan is very close and loyal to me; and then I’m very close to Trump and very loyal to Trump, and Trump is loyal to me. And we’re all connected by this UFC thing.”

A fighter like Blanchfield has something of a cushion: a slot in the top five, regular endorsements, high billing on fight cards, and enough star power that she can claim better prize money, or purses. But to get to that point, a fighter has to grind their way up in smaller promotions, hoping to get noticed by White or another of the UFC scouts. 

The story of how a president of the United States wound up cage-side in Madison Square Garden that night is also the story of MMA, a sport that over the past 30 years has gone from being a late-night cable TV sideshow to a new American pastime. MMA is street fighting distilled into sport, practiced by professional athletes who have tuned every cell of their body for violence. As it happens, that’s something a whole lot of people want to watch. Depending on whom you ask, MMA is the third-largest sport in the world, behind only basketball and soccer, with anywhere from 300 million to 600 million fans worldwide. Some 60 percent of those fans, according to the statistics website Cagewalks.com, are people (mostly men) between the ages of 25 and 44, a demographic that is highly prized by advertisers and that also, perhaps not coincidentally, has gotten mashed in the face by the ass end of the American political system for the better part of 20 years.

In MMA, almost all of the human body’s weapons are allowed, and a scarce few — headbutts, biting, eye-gouging, and the aforementioned blows directly to the back of the skull — are banned. You can punch, knee, kick, and elbow. (Bend your arm and feel for the little knob of bone beneath the skin at the tip of your elbow. At the right angle and speed, it will cut like a scalpel.) On the ground, there’s a war of grappling, chokes, and limb breaks, and Oliveira is one of the best to ever fight it. Late in the fifth round, Oliveira latches onto Chandler’s back, squeezing him with all four limbs. Instead of going limp, Chandler stands up, taking Oliveira with him like a 155-pound backpack, and waddles to the center of the ring. “Fuck it!” he says, launching himself backward into the air and crashing down, crushing Oliveira to the mat, which booms like a giant drum. Chandler’s mouth guard is painted with an American flag. He does this slam, impossibly, twice. Oliveira does not let go. The fight ends. Oliveira wins, a unanimous decision, but Chandler is triumphant in defeat. “Madison Square Garden, are you not entertained?” he shouts. From across the cage, I see Trump smile.

Thomas says there are other fault lines aside from politics: rising ticket prices like the ones that forced out fans in Vegas, a glut of pay-per-view events bleeding fans’ wallets dry, the possibility of stagnant competition as the company prioritizes its brand over its pool of talent. But the waters are so high right now, it’s hard to tell if any of those amount to significant cracks. 

I head out into the crowd. “He comes out like a fighter, that’s the biggest thing,” a baby-faced 29-year-old named Jonathan in a bright red hat tells me. “It resonates with a lot of people that are hurting,” his friend Ethan says. “When they see a strong figure like that, it gives a sense of hope.” Jonathan and Ethan are Canadian but love Trump. 

White got the Nelk Boys on Trump’s plane, put him on the radar of podcaster Theo Von, comedian Andrew Schulz, and eventually Rogan. Rogan, White says, was resistant to wade into the political scene, but as the 2024 campaign escalated, White made it a personal project to get him on board. “I’ve been working on Rogan for years,” White tells me. “I knew that if I could get him and Trump together that they would hit it off.” White says he made a breakthrough when he invited Rogan to a private dinner with Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, who helped persuade Rogan to bring Trump on his podcast, eventually leading to Rogan’s endorsement. (Reps for Rogan did not respond to a request for comment. A rep for Kushner and Ivanka Trump declined to comment.)

“There’s no rules [in MMA] to protect fighters, because there might be hundreds out there, but you’ll be dealing individually with this huge organization,” Ngannou says over Zoom from Paris. “You have no leverage … unlike other sports that have been around for so long and have a union that protects them. I was abused in that [UFC] contract. I was powerless, I was voiceless. On the other side, you have a guy who is the jury and the judge. He decides what goes.”

Here it is, in short: It’s the late Nineties, early 2000s. White, a boxing-fitness coach who claims he was run out of his native Boston by Whitey Bulger and the mob, is living in Las Vegas, palling around with a pair of casino-­magnate brothers, Lorenzo and Frank Fertitta. Even­tually, White and the Fertittas get “addicted” to grappling — Brazilian jujitsu, one of the bases of modern MMA — by training with former UFC fighter John Lewis and “trying to kill each other down in the gym at Fertitta Enterprises” three or four times a week, White says. Through Lewis, White starts managing some of the fledgling UFC’s fighters.

“When you’re at the level that Trump and all these other politicians are on, all you focus on is Fox, MSNBC, CNN, whatever. But that ain’t it,” White tells me. For the past several years, White has personally deepened the UFC’s relationships with the “manosphere,” seating podcasters like the Nelk Boys ringside and making Barstool Sports presenters favored mainstays in the UFC press room. 

Sphere Factor 

“Boxing would do Atlantic City, Vegas, and sometimes New York and L.A. They didn’t travel around to all these different states and small towns and big cities,” White says at the Peninsula, as he polishes off his steak. “We literally went everywhere with the UFC. We got the live event so dialed in, and so good — even in the early days, when it wasn’t at the level that it is now — nobody had ever seen anything like that. You never walked out of a live UFC event and said, ‘Yeah, I don’t ever want to come to one of these again.’ ”

“He called me on the phone and said, ‘If you don’t want to do this, I completely understand. But I would be honored if you would speak at the Republican Convention. I’m going to run for president,’ ” White says. “And everybody — everybody — told me not to do it. But you know, this guy’s been a good guy to me. I’m not going to say no.”

At any amateur or low-level professional MMA competition in America — of which there are dozens, if not hundreds — you can see people experiencing both sides of this equation in real time. A few weeks after returning to New York from Vegas, I take the train out to a nightclub in Queens called Amazura, which hosts a local promotion called Flex Fight Series. Local fight cards are often a mix of kickboxing and MMA matches with both professional and amateur fights on the ticket. There are generally two types of fighters in these brawls: the kind who get in — and push harder — when they’re hit in the face, and those who get out. The former, in most cases, make better fighters. (I have fought just enough to know that I am the latter.) Nobody likes getting hit in the face, but as the night at Amazura gets longer, more and more of the fighters in the ring seem like “get in” guys. Midway through the card, I head upstairs to the club’s steamy VIP room, which has been repurposed into the fighters’ warm-up area. The place is filled with wiry fighters reeking of Tiger Balm and sweat. There’s a guy jumping rope in the corner while another hits pads with his coach. The bar area has been taken over by the glove guy, who hands fighters the appropriate gear — boxing gloves for kickboxing, fingerless four-ounce gloves for MMA. I strike up a conversation with Elias Aminov, who is 23 years old, six feet one, 170 pounds, and 4-0 in amateur competition. All four of his previous fights ended in the first round, three by way of forcing a fast tap-out through chokes (also known as a “submission”) and one by technical knockout. 

This is the grind. Fighters suffer through constant pain for years before they ever see a cent from it. There are no high school MMA teams, no college programs that provide coaching and medical care and state-of-the-art facilities. Fighters come to the sport because they step into a gym and never want to leave, because they washed out of those fancy college sports, because they were getting in too many fights on the streets and figured training was easier than jail. There is no pipeline to the pros: There is only the grind. 

Boxing, it should be said, still exists, but these days a casual fan is more likely to see a YouTuber fight a has-been than an actual title fight. Rogan called his shot well, and Trump, as White tells me, also saw the sport for what it could be. Trump has always known what will play well on TV.

Unlike the UFC’s ad-hoc matchmaking, the PFL’s regular roster of fighters compete in an annual tournament with a winner-take-all prize of 0,000. PFL’s chairman, the dot-com investor Donn Davis, claims that this structure puts more power in the hands of the fighters themselves. “I like that the athlete’s in control,” Davis tells me. “Nobody here is a puppeteer, nobody’s here playing favorites.”

What drew those three men together, above all else, was the belief that a little-known, barely regulated blood sport could tap into America’s latent appetite for violence and catharsis. Two decades later, they’ve been proved right, and their gamble has put all three at the direct center of one of the most extreme political realignments the country has seen in a century. If you want to understand Trump’s America, you have to understand the UFC.

White doesn’t control what happens in the cage, but before a referee yells “Fight,” he is essentially the only voice that matters. When I got to Vegas five days before the Sphere fight, I went to the UFC Apex, a satellite building near the main headquarters where a massive, balding kickboxer beat the snot out of a much smaller-­looking Japanese striker. The fight was one of several White attends almost every Tuesday night as part of his televised “Contender Series,” a sort of UFC tryout circuit that functions like a bloody episode of The Apprentice. 

Belgaroui’s face falls. He won, but it wasn’t enough.

The Loudest Voice

Jones versus Miocic goes about how everyone expected. Miocic puts up a fight, but is clearly outmatched from the first round. In the third, Jones finishes it in spectacular fashion — a devastating spinning back kick that hits Miocic so hard in the floating ribs that he crumples, all the wind and fight gone out of him at the end of one angry man’s heel. Jones saunters to the middle of the cage, shimmying his hips and arms in an imitation of Trump’s signature shuffle-dance. White brings out the belt, a gleaming, skateboard-size strap of leather and gold, and Jones presents it to Trump, as Rogan hovers around after post-fight interviews. Miocic, quietly, announces his retirement. 

“The kids at the jitsu gym — when they see me, I can see their eyes get wide. I remember being that kid looking up to others,” Blanchfield tells me. “The women before us didn’t have anyone to look up to.”

The next day, I fly to Las Vegas, where White prepares for one of his biggest live events yet. The confusingly named “Riyadh Season Noche UFC” is a partly Saudi-sponsored blowout celebrating Mexican independence and culture in Vegas’ absurdly futuristic Sphere amphitheater. (White picked the venue after Tom Brady took him to see U2 play there.) It’s the first MMA fight at the Sphere, and, all together, it’s costing the UFC upward of million. I meet White at the UFC’s corporate headquarters in a sparse industrial district southwest of the Strip. White strolls into the lobby, which has a bank of TVs playing Judge Judy and ESPN above a wall full of broadcast awards. White is bald, a few inches short of six feet, and built like a small fridge: thick neck, broad shoulders, biceps straining at the short sleeves of his polo shirt, and the rolling gait of guys who are intimately familiar with the concept of “leg day.” 

Aminov and I don’t talk much about politics — I’m not much interested in his, and he’s not much interested in mine. MMA gyms are some of the most accepting places I have ever been: If you show up to work and respect your training partners, most other facets of your identity will be pretty much ignored. But there’s no denying that in recent years, the sport’s culture as a whole has taken a drastic and alarming swing to the far right. 

I meet White for the first time in early September. We eat lunch in a private dining room attached to the restaurant in the Peninsula hotel in Manhattan, where White stays when he’s in New York. He runs late to the interview because he’s been downstairs buying a watch at the Rolex store for a longtime associate, a gift for his service and loyalty over decades. He orders a strip steak medium well, asparagus, and a Cobb salad chopped and tossed with both ranch and blue cheese dressing. He brings his own drink, some blue electrolyte mix that he pours out of a glass Voss water bottle into a plastic cup emblazoned with Power Slap branding. (Power Slap is White’s latest venture, a “slap fighting” promotion in which “fighters” slap each other in the face, usually until one is knocked out.) Fortunately, I’m not there to talk about Power Slap, and White happily launches into the story of the UFC.

Making Ends Meet

I don’t know what will happen next to Belgaroui. He’s a seasoned fighter — 8-3 as a pro in MMA, with a 27-7 record against high-level kickboxing competition before he made the jump to the cage. But without the UFC, your options are limited. That fact is even more brutal when you realize what it takes to even get that shot on the Contender Series. All around the country, fighters sweat, puke, and bleed their way through an endless grind of high-impact training for the slim chance of getting a shot at real money. The UFC, ONE, the PFL, and Bellator can offer contracts that, with sponsorships and social media endorsements, can amount to something like a living wage: say, three fights a year at mid five-­figures per, plus money on the side through the social marketing. The biggest fighters make hundreds of thousands if not millions per fight, but they’re outliers. Everyone else, for the most part, is just like you and me: working a day job, making ends meet. But when their day job is over, MMA’s up-and-­comers go right back to work in the gym.

“You don’t see me running around trying to defend the pay and all that stuff all the time, because I don’t give a shit,” White tells me. “I know what we’re doing. I know how many people’s lives we’ve changed, and I know for a fact that we’ve built the right pay structure to build a business, and grow the business, and reinvest in the business.”

The question, then, is how far White can ride this wave. How far does this new America go? How long do the fights last? “For the short and medium term, this is absolutely the sport of the moment,” Thomas, the longtime MMA commentator, tells me. “But they’ve tied their fortunes so nakedly to one guy’s political identity and movement. I’ve got a feeling it’s not going to last forever.”

The UFC aims to build on the success of last year’s Noche UFC, tapping into its passionate Latin American fan base with a fight card (the term for the list of matchups at a single event) made up mostly of Mexican and Central American fighters. Still, it’s a risk — the experimental venue and budget throw a wrench in the company’s polished live-event process. 

T
here are two men bleeding in a chain-link cage in front of the next president of the United States. A week and a half ago, Donald Trump was elected for his second term, and now he is back home at the center of the world, underneath the lights at Madison Square Garden, watching the greatest gladiators of our time fight in a canvas-and-steel octagon. For the past four rounds, Charles Oliveira, a tall Brazilian with blinding white teeth and icy bleached hair to match, has been beating the absolute shit out of Michael Chandler, a short American wrestler who fights with a kind of manic joy that often works against him. Case in point: Early in the fifth and final round, Chandler finally connects with a right hook right on the side of Oliveira’s jaw that sounds like slapping the flat of a shovel into wet earth. Oliveira staggers, and Chandler blitzes forward, arms and eyes wide, looking for the kill, but then slips and falls over. They end up on the ground instead, Chandler on top, pounding at the back of Oliveira’s head: brutal, dangerous strikes that are illegal in the universal rules of mixed martial arts but not called by the referee.

Inside the UFC, White has his fighters who he has gone to bat for time and time again. One of those fighters is Jones, the current UFC heavyweight champion, who is headlining the event at Madison Square Garden in mid-November. Jones, now 37, has had multiple arrests and failed drug tests, a previous title belt stripped, compounding injuries, and years without fights. He and White have had public differences, but Jones tells me that behind the scenes, White has stuck with him. To sell this fight, White has made that loyalty public, declaring Jones the “pound-for-pound greatest of all time” so incessantly that the phrase becomes a fan meme. 

The union of UFC and what would become MAGA started back in 2015. Since the early fights at the Taj Mahal, White and Trump stayed in touch, with the latter making it clear that he was keeping a careful eye on the UFC. “There was a write-up in The New York Times about the UFC, and Trump took the article and wrote, ‘Congratulations Dana, I always knew you were gonna do it,’ ” White tells me. “Stuff like that would roll into the office.” Their relationship was friendly but not close, until White got the chance to stick his neck out for Trump the way Trump had for him way back at the Taj Mahal. 

The boss was not pleased. Usually, if a fighter wins a Contender Series fight, they’ll get their first real UFC contract, but it’s not always cut-and-dry: White hams up the drama, proclaiming that he is “interested” or “not interested” in each fighter at a press conference following the fights. When Belgaroui’s name comes up, he gets the latter. 

This culture, this movement, Kay says — “It refuses to be denied.”

“Coach, you think this needs stitches?” Aminov asks. Jimenez grimaces. “I dunno man … I think it needs something to keep it closed.” Aminov swears. We look up the nearest walk-in place to the gym, but it’s almost 10 p.m., and everything is closed. “You don’t have someone to do that stuff for you … a nurse girlfriend or something?” Jimenez asks. Aminov laughs and shakes his head. At least he has insurance, which is more than many fighters have.

A few months later, Ngannou signed a new contract with an upstart, rival promotion: the Professional Fighters League. Ngannou tells me the PFL approached him with a contract that he agreed to on the spot, including a minimum purse for his opponent. His own take was reportedly north of million for his first fight with the PFL. 

“The production we have now has taken 25 years to dial in and get right where we want it. I believe it’s perfect,” White says. But this week is different. “We don’t know what’s going to happen. Is this a good idea? We’ll know Saturday night. But I wanted to attempt it, and I wanted to be first, and here we are.”

The UFC — and White — have built this business around a bloody version of the American dream: that any given fight could be your highlight-reel knockout, your big break. And that anyone, even a Venezuelan immigrant who can’t afford groceries, can make it to a title shot someday, if they just work hard enough, sweat hard enough, bleed enough. The UFC’s roster is riddled with testaments to this: fighters who’ve come from nothing and achieved everything. The UFC’s parent company was projected to make around .75 billion in 2024. What portion of the UFC’s revenue goes to fighters is unclear, but prior reporting based on court documents shows it hovers at around 20 percent. In the NFL, NBA, and MLB, that revenue share is closer to 50 percent.

“Nobody wanted to give him arenas because they said it’s a rough sport — a little rough,” Trump said at his election-night victory party last year, telling the story of their meeting before ushering White onstage to speak. “I said, ‘This is the roughest sport I’ve ever seen,’ and I began to like it.”

White, and many fighters, see this as a success story — a dedicated athlete making the most of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. But it’s clear that in this system, White’s favor can be the most valuable currency.

Aminov is getting back into regular training after his fight. We spar for a few rounds. Aminov takes it easy on me: He loves the sneaky left high kick and has a lanky fighter’s long jab that pops right through my guard more than once. When you move around with a fighter in the gym, their eyes are dead until they hit you. It’s disconcerting to try to punch someone who looks bored, but it’s even scarier when their eyes light up after they tag you with a shot. And even with everyone playing nice, there’s always a chance of blood: At one practice, Aminov eats an accidental headbutt that splits the skin over his right eye. 

The line about favorites seems to be a reference to White. When I bring it up, White responds: “Who the fuck is Donn Davis?” 

The nature of Trump and White’s relationship is unique, especially in a second term riddled with presidential friends and familiar faces, as White appears to be one of the few people in his inner circle who is not jockeying for a cabinet seat or personal advancement. “I don’t want anything from him,” White says. “I don’t want anything from this election. I don’t want anything from him in that way, other than his friendship.”

Dvalishvili walks out to a thumping Georgian folk song and then enters the cage to “Por Mi México,” by Lefty SM. The Sphere projects a four-story hologram of him over the domed screen. O’Malley follows, walking out to “Superstar,” by Lupe Fiasco. The crowd goes nuts, chanting “Su-ga! Su-ga! Su-ga!” The cage closes, the fight begins. 

Hunter Campbell, the UFC’s chief business officer, claims Ngannou left after refusing terms for a fight with undefeated heavyweight Jon Jones. “Francis Ngannou publicly raised issues such as health insurance as a talking point for himself to attempt to change the narrative,” Campbell says. “I dealt with Francis extensively, and it’s my opinion he was always most concerned with himself.” 

A Right Hook

In 2001, Trump was a famous but bankruptcy-plagued developer and casino owner, riding high on a powerful personal brand. At the time, the UFC’s most recognizable figure was its lead commentator, a stand-up comedian and reality-TV host named Joe Rogan. 

The vast majority of fighters on this path are men. White, for years, resisted including women in the UFC, but relented in 2013 thanks to the star power of Ronda Rousey, a blond, photogenic fighter who took bronze in judo at the 2008 Olympics. After that, the women’s game grew rapidly. In 2014, I met a fighter named Erin Blanchfield, a 15-year-old grappling prodigy who was already training with adult fighters. Now, she’s the UFC’s number-­three flyweight, inches away from a shot at the belt, and a testament to how far the sport has come in those 10 years. 

“THIS IS THE ROUGHEST SPORT I’VE EVER SEEN,” TRUMP SAYS, “AND I LIKE IT.” 

The fights start up again. The crowd bursts into chants of “USA! USA!” every few minutes. The energy carries all the way through to the main event, through Oliveira and Chandler’s wild scrap. 

“The sport has probably always been decidedly right wing,” Luke Thomas, a longtime MMA commentator and podcaster, tells me. Fighting is a brutal and individualist sport, and orienting your life around violence can lend itself to seeing the world in harsh absolutes. But in the early aughts, Thomas says, those attitudes were kept more under wraps as the UFC was “groping for mainstream appeal.”

A few weeks later, I drop by Aminov’s gym in midtown Manhattan, a two-story studio with sweat-fogged windows and a full octagon for sparring and drills. He trains under a grappling coach and former pro, Andy Jimenez. Jimenez is a quiet, friendly man who immediately tells me to grab some gear and hop into drills with Aminov. “I like to let fighters be themselves,” he says. It shows — his room is a mix of former wrestlers and guys with a few years of boxing who are switching to MMA (Aminov, who had no background in combat sports before taking up MMA, is somewhat of a minority in the fight world). 

Tonight, Aminov is fighting for his first belt — the Flex Fight Series amateur welterweight title. His opponent, Randy Mendez, is shorter and stronger, and comes out fast, catching Aminov with a jab. Mendez gets a takedown but loses position. In the second round, Mendez connects with a hard right and drops Aminov to the mat, but Aminov recovers quickly, nearly ripping through Mendez’s elbow joint with an “armbar.” In the third, Aminov almost gets a leg lock, but Mendez’s shin is so slippery with sweat and blood, he can’t finish it. Amateur fights are quick: three three-minute rounds. Aminov wins in a controversial split decision. 

The Ultimate Fighting Championship, a 31-year-old company that dominates the sport globally, is one of the most profitable properties of the Endeavor Group, an American conglomerate of talent management and media companies that earned around billion in revenue last year. The UFC is the gold standard of the sport, valued at some billion on its own. There are other companies, which the fight world refers to as “promotions” — the Professional Fighters League, Bellator MMA, Cage Warriors, and the Asia-dominant One Championship — but if you want to be a star in MMA, it has to happen in the UFC. And it won’t happen without Dana White.

Aminov hopes to turn pro after his next fight, either sticking with Flex or making the hop to a bigger promotion like the Texas-based Legacy Fighting Alliance or the Northeast’s Cage Fury Fighting Champion­ship. There, pros can expect a couple of thousand bucks per fight, maybe doubled if they win. In the UFC, it doesn’t get that much better — a new fighter’s standard contract is often somewhere around “10 and 10,” or ,000 per fight, with ,000 for a win. That’s a step up from the regionals, but when you consider that fighters will fight at most four times in a year, it doesn’t add up to much, even if they win. The week before I went to Vegas, a Venezuelan fighter on the Contender Series didn’t have money to buy herself groceries during fight week, and the UFC stepped in to help her out. She won the fight — a spectacular knockout that impressed the hell out of White and earned an immediate contract with the UFC and bonus from White himself. “Let me tell you what, she ain’t broke now,” White said following the fight. 

A Political Win 

The buildup to Noche UFC is as big as it gets. The main draw is the hyped-up bantamweight championship between Georgian wrestler Merab Dvalishvili and the current belt holder, “Suga” Sean O’Malley, a rainbow-haired, lanky knockout artist. For months before this fight, they’ve taunted each other online to drum up hype (Dvalishvili has a shockingly good O’Malley lookalike on hand to be the butt of his Instagram skits, for instance). The official press conference takes place on a stage erected in the Sphere’s baking-­hot parking lot, adjacent to a “fan experience” area where hordes of young men in “Suga” basketball jerseys and free, bright-pink Happy Dad seltzer trucker hats mill around. When O’Malley takes the stage, his basketball-jersey boys go absolutely feral: screaming at Dvalishvili, jeering at the Georgian fans in the crowd. In person, O’Malley is quiet and thoughtful: “He [Dvalishvili] is good. He’s great. He’s as good as he says he is,” O’Malley tells me before the press conference. “I just believe I’m better.”

One of them, Francis Ngannou, is perhaps the only former fighter who has gone toe to toe with the boss and won. Ngannou, a Cameroonian immigrant who took up MMA after living on the streets of Paris, tore his way through the UFC’s heavyweight division in the late 2010s, claiming the undisputed championship in 2021. But after a single title defense, Ngannou’s contract negotiations fell apart. Ngannou says he pushed the UFC to give their fighters health insurance, more opportunities for personal sponsorships, and an advocate at meetings with the company.

To know what this is like, you need to understand what it feels like to get hit in the face. The pain is easy to imagine: a sharp jolt as your brain rattles inside your skull. Your eyes well up with tears, and you both smell and taste copper at the back of your nose and throat. It hurts, yes, but there’s also an immediate sense of disgrace. It makes you angry and afraid and ashamed — another person has hit you and you couldn’t stop them. A punch steals your pride and your confidence, and if you get hit with enough of them, they’ll even take your sanity. Getting hit hard feels awful. To do it to someone else, however, is one of the greatest feelings in the world. 

In the years since Trump’s first election in 2016, and particularly since the Covid-19 pandemic, the wraps have come off. “It is expressly right wing now,” Thomas says. “The fan base and the sport more generally have been ideologically homogenized.”

White has effectively run the UFC since 2001. Under his tenure, the UFC has become synonymous with MMA and served as the driving force behind the sport’s transformation into a global sensation. White’s more than 25-year devotion to the sport and making money from it has made him its principal god, his authority largely unchecked by investors and fighters alike. The UFC’s rise and current dominance have paralleled that of a new political movement centered, similarly, on one man: Trump. It should come as little surprise, then, that White and Trump are close friends, their lives intertwined for decades by politics and business, their outlooks on the world united by a fixation on loyalty and a ruthless intolerance of opposition.

Finally, it’s fight night. The octagon sits in the center of the Sphere’s stage, with amphitheater seating stretching high up into the dome on one side and a gargantuan, LED-display screen enveloping the other. When the main card starts, the Sphere itself steals the show. After each fight, a film tells a history: steamy Aztec jungles, pueblas and markets, scenes of battle and revolution, all building toward a futuristic cityscape meant to show what Mexico could become. I begin to understand where the million went. All this, for a sport that started in 1993 with a fight between a 200-pound Dutch kickboxer and a 400-pound Hawaiian sumo wrestler in an outdated hockey arena in Denver (the sumo wrestler lost).

In the years since, White and Trump’s mutual loyalty has deepened. They dine together when they can and speak on the phone frequently (“He hates FaceTime,” White says), and White is also close to several other members of the Trump family, including Ivanka and Jared Kushner. Last year, White took an even more active role in Trump’s orbit, advocating for the presidential candidate to engage with the new-media empire of podcasts, comedians, and You­Tubers who sent the president’s numbers skyrocketing with young men. 

“He was an 11-to-1 favorite against a guy who took a fight on short notice. He’s a six-foot-five middleweight,” White says into a microphone. “Instead of closing his hands and using them to keep him off him or to finish him, he poked him in the eyes. He did not impress me tonight. I’m not interested.” 

It’s not, perhaps, the most cinematic ending for the UFC: O’Malley is one of its biggest stars, and his horde of merch- and ticket-buying fans just watched him get his face shoved into the canvas for 25 minutes straight. In the post-fight press conference, well after midnight, White tells it straight. “You can put on million of production, but you can’t control the fights,” he says. “I cannot let that drive me crazy.”

The arena clears out quickly. Outside, I try talking to a gaggle of red hats, but most of them are too drunk to give me anything worth writing down. “MMA is amazing” is all I get when I ask one guy why he likes the sport. 

The Victory Lap

“It feels good to have a sense of control over the way my story ends,” Jones tells me backstage at MSG. “Oftentimes, you see athletes that stay too long, and a lot of times fans remember them for the old version of themselves instead of them in their prime. I don’t want to be remembered for my degression.”

The Fertittas bought the company two months later for a price of million. By January 2001, White was installed as president and CEO, with a stake in the company as a finder’s fee. At the time, the UFC had nothing, and White was faced with rebuilding the organization essentially from scratch. Fortunately, he had two dedicated allies: Rogan and Trump. White and Rogan, who had been calling fights for the UFC as a side gig since ’97, went on a nationwide media blitz. 

White tells me: “Trump got it. Think about where the Trump brand was and where the UFC brand was. Not only did he get it — he also showed up for both events. He was there for the first prelim of the night, and he stayed through the main event.”

In the cage at the Apex, a Tunisian Dutch kickboxer named Yousri Belgaroui used his range and length to great effect: long, snapping punches that his opponent, Taiga Iwasaki, couldn’t seem to get through to close the distance. Belgaroui was also eye-poking the shit out of Iwasaki, prompting the referee to deduct a point. Cage-side, White frowned. Belgaroui is six feet five but competes at middleweight, the UFC’s 185-pound division, which means he towers over most opponents. He should be making short work of this guy or else picking on someone his own size. In the third round, he opted for the former, throwing a leaping knee that connected hard with Iwasaki’s jaw and sent him backpedaling frantically. Belgaroui chased him before stabbing a straight right punch into his gut. Iwasaki crumpled as Belgaroui fired a few more sloppy strikes that glanced off the top of his head.

Peña is a brilliant and intensely dedicated fighter — first claiming the title in a massive upset win against Amanda Nunes, one of the greatest female fighters of all time. But for every bonus White pays out, for every new champion crowned, there are dozens of other fighters who take their bare-minimum check and try to make it last until their next chance to impress the boss.

“He’s the type of guy where you have to talk to him like you own the joint. If somebody goes out there and fights their ass off, he’ll reward you for it,” Julianna Peña, the current women’s bantamweight champion, tells me. (Peña’s last fight reportedly netted her somewhere around half a million dollars.) “There’s never been a time when he hasn’t given me everything that I could need.”

When an athlete leaves the cage for the last time, they’re completely on their own. White points to former fighters having opportunities to become UFC analysts and do paid meet-and-greets with fans at live events. “Believe me,” White says, “we do more than everybody does. I say it all the time: It’s not a job, it’s an opportunity.” The fighters I talk to admit the system’s flaws but balk at considering any kind of widespread change. The grind is the grind. If you make it to the top, there’s no way anyone can say you didn’t earn it. “It’s like what some people say,” Aminov tells me after practice, his eyebrow still wet with fresh blood. “You eat what you kill.”

“I got into this huge contract dispute with Bob Meyrowitz — the old owner — and one day he fucking flipped out on me and just started saying, ‘There is no more money. I don’t even know if I can put on my next event,’ ” White says. “And after we hung up the phone, I was like, ‘Holy shit.’ I called Lorenzo and I said, ‘I just got off the phone with the owner of the UFC, and I think they’re going bankrupt. I think they’re done. I think we could buy the company.’ ”

At the Garden, there’s plenty for fans to remember. Jones, Miocic, Chandler, and Oliveira are all huge draws in their own right, but tonight, they share the stage with the biggest headliner the UFC could possibly pull: the newly victorious President-elect Trump. Trump arrives just at the start of the main card, entering the arena like a fighter. White leads him out. His walkout song, Kid Rock’s “American Badass,” thunders through the arena. “I wish the people at home could hear the sound in this room,” Rogan squeals on the pay-per-view broadcast. The cheers rise and fall like waves as Trump glad-hands his way through the UFC announcers’ table and VIP section. Kid Rock himself is there, as is Elon Musk, prospective Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., prospective Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Department of Government Efficiency co-­chair Vivek Ramaswamy, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, some of the Trump kids — it’s their victory lap. The jumbotrons above the octagon play a sizzle reel of Trump and Vice President-elect J.D. Vance on the campaign trail. “God spared my life for a reason,” drones a recording of Trump, “to restore America to greatness.” As a giant red 45 turns to a 47 onscreen, the voice-over blares, “Together we can truly make America great again.” The crowd is deafening. “It’s always loud when he comes in, but now that he’s won? Now that he’s the president again?” an elated Rogan says on his broadcast. 

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Rolling Stone contributing writer JACK CROSBIE covered Democratic incumbent Sherrod Brown’s Senate campaign in Ohio in the July-August issue.