President-elect Donald Trump returned to Madison Square Garden for an Ultimate Fighting Championship event on Saturday, less than one month after his supporters descended on New York City for the then-candidate’s hate-filled homecoming rally.
Kid Rock’s “American Bad Ass” was playing as Trump walked to his cage side seat as the crowd chanted, “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!”
Flanked alongside the incoming president were big names in UFC, like the organization’s chief executive and a close ally of Trump, Dana White, and former UFC announcer and current top podcaster, Joe Rogan. They were joined by several people who Trump intends to have on his team, including his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., billionaire Elon Musk and one-time Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy, who are poised to head the Department of Government Efficiency. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the likely secretary of Health and Human Services and prominent vaccine skeptic, Trump’s pick for director of national intelligence and former Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, and current Speaker of the House Mike Johnson also attended the fight.
“As the president-elect took his seat around 10 p.m. at the edge of the octagonal fighters’ cage, the arena for a few minutes could have been mistaken for one of his rallies,” the New York Times’ Aishvarya Kavi wrote of the appearance. “In an unusually political scene at a major sporting event, Mr. Trump was heralded on the Jumbotrons with a sleek video that began with Fox News calling the election for him and ended with the numbers 45 and 47 flashing red on a black screen.”
According to reporting from Vox based on the sports data site IMG Arena, 75 percent of UFC’s fans are men, and 88 percent of those men are between the ages of 18 and 44. During this election, young men turned toward Trump.
Trump’s warm welcome on Saturday maps onto his campaign’s emphasis on a particular brand of masculinity. His first TikTok in June—which gave him millions of followers within a day—was a 13-second clip filmed at another UFC event in Newark, NJ, alongside White. Trump also made it a point to go on podcasts that appeal to young men, like the now-highly discussed Rogan interview.
In 2020, President Joe Biden beat Trump by 11 percentage points among young men, but this year, Trump beat Vice President Kamala Harris by 2 points, per exit poll reporting from NBC News.
The last time Trump was at MSG on Oct. 27, he and his lineup hosted a “Racist, Misogynistic, Antisemitic” rally that “Was an Explicit Preview of a Second Term,” as Vanity Fair’s Bess Levin reported.
There was Trump surrogate and stand-up comic Tony Hinchcliffe referring to Puerto Rico as “garbage” and saying that “these Latinos, they love making babies too. Just know that. They do. They do. There’s no pulling out. They don’t do that. They come inside. Just like they did to our country.” (That same guy also made a racist comment about a Black man and “watermelons” and described Palestinians as violent and Jews as cheap.)
Conservative radio host Sid Rosenberg called Hillary Clinton “some sick bastard,” adding, “What a sick son of a bitch. The whole fucking party, a bunch of degenerates, lowlives, Jew-haters and lowlives. Every one of them. Every one of them.” Real estate businessman Grant Cardone claimed that Harris had “pimp handlers.” And former Fox News host Tucker Carlson insulted Harris’s intelligence and mocked her ethnicity with an obviously false descriptor, saying, “It’s going to be pretty hard to look at us and say: ‘You know what, Kamala Harris, she’s just, she got 85 million votes because she’s just so impressive as the first Samoan-Malaysian, low IQ former California prosecutor ever to be elected president.’”
At that rally, Trump himself called on one of the phrases he repeated during his campaign, describing “a massive, vicious, crooked, radical left machine that runs today’s Democrat party” as the “enemy from within.”
Three weeks later, Trump was once again welcomed into the Garden—Saturday night’s event pit Jon Jones, the headline fighter, against Stipe Miocic. Jones emerged victorious and, when he did, decided to celebrate with a nod to Trump—imitating his signature dance move of fist-pumping the air as he twisted his hips. Jones also handed the president-elect his championship belt.
Trump’s recent visits to Manhattan come as he is still awaiting the New York judge’s decision in the criminal hush money case where he was convicted of 34 felony counts for “falsifying business records related to a hush money payment to adult film actress Stormy Daniel to silence allegations about a 2006 sexual encounter with Trump to boost his electoral prospects in the 2016 presidential election,” ABC News reports. Judge Juan Merchan has until Tuesday, Nov. 19, to decide the fate of the case and recommend next steps.
Trump is currently set to be sentenced later this month, but that could now change based on the Supreme Court’s July ruling on presidential immunity.
Right now, it’s unclear when Trump will be called back to the city again—not for another glorious evening at the Garden—but for his court date downtown.
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