TrumpMania won the White House
why combat sports were the perfect breeding ground for Trump to help build his base
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A note: A reader emailed me to tell me that they felt I painted wrestling fans with too broad a brush in this piece, especially by reducing them to “young, white, low and middle class men.” I take that critique; I should have done a better job of clarifying that I am talking specifically about the WWE fanbase that VinceMcMahon has spent decades shaping, and not the entire world of wrestling and its fans. There is a long history of wrestling in the Black South, of lucha libre in Latin America, of women and queer wrestlers. The fans of those leagues are diverse and varied and I should not have erased them from this conversation.
Just a week-and-a-half after the election, President-Elect Donald Trump made an appearance at UFC 309. He entered Madison Square Garden to applause and chants of “USA!,” which went on for more than five minutes. His entourage that night included many familiar faces from his political circle: Elon Musk, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, House Speaker Mike Johnson, and Vivek Ramaswamy. Trump entered alongside UFC President Dana White, and made it a point to say hello to podcaster Joe Rogan.
On the Jumbotron, a video played of Trump declaring, “I will fight for you and your family and your future with every breath in my body.” The crowd went wild.
Perhaps at first glance, a UFC event would be an odd place for the President-elect to trot out his loyal cronies. But to anyone paying attention, it made perfect sense. While much has been written about how Trump conquered the “man-o-sphere” to win re-election, he leveraged one specific part of that community particularly well to build his base among disaffected men: the world of combat sports. Journalist
called the appearance at UFC 309 “a MAGA victory lap and symbolic coronation with the loyal base that helped put him in the White House.”
Trump spent years courting this base through his alignment with first Vince McMahon and WWE, and then Dana White and UFC (the two powerhouse leagues merged in 2023, combining under the umbrella organization TKO). His nomination of WWE co-founder McMahon’s wife, Linda McMahon, for education secretary is another nod to how much he values these relationships.
The world of combat sports, with its appeal to increasingly aggrieved men who see themselves as an oppressed class, has been complicit in the rise of white nationalism. We have entered what
refers to as “the era of institutionalized male grievance and insecure masculinity.”It was on display at Pete Hegseth’s confirmation hearing last week, as his nomination to the role of Secretary of Defense was approved. As
describes, the hearing included “braying about ‘war-fighters,’ a ‘warrior ethos,’ [and] the repeated assertions that women in combat roles were bringing down military standards… The whole point of Hegseth’s confirmation was to convey that a brand of American Man was back in charge, that he can do 5 sets of 47 push-ups, and that he will sneer at (but also destroy) anyone who challenges him—protesters, Democratic senators, journalists, civilians.”As a culture, we’re going to have to grapple with the ways these leagues have tapped into the most toxic and harmful parts of masculinity, how Trump was able to exploit that to win re-election, and what their population says about the modern American man.
Sitting ringside at an event where men beat each other to a pulp harkens back to the days of the Colosseum, where slaves performed feats of masculinity and fought to the death in hand-to-hand combat in front of Emperors. It has echoes of Victorian-era boxing, which has been described as “spectacularly mustachioed men with fists of iron and a thirst for the other man’s blood.”
Both of these time periods are known for cultural ideas of male supremacy, which hide deep crises of masculinity and anxiety about gender roles, as well as anxiety about maintaining crumbling empires. This male violence, standing in for healthy emotional development, was celebrated. The victor was crowned a metaphorical king—or, in our current timeline, the literal president.
“Generations of men have historically been instructed, through suggestion, inference, risk, reward, and punishment, not to express themselves, especially when that means sharing our feelings,” Michael Andor Brodeur writes in Swole: The Making of Men and the Meaning of Muscle.
“Given the myriad ways American men are taught to suppress real manhood in service of the preservation of Real Manhood, it’s no stretch to suggest that we have turned our bodies… into our primary mode and means of self-expression. What men don’t put into words, they broadcast with their bodies, whether it be sizing each other up in a confrontation, projecting dominance in a social setting, revealing meekness or weakness through nothing but posture or volume.”
Trump understands how men connect to violence better than perhaps anyone, and has capitalized on that knowledge for decades. Through his embrace of combat sports, he has cultivated and riled up a group of men who long for a return to those days when men were “Men.”
While the demographics of UFC fans skews a bit younger than WWE fans, both leagues are strongest among 18-29 year olds. Research shows that the popularity of UFC is rising among Gen Z viewers and the league netted a record $1.3 billion in revenue total in 2023—a 13% increase from 2022. This demographic of white, Gen Z men overwhelmingly voted for Trump in 2024 (by a 28-point margin!), making a huge rightward shift from 2020.
Trump has been ingratiating himself with wrestling fans for years. As far back as 1988, he was hosting WrestleMania events—WrestleMania IV and V both took place in Atlantic City at the Trump Taj Mahal. By 2007, Trump was entering the ring. He participated in WWE WrestleMania XXIII’s “Battle of the Billionaires,” between himself and Vince McMahon’s wrestling persona, Mr. McMahon. His bombast was perfect for speaking to wrestling fans. By the time Trump's political ambitions materialized, he was well versed at whipping young, white, low and middle class men into a frenzy. As Shareon Mazur, the author of Professional Wrestling: Sport and Spectacle, says in the Netflix docuseries Mr. McMahon, “Donald Trump is an example of a pro-wrestling-ification of American politics and American society."
Wrestling, especially in the style of McMahon’s WWE, is based on good and evil, telling stories through the use of “faces” (good guys) and “heels” (bad guys). The takeaways are often black and white, and at the height of WWE’s popularity, these storylines relied on heavy doses of nationalism and patriotism at the expense of other countries and cultures. These narratives—which leaned into the geopolitical conflicts of the time and relied on outright xenophobia—helped whip up anti-Arab sentiment among Americans for decades, from the Gulf War through 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan.
"Wrestling is an imitation of the world,” Tony White, a former WWE wrestler who went by Tony Atlas in the ring, said in Mr. McMahon. “If you want to know what America is like, watch wrestling. We show you yourself.”
Wrestling’s low-hanging narratives also aligned with Trump's simplistic, strongman worldview. “Trump's world is one of good and evil, based on the Christian past,”
writes in Performing for the Don: Theatres of Faith in the Trump Era. “But, perhaps most importantly, it’s one which needs the strong hand of a patriarch to keep it ordered.”Over time, Trump’s influence on the world of combat sports expanded beyond just the WWE. As Zidan documented in his excellent podcast, In The Red Corner, Trump has spent years building an alliance with the UFC and its CEO and president, Dana White. The relationship can be traced back to 2001, when Trump offered the Trump Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City for two UFC events.
Though WWE's scripted and theatrical violence is very much real, it's not quite the same as UFC's visceral, and often gruesome combat — the type of violence that can be felt in your bones.
“[Trump] embraced the UFC’s culture of defiance, machismo and spectacle to help buttress his image as a rebel against liberal norms,” Zidan writes in The Guardian. “It has also hastened the replacement of America’s conventional political culture with an abrasive new blend of entertainment and confrontational politics, perfectly embodied by both Trump and White.”
These connections, between the fight world and the political one, are important in a variety of ways. Trump played the long game, for sure, but he isn't necessarily the genius he says he is. He got into wrestling because he identified this demographic as deeply exploitable, not because he had some kind of mastermind endgame that ended in the White House. However, once he set his sights on the presidency, he was able to leverage the fanbase he had already ingratiated himself to because the kind of masculinity platformed by American combat sports has gone mainstream (at least one MMA fighter joined the January 6th riots).
Interestingly, though, the political leanings of these fanbases are not nearly as conservative as the perception of them are. While UFC has one of the more politically conservative fanbases in sports, with 55% of its fans identifying as “more conservative,” it still lags behind leagues like the NFL and MLB. Meanwhile, 52% of WWE fans identified as “more conservative.” Both fanbases were found to be more liberal than public perception thought they were.
This 55-45 split is right in line with where American culture sits. And while this kind of political position has become the norm, a large chunk of these fanbases have managed to paint themselves as a kind of oppressed class. A recent study from Pew Research found that among Republican men, 45% think people have negative views of “masculine” men, and the vast majority of those who feel this way say this is a bad thing. While combat sports aren't an overwhelmingly conservative fandom, aspects of it—the violence, the machismo—trigger a particular fervor in conservatives, who largely think there's an attack on masculinity in this country, compared to the liberal side of the fanbase, which seems to enjoy it like any fan would enjoy any other sports league.
So a base of disaffected young men has been riled up by combat sports, yes, but there’s more to it. Tech billionaires like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have also bought into these ideas of besieged masculinity. These are the men who not only have Trump’s ear, but have the money and the access to control much of the world around us, from our media to our internet platforms.
“While male supremacy has long been law of the land, the narrative of white men as persecuted victims has not—at least not at this rhetorical scale,” writes Montei. “We’re entering a new era in which tech bros are not only jockeying for favor, but for their own masculine validation, right in front of our eyes.”
During a recent appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Zuckerberg shared his personal experience that helped lead to the right-ward shift that his company has taken recently, the one that has him gutting Meta’s moderation policies, ditching fact-checkers, and blaming Sheryl Sandberg for Facebook’s previous positions (how’s “Lean In” feminism treating you now, Sheryl?).
Zuckerberg also described his shift towards UFC-sanctioned masculinity. As
summarizes, Zuckerberg “talks about being ‘surrounded by girls and women,’ both in his childhood growing up with three sisters and now as the father of three daughters. Then, Zuckerberg says, he found jiu-jitsu and mixed-martial arts. He started getting together with his ‘guy friends’ to ‘beat each other a bit.’”Flory continues, “This world of men—of mutual beating—helped him to discover himself more fully, he says. ‘It just turned on a part of my brain that I was like, okay, this was a piece of the puzzle that should have been there,’ he explains.”
Equating manhood and masculinity with violence, with “mutual beating,” underpins American masculinity's toxic turn. That violence was evident in Charlottesville, in Musk's Nazi salute during Trump inauguration earlier this week, and on January 6th when furious Trump voters stormed the White House and attempted a coup.
Which brings us back to UFC and Dana White. White, who recently told TIME his idea of “what it means to be a man:” “You can’t afford to be a man and talk publicly about, ‘Oh, my mental health,’” White said. “There’s no time for men’s mental health. You’re a f-cking man. Get up, put your f-cking shoes on, and get out there and be a man." White, who Zuckerberg recently added to Meta’s board of directors in a bid to, as Zidan speculates in The Guardian, “solidify ties with Trump through one of his closest and most influential allies.”
One look at Trump's cabinet nominations makes it clear that the people who run combat sports are also in line to help him run the country, and that those connections are filtering into other parts of the sports world, too.
Trump’s nomination of Linda McMahon to lead his Department of Education, which he has promised to dismantle, is an interesting turn from the likes of Betsy DeVos. Linda has spent years trying to make her way into politics. Her journey began at the end of the 20th century with large political donations. In 2008, she was appointed to the Connecticut state board of education, where she served briefly. In 2010 and 2012, she ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate, but became what Josie Riesman calls in her book Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America, “the GOP’s money woman” for how much she bankrolled the party. In 2017, Linda was confirmed as the head of the Small Business Association in Trump’s first-term cabinet.
Vince McMahon, as a businessman, has also long been in bed with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. In 2018, Saudi sports minister Turki al-Sheikh signed a ten-year deal to produce WWE shows in Saudi Arabia estimated to be worth over $40 million dollars, according to Riesman, which makes up a significant portion of WWE’s operating budget. As Riesman notes in Ringmaster, the Saudis were likely intentional in courting McMahon. Access to him meant access to both a cabinet member (his wife) and a President (his close friend). Who else has hosted events in Saudi Arabia? UFC and Dana White. (Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the governor of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), was also present ringside near Trump at UFC 309 last November.)
Meanwhile, Pam Bondi—Trump’s pick for Attorney General—once earned $115,000 a month as a registered foreign lobbyist for the Qatari government ahead of the 2022 FIFA World Cup. Is it any coincidence then that Trump is eyeing FIFA and the World Cup as his next stage for global influence? Last month, at the World Cup Draw, FIFA President Gianni Infantino welcomed attendees by introducing Trump, who he called a “very, very special friend.”
“Sports leaders from FIFA, the Olympics, the UFC, WWE, and Saudi Arabia are orbiting Trump ahead of his inauguration, eager to kiss the ring,” Zidan writes at Sports Politika. (not to mention that Trump’s explicit use of sports’ fanbases to build support exposes the hypocrisy of the “shut up and dribble” crowd who want sports and politics to be separate seemingly only when it comes to athletes expressing liberal views).
Rebecca Shaw made light of Trump's sycophantic brood at The Guardian, quipping, “I knew one day I’d have to watch powerful men burn the world down – I just didn’t expect them to be such losers,” but it doesn’t much matter at the end of the day if these men are sad and pathetic. Yes, they’re corny. Yes, they feel like cartoon characters. It would almost be funny if it wasn’t so dangerous, but their crisis of masculinity will kill or harm countless marginalized people.
“Our fingerprints are on so many things in the world,” McMahon says in Mr. McMahon. “Politics, absolutely. Why wouldn't you want to be like WWE?”
This story was edited by Louis Bien, and William Horn contributed.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this story misspelled Josie Riesman’s name.
Just finishing Josie’s book, I think what she says about trump first getting into wrestling as a fan who clearly thought it was all real pretty much sums it up.
Interesting to get the UFC part of this, and the fan demographic part - would never guessed ufc skews younger, wrestling seems so teenage boy to me.
Yes to all you wrote. Plus, I think the fitness mindset encourages you to be so self-centered that makes you more susceptible to manipulation. I was shocked when a high school friend (living outside the US) casually dropped her admiration for Jordan Peterson. I assumed that she absorbed that info from her gym & running buddies. Also, another friend who runs a Brazilian jiujitsu studio started posting about aliens on FB!?! And of course they (a non-white person) think Trump is so funny. Ugh.