A UFC event at Donald Trump’s White House would be an embarrassment anywhere

With its history Given his involvement in pro wrestling and boxing and his overzealous enthusiasm — the man is a failed casino manager, after all — it makes perfect sense that Donald Trump would want to celebrate America’s birthday and his own with UFC cage fights on the White House lawn, sponsored by Monster Energy. If there is any surprise, it is how much the whole case has so far failed to cross the threshold.

Event promoters certainly set high expectations. “We are putting on the most historic sporting event in history,” UFC CEO Dana White told TIME. One problem here is that this fight card, absent a White House backdrop, will not be the most historic scheduled for next month, or particularly large or impressive by any month’s standards. “Dignity” is not a word usually associated with combat promotion; However.

On Thursday, multi-hyphenate Marco Rubio compared the founding of the Ultimate Fighting Championship to landing on the moon, while making a hard-to-follow point about the company’s uniquely American nature. Although this may be generally silly, it is somehow more specific.

The UFC, which was founded largely to showcase the jiu-jitsu skills of a Brazilian family, was not the first mixed martial arts promotion. It wasn’t even the first mixed martial arts promotion founded in 1993. (That honor goes to Pancrase, which wasn’t even the first Japanese mixed martial arts promotion to ask “What if pro wrestling was real?”) White did not, as Rubio claimed, introduce the ideas of rules and weight classes to the sport. None of this made any sense.

Rubio, as secretary of state, was on hand at an event with White in Washington, D.C., to sign what for some reason is called a memorandum of understanding aimed at bringing the UFC’s unique virtues to the administration’s sports diplomacy. Chechen warlord Ramzan Kadyrov, whose deep ties to UFC fighters do not contractually extend to the UFC itself, may play a role.

White, to be fair, is innovative. His show Power Slap, which premiered in January 2023 — the same month TMZ posted a video of him slapping his wife in public — promotes a new, uniquely American sport consisting solely of people trying to concuss each other.

Now, he’s wreaking havoc in the bombastic space by claiming to expect “Super Bowl-type numbers” for Sunday’s event. (Netflix, which maintains that her recent fight with Ronda Rousey was the most-watched MMA event of all time, estimated peak U.S. viewership at 11.6 million, less than 10 percent of the average viewership of the most recent Super Bowl.)

He certainly spared no expense for the most historic event in history. If you looked at the White House lawn, you’d be forgiven for thinking that organizers had literally transported the contents of a Meta-branded warehouse from Las Vegas and dumped them there.

If UFC Freedom 250 fails to get everyone in the US watching, it may be because the card showing the fighters entering from the Oval Office isn’t exactly exciting. A generous description would be… good. In the main event, undefeated 155-pound champion Elijah Topuria will face interim 155-pound champion Justin Gaethje, who has been reliably entertaining the fighter as he has for years. There will be an interim heavyweight title bout and several other fights as well, almost all of which feature ranked fighters (and none of which feature women). It’s likely that relatively few people who aren’t familiar with the pros and cons of different betting apps will be very excited about the offers, but there are a lot of people out there who are, and it should be a solid night of action.