To hear White tell it over this series of interviews, Trump saved UFC from the cultural margins, the threat of John McCain, who infamously described the sport as “human cockfighting” amid his campaign to ban it, and dire financial straits. It is an echo of the speech White gave at the 2016 Republican National Convention after Trump’s political star had begun to rise. “Arenas around the world refused to host our events,” White told the audience. “Nobody took us seriously. Nobody. Except Donald Trump … I will always be so grateful to him for standing with us in those early days, so tonight I stand with Donald Trump.” (Trump, for his part, said in the Oval Office this year, “They couldn’t get any arenas because it was so violent. I was able to give them the first four or five fights.”)
Amid the influx of attention on White and Trump’s relationship, Werme has been making the case on social media, along with a vocal corner of UFC aficionados and journalists, that it was never so straightforwardly fruitful. “Former head of UFC PR here,” Ant Evans wrote on X last month. “Trump’s name didn’t appear in a single press release, one-sheet briefing, talking point, UFC-produced document, book, or piece of content before 2016 … [White’s] narrative is simply false.”
“Dana says Trump called and bailed them out by offering the Taj to host their first show,” Werme told me. “Complete nonsense.” (“What is the point of this story?” White House spokesman Davis Ingle said when reached for comment. “Does someone need to attend every single event to have a relationship?” A representative for the UFC didn’t immediately return a request for comment.)
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Werme’s history with the sport stretches back to 1995, when the promotion was owned by the defunct pay-per-view company Semaphore Entertainment Group (SEG), and he stayed on when Zuffa, a holding company owned by Las Vegas casino magnates Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta, acquired UFC in January 2001 and appointed White as president. (Zuffa sold UFC to Emanuel-led buyers for $4 billion in 2016.) Not only had the February 2001 show at Trump’s Atlantic City casino, Werme told me, been arranged months prior to Zuffa’s acquisition—and prior to White assuming his new UFC role—but SEG had had another show at the venue the year prior. “Dana says when they bought the UFC they had nowhere to do the show as arenas did not want the event,” Werme says, describing this too as “complete nonsense.” (In February 2001, UFC was banned in 36 states, but New Jersey was not one of them, and as Werme tells me, SEG did shows throughout the country as well as in Brazil and Japan.)
