The Dictatorship
The UFC Freedom 250 fight at the White House is hardly Trump’s first brawl
The last time notable combat sports were held at the White House, former President Theodore Roosevelt was hosting boxing matchesincluding taking up opponents himself. In one bout, he even took a blow to the face that left him partially blind in one eye.
Despite President Donald Trump’s past forays into the world of professional wrestling, he won’t be the one in the ring at the UFC fight scheduled to be held on the White House South Lawn.
But before taking office, Trump had long-running relationships with prominent figures in the world of combat sports. From boxing events at the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, New Jersey, to his friendship with boxing promoter Don KingTrump has long sought to make his mark on sport.
The match at the White House — part of a slate of events to celebrate the United States’ 250th birthday (although not to be confused with the congressionally sanctioned events known as America250) — is scheduled for June 14. The date, coincidentally, is Trump’s 80th birthday.
During a press event in the Oval Office with the fighters earlier this month, Trump (displaying a disregard for well-known trademarks) promised the event will be “the greatest show on Earth.”
“It’s never going to happen again,” Trump said. “Never happened before.”
Renderings from the UFC show a 5,000-seat arena, currently under construction on the South Lawn, that will sit underneath a red, white and blue arch. The White House and the UFC said invited guests and members of the military will sit around the octagonal cage, while screens will be set up at the Ellipse to show the fights to roughly 85,000 fans. Weigh-ins for the fighters are expected to take place at the Lincoln Memorial.
In a recent interview with The New YorkerUFC CEO and longtime Trump ally Dana White said the president had floated the idea of fights at the White House while attending a recent fight.
“He leans over to me in the middle of the fight and goes, ‘We should do a fight at the White House,’” White said. “I said, ‘Yes. Yes, we should. I’m in. I’m in!’”
Ties to White and UFC
Before White took over the UFC in 2001, mixed martial arts fighting was banned in a majority of states across the country. Speaking in support of Trump at the 2016 Republican National Convention, White said most arenas didn’t want anything to do with hosting UFC events.
But, he said, Trump took a chance on the company and hosted the first and second matches of White’s promotion career at the Trump Taj Mahal.
“Nobody took us seriously,” White said in a speech at the 2016 RNC. “Nobody, except Donald Trump.”
Over the course of their relationship, White has stumped for Trump at rallies, and he appeared again at the RNC during the president’s 2024 campaign, where White called Trump “the toughest, most resilient human being.” On election night in 2024, Trump invited White to speak on stage during the celebration.
Trump did a victory lap at a UFC fight at Madison Square Garden just 11 days after winning the 2024 election. In 2019, Trump made history as the first sitting president to attend a UFC match. Since his first term, Trump has sat cageside at seven UFC matches.
Trump last attended a UFC fight in Miami on April 11where he walked out grinning and waving to the stadium crowd.
And while Trump sat cageside with White, Vice President JD Vance announced from Islamabad that 21 hours of peace talks had failed to produce a deal to end the war with Iran.
Past with combat sports
From the 1980s onward, Trump frequently has hosted, sponsored and attended boxing and pro-wrestling events, cozying up to big names like boxing promoter King and his clients Mike Tyson and Muhammad Ali.
In 1984, Trump opened Trump Plazaa casino and hotel, in Atlantic City. Soon after, he started sponsoring boxing matches at an adjacent convention hall where he hosted a number of Tyson fights.
Trump later ventured into professional wrestling, hosting WWE events in the late 1980s and appearing at showcases through the early 2000s. He’s had a decades-long relationship with Vince McMahonwho co-founded WWE with his wife, Linda McMahon.
In 2007 and 2009, the WWE made contributions totaling $5 million to the Trump Foundation.
Linda McMahon has served in Trump’s Cabinet twice: as Small Business Administration administrator from 2017 to 2019, and as secretary of education in the current administration.
Throughout Trump’s multiple presidential campaigns, well-known combat sports figures have showed up in support. In addition to White and King, who attended the 2016 RNC, the late WWE wrestler Hulk Hogan stumped for Trump at multiple events during the 2024 campaign.
While speaking at the RNC that year after the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, Hogan ripped off his tank top to reveal a Trump-Vance tank top beneath.
“Let Trumpamania rule again!” Hogan exclaimed. “Let Trumpamania make America great again!”
Selena Kuznikov is a desk associate for MS NOW.
NEW YORK (AP) — President Donald Trump took in nearly $1.2 billion from his crypto businesses last year, a federal filing released Tuesday shows, locking in profits while his investors were socked with losses.
Mere startups when he took the oath of office, the new ventures have now eclipsed in revenue much of his vast property portfolio that took him decades to accumulate. Fueling their rise were billionaire investors and Trump’s own move to quash a federal crackdown on the industry.
Trump got more than $500 million from his World Liberty Financial business selling new crypto products, including “governance tokens,” according to the required annual disclosure report with the Office of Government Ethics. It also showed another crypto business, CIC Digital LLC, took in more than $600 million from sales of souvenir-type “meme” coins stamped with his face.
Both the tokens and the coins have plunged in value since the sales.
Trump also took in millions last year from selling Trump-branded Bibles, sneakers and other small items in another unprecedented move for the presidency. The sale of Trump-branded watches alone brought in $4.7 million.
The 927-page disclosure form paints a stark, if incomplete picture of the massive growth of the president’s wealth since taking office last January through a web of business interests — many of which have benefited from the policy moves of Trump’s own government. Trump has insisted that his sons direct his finances but the arrangement rejects the conflict of interest protections that his recent predecessors in office had instituted.
Forbes estimates Trump’s net worth at $6 billion, up from $2.3 billion in 2024.
The Trump business is growing abroad
The rise of crypto relative to Trump’s property is especially noteworthy because he first rode to office boasting of his property wins. It’s also remarkable because that mainstay business also boomed last year. Trump took in tens of millions in fees from a flurry of new hotel, resort and condo deals overseas that amounts to the biggest property expansion ever in the century since the family business was founded.
Many of those countries were negotiating with the U.S. over tariffs, military aid and other important matters while the family business was striking the deals.
A property in the United Arab Emirates generated $10.4 million for the Trump business last year. One in Saudi Arabia being built by a real estate developer close to the ruling family sent the president’s company $9 million. And one in Bucharest, Romania, and another in Qatar sent him $5 million each.
One of his prominent domestic properties, Mar-a-Lago in Florida, notched big growth last year, too.
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Trump took in $77 million from the property, a 50% jump from the year earlier when he was just another citizen, as heads of state and business people flocked to it in his new term.
The disclosure report doesn’t give profit figures, just revenue, so it’s impossible to know how much he is earning.
Trump is now the billion-dollar crypto man
Trump said Wednesday that most of his gains last year came from the stock market and he’s just riding along with everyone else.
“We’re all profiting,” he said. “I’m profiting because I have a lot of money and a lot of cash.”
But crypto was clearly the big revenue generator last year in part due his own moves since taking office — pushing policies friendly to the industry and reversing a Biden administration regulatory crackdown.
The regulators are still worried. Before Trump’s World Liberty began selling “governance tokens,” they issued warnings about this new kind of crypto asset, saying that unlike stocks, the tokens offer no ownership stake in the issuing company, just voting power on certain corporate policies, and are difficult to value.
Buyers pounced anyway, including a Chinese billionaire who spent $75 million on the tokens and $200 million on the souvenir coins. In February last year, a federal lawsuit charging him with duping investors was paused before being settled for a $10 million fine.
The billionaire, Justin Sun, has repeatedly denied his spending on Trump businesses had anything to do with his federal case, while World Liberty has dismissed the notion of a conflict of interest.
Meanwhile, investors have seen the value of their Trump-tied holdings drop significantly.
The price of World Liberty tokens has fallen 80% since they started trading in September. And the Trump souvenir coins that spiked to more than $74 in the days after launching in January 2025 now sell for $1.68.
The White House says Trump only acts in the public interest
The White House has repeatedly said Trump put his business in a trust managed by his sons and is not involved in its decisions and that there are no ethics issues to discuss.
“Neither the President nor his family has ever engaged — or will ever engage — in conflicts of interest,” spokeswoman Anna Kelly said. “All actions by President Trump and his administration are taken in the best interest of the American people.”
The Trump umbrella company, the Trump Organization, has said its deals overseas were with private companies, not with governments.
Still, it is difficult to know what is truly private in countries ruled by authoritarians, royal families and one-party governments.
For a new Trump resort in Vietnam, the report shows Trump took in $5 million last year after the ruling Communist Party sent its deputy prime minister to sign off on the deal and, according to The New York Times, pushed farmers off the land to make way for the construction.
Whether the deals played any role in changing U.S. policies in ways these countries sought is nearly impossible to know, but the countries did get what they wanted.
Vietnam got tariff relief. Qatar got access to advanced U.S. technology previously off limits, and Saudi Arabia got U.S. fighter jets it had coveted for years.
___
AP White House reporter Josh Boak contributed from Washington.
It turns out readers still want to learn more about President Donald Trump after all.
“Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump,” the l atest book on the Trump presidencywritten by political journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, has sold more than 300,000 copies in its opening week, according to publisher Simon & Schuster.
They’re the kind of sales that numerous works about Trump reached during his first term, but had been rare during his second term. Publishers had speculated that the public had tired of Trump books, believing there was little left to know.
The total figures include preorders, print book sales, ebooks, and e-audiobooks and orders that have yet to be fulfilled because of demand, the publishing house said. Simon & Schuster said the book is into its third hard copy printing, with 200,000 copies on order, after it sold out quickly in bookstores and on Amazon. It’s the best first-week clip of any hardcover nonfiction book in 2026.
The book covers the first 14 months of Trump’s second presidency and takes readers inside the West Wing, White House residence and Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, aboard Air Force One and on foreign trips with the president.
Trump, who has a long history with Haberman from her days covering him as a New York City business and society figure, has trashed the book as “mostly made up.” Haberman and Swan are now New York Times reporters.
Their manuscript depicts meticulous details of Trump’s military decisions, how he’s wielded the power of the Justice Department against his political opponents, his conversations with other power players, and the time and attention he’s devoted to remaking the aesthetics and structure of the White House.
The book spells out a thesis that Trump himself believes: Had he not lost the 2020 election, he would not be as powerful in his second term as he is now — emboldening him to trample norms, dismantle established institutions and push the limits of presidential power.
Haberman and Swan have been featured regularly across news talk shows promoting the book and sharing details of their reporting, including a sit-down with Trump in which he boasted about being compared to some of history’s great villains.
Sean Manning, vice president and publisher at Simon & Schuster, said the book “has entered the national conversation” and will hold up as “a work of historic importance.”
As a rule, JD Vance seems to go out of his way to say whatever Donald Trump wants him to say, but from time to time, contradictions emerge between the president and the vice president.
Take the recently passed housing bill, for example, which arrived at the White House earlier this week.
As part of an interview Tuesday night with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham, the Ohio Republican said, “Frankly, Laura, I would love it if Democrats were willing — you know, not that they will agree with Republicans all the time — but if they were willing to work with us on lowering housing prices, on lowering gas prices, on actually making the lives of American citizens better. You know, we could have some real bipartisan compromise. That’s not what they’re talking about.”
I realize the vice president must be very busy, but it really isn’t that difficult to keep up with the basics of current events. In this case, when Vance said Democrats are unwilling to work with Republicans on priorities such as “lowering housing prices,” he turned reality on its head. It was literally last week when Democrats offered unanimous support for a bipartisan bill to address housing prices — legislation that members such as Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts helped to write.
Democrats recognized that doing so would offer the GOP some election-season bragging rights, but Democrats did it anyway because they have prioritized governing and “actually making the lives of American citizens better” over partisan considerations.
But Vance didn’t just contradict reality; he also contradicted his boss.
Just one day before the vice president brazenly misled a national television audience, Trump was asked about the pending housing bill. “It’s very bipartisan; that means the Democrats like it,” the president saidwhile acknowledging that he hasn’t yet decided whether to sign it.
In other words, when Vance said policymakers “could have some real bipartisan compromise,” he seemed indifferent to the fact that we’ve already had some real bipartisan compromise — a detail that even Trump was willing to acknowledge a day earlier.
Whether the vice president will suffer for publicly contradicting the president remains to be seen.
Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”
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