⁠Inside the UFC's White House week: Dana White, diplomats and the bizarre road to Freedom 250

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Regardless of how you might feel personally about the UFC’s “Claw” structure that has erected on the White House’s South Lawn with Viagratic might, it is a marvel. It can be seen at least a mile away as you head down Pennsylvania Ave., peeking over the tree line like the dawn of a new day. The White House sits somewhere behind it from those distances, quietly enduring its gleaming house guest which, from the looks of things, has made itself right at home.

Not that President Donald Trump is in a hurry to get rid of it. He joked last week that it could become a permanent structure, much like the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Even if he’s pulling our chain, there are a good many locals who aren’t in the mood. My Uber driver asked me why they couldn’t just put plastic pink flamingos out front if they wanted to be tacky.

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It's the first thing that grabs your attention, though, that steely star-spangled structure. It’s Independence Day a few weeks early, closer to the film than the actual day itself, the actual semiquincentennial. If it were a children’s book, it would be called, “The UFC Goes to Washington.”

Not that it’s a negative thing here in the nation’s capital. Many people I talked to seem to like it. Even when I went over to the U.S. Department of State on Thursday, there was a SXSW-type of buzz in the air, only instead of catching Meat Puppets at Stubb’s we were there to see Dana White sign a piece of paper with Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Last month Rubio was with Pope Leo XIV in Rome. This month, Dana White, who was wearing tennis shoes. White was there to sign an MOU – which means a Memorandum of Understanding, a kind of ceremonial handshake deal for a shared vision for maximizing global reach. The Department of State has an MOU with NFL, too, for instance.

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“We come from very humble beginnings, when we first bought this company 25 years ago,” White said when he took his turn on the microphone. Twenty-five years, it should be noted, is exactly 10% of the 250 consecutive years that America has been operating.

“We believed at that time that this thing would work everywhere and work all over the world. I’ve always had this philosophy, and thank God it ended up being true, but no matter what color you are, what country you come from, or what language you speak, we’re all human beings and fighting’s in our DNA. We get it, and we like it.”

As far as I could tell, other than UFC COO Lawrence Epstein (who is mostly a politician anyway, as evidenced by his actual first name, Ike), I was the only delegate of MMA at the gathering. Even among the media. The other press gathered were fraternity brothers and sisters from Washington. If the “P” word has been delicately handled by the UFC as it “celebrates America’s 250th birthday,” which rhymes with folitical, the crude manner in which it was being slung around by this media contingency made you wonder if anyone there got the memo.

Those in attendance as guests were largely embassy officials and members of the Diplomatic Corps, wearing loafers and suits, snapping up the stemware as they engaged in some modest day drinking and sampled a good many hors d’oeuvres. The chandeliers hung overhead. The stanchions were gold. The Eagle emblems were gilt as well.

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When people stop to reflect how far the sport of MMA has come in its 33 years of existence, which has been a theme all week for UFC Freedom 250, the sight of Dana White being escorted from (what must be called) the antechamber to the Ben Franklin Room to the podium illustrates the point. All around are reminders of America’s forefathers.

The UFC’s own forefathers have receded into the background. White has told everyone over the last few weeks that Zuffa purchased what was essentially a sporting leper for $2 million back in 2001, and it was none other than Donald Trump who extended the first olive branch by booking them into the Taj Mahal in Atlantic City when nobody else would.

UFC 30 was Zuffa’s first time playing the Taj.

Of course, the previous owners of the UFC, Bob Meyrowitz’s SEG, held a show there at UFC 28. It took SEG a long time, with the help of the then-commissioner Larry Hazzard, to get the sport sanctioned in New Jersey, which is as insignificant a detail in today’s tellings as it is to remember Grover Cleveland’s favorite snack (pickled herring). James Werme, who held many stations from a 23-year-old peon to a UFC executive from 1995-2002, was there.

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“We were not only sanctioned by New Jersey when Zuffa bought the show, we were also sanctioned by Louisiana, Mississippi, Iowa,” Werme says, “and of course we could do shows in Georgia, Alabama.

“I know things were bad and I don't want to deny that, but to say that this was a renegade back-alley thing is just not true, because in some ways we kind of teed it up [for a run of success] — or at least gave a glimpse of what it could become.”

What it has become is a $7.7 billion enterprise, with important fans in Washington who have turned the sport of MMA into a symbol of the broader fighting spirit. These days the metaphors are as strong and sturdy as the Claw itself, which looks as though it’s scooping itself a nice helping of pure American soil.

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“UFC is tailor-made for diplomacy,” was the way Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy, Sarah B. Rogers, put it as she opened the proceedings on Thursday.

“Sports is a stand-in for combat. It is the most ancient and universal form of contention. And not only does the UFC draw on that universal human tradition, it is tailor-made for diplomacy because it accommodates and embraces all international styles. Whether you’re a Brazilian jiu-jitsu artist or a Chinese kung fu master or an American boxer, UFC is a sport where you can fight, and you can win.”

UFC, of course, is no more a sport that the NBA or the NFL is, but I can assure you this would be considered “quibbling” among the assembled.

In any case, she said that getting the UFC on board meant “expanding and doubling down on our sports diplomacy portfolio,” and called the Octagon the “ultimate meritocracy,” which I’ve long contended. It took some time, but the metaphors of a writer’s fancy are now “axiomatic” enough to bring people together.

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Back in the day, in the late 1990s, the UFC’s having two appearances on the hit show “Friends” stood in for validation, as did appearing on the cover of “Mad” magazine, where Alfred E. Newman sits cageside holding a catcher’s mitt hoping to snag a heart that has been ripped from somebody’s chest.

“I remember the early fights back in the day and you could get a 170-pound jiu-jitsu guy fighting a 250-pound heavyweight who was a striker, the rules weren’t clarified,” Rubio said when it was his turn to speak. “And Dana and the people around him had a vision, and that is create a structure around this company. To give it rules, to define it by weight class, to structure the events.”

By the time Zuffa purchased the UFC, it had long been running toward regulation, but they were but entertainment men without political pull. They were just worried about holding up against political opposition, cable industry opposition, corporate opposition, opposition of every prude kind.

Prude in 2026 has blossomed into prudent, which is either a dystopian development as one side says, or a happy evolution on the other. In any case, when Lorenzo and Frank Fertitta bought in, it all changed. The casino magnates would get the sport of MMA sanctioned in Nevada in mere months, and from there it was on. It is true, the sport would not have flourished without Zuffa. It is the fact, even the details can’t be contained.

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Now it’s at the White House.

Rubio, who used Carlos Ulberg’s fathomless grit after a blown-out knee to beat Jiri Prochazka in winning the UFC’s light heavyweight title as a metaphor for American perseverance, called Sunday’s hootenanny a “gift to the American people.”

“We could have done a band, we have great bands, we could have done a Shakespeare in the park production, there are a lot a things we could’ve done with it,” he said. “But this one will have people watching — probably, what, over what, a billion people all over the world? — a billion people all over the world will be watching America celebrate its 250^th birthday, with the White House in the background and some of the best athletes in the world in that Octagon.”

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A billion, of course, is a hefty number. But the larger point was that fighting “speaks to the human spirit,” and it chooses its words much better now that Dana White is the mouthpiece. Back when others tried to speak to the human spirit that way, politicians like John McCain called it “human cockfighting.”

“I mean, and that's why my era, the ‘Dark Days,’ gets skipped over, because it's better for them to go right from John McCain’s human cockfighting to ESPN deal, to the Paramount+ deal,” Werme says. “In order to recognize my era, you have to recognize the evolution, the rules evolution, the sanctioning evolution, the everything, the mainstream, the pop culture, the international expansion, the [SEG era] video game, the multimedia stuff.

“So that's why my era tends to get skipped, because it would take away credit and take away from the hero story that Dana likes to convey.”

Heroes don’t always wear capes. But they do wear smirks.

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Epstein introduced White as the UFC’s own “secretary of state,” and White talked about the UFC’s global reach.

“What’s been fascinating over these last 25 years is, when you go into these different countries, presidents from the countries, or royal families from the countries, everybody loves the fights,” White said. “And more importantly, if somebody looks like you, talks like you, and comes from where you come and they’re looked at the best in the world when it comes to fighting, the entire country rallies around them, and it’s a powerful thing.”

Afterward, White and Rubio disappeared back to (what I presume was) the antechamber, while the media was whisked out through the kitchen, and down to the service elevator from where we came. On that huge slow elevator, one of the political reporters said, “So I guess the message is that punching people in the face is what America is all about?”

Another answered, in trying to understand the global interplay between UFC and the State Department, “So, if an Irani fighter doesn’t submit, we bomb them three more times?”

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There were laughs. Nobody was really sure what had been agreed upon.

Yet once back outside, as everyone dispersed in different directions, you could see the Claw sticking out over the tree line, just as real as it gets.