In the wake of being destroyed in the midterm elections, it was only a matter of time before Donald Trump did something outrageous in an attempt to misdirect public attention away from his catastrophic losses. Before the midterms, published reports suggested the possibility of apocalypse, global or domestic – a nuclear strike on Iran, martial law to suspend last week’s, the invalidation of individual races, such as in Alaska – but Trump opted for banality over Armageddon, offering his vacant press secretary opening to Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White.
It was absurd, and widely posited that a confused Trump had erroneously conflated UFC’s White with the Dana White who made more sense, former Heritage Foundation staffer Dana White. Because the public reactions made him look even more lost, confirming the sentiments of recklessness and disorder, utter chaos and buffoonery that led to the Republicans being routed in the midterm elections, the president said his offer to White was all a joke. As a disciple of the notorious McCarthyite Roy Cohn, who taught Trump one of his main political pillars – never apologize or admit wrongdoing. Ever. – Trump should not, of course, be taken at his word.
Either by mixing up the female PR professional Dana White with the UFC ringleader and having to backtrack regardless, Trump’s bluster has at last been pierced by last week’s mandate that a larger segment of the electorate is no longer charmed by his garrulousness, or energized by his ugly charisma. The downward spiral has begun. His press secretary job is vacant because his last choice, Katie Zacharia, lasted less than a week. Failure can only mean that Trump will intensify his worst instincts and play the hits that have always worked, in the arenas with the most eyeballs.
One of those arenas has always been sports, and thus it tracks that, joke or not, he would use White to wring another bit of life out of a news cycle. When Trump has needed headlines or kindling, he has turned to sports. He used the public’s always bizarre adulation and resentment toward Black athletes a decade ago by attacking Colin Kaepernick and the NFL, and sports has stood at the center of his culture wars ever since. He and his justice department have pivoted from the NFL to the NBA, waded into MLB by trying to turn Pride Night into an anti-Christian grievance. The WNBA now lives in his crosshairs.
Trump has always relied on sports to bail him out. In trying to appeal to the machismo of his base and give America’s 250th birthday a performative sheen of strength, Trump held a UFC cage match on the White House South Lawn earlier this June – an event that was highlighted by one of White’s fighters racially insulting former first lady Michelle Obama. Given the Black community’s animosity toward him but the number of high-profile Black athletes who support him – Lawrence Taylor, Mike Tyson, Darryl Strawberry, Herschel Walker, among many others – sports have provided a cover for his racism.
Trump relied on sports giving him the real-man boost and muscularity he always craves, but this time the gambit failed. The whole thing looked pathetic. He looked like a confused who did not know what he was talking about and there was no way out. The professional White publicly announced she was not a candidate. Trump looked befuddled, and employed another of Cohn’s teachings – always stay on the offensive, and increase the attack – by telling reporters Sunday that UFC’s White “loved the idea”, and that “You wouldn’t mess around with him.”
None of it resonated. What did resonate was a tired America rejecting him in places Republicans had not lost in decades, and in one case, Kansas, in nearly a century. He and his party were repudiated so comprehensively that even to the people who used to laugh, the jokes aren’t funny anymore, and for once, even the distracting, celebrity power of sports couldn’t inflate what is a sagging tent.
Howard Bryant is the author of 11 books, including Full Dissidence: Notes from an Uneven Playing Field, and Kings and Pawns: Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson in America. He also writes on Substack
