UFC chief Dana White said in an interview with Time magazine that he invited a handful of megawatt stars to join him at the bout: Adam Sandler, Guy Ritchie, Tom Brady, Jared Leto, Jason Statham, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, and Mario Lopez.
Of that group, few, if any, will actually be there. A source close to The Rock tells Vanity Fair that he will not be attending. Representatives for Sandler, Leto, and Lopez say they won’t be either. Reps for the others did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The White House and UFC did not respond to requests for comment about the guest list.
The caution speaks to a growing trend in Trump’s second term. As the United States prepares to celebrate its 250th birthday, a monumental milestone in the nation’s history, the events scheduled to ring in the semiquincentennial are increasingly seen as tainted by the tawdriness, hyperpartisanship, and self-obsession that have been hallmarks of Trump’s political career.
The UFC cage match is billed as a 250th event, but it looks more like a celebration of Trump than of country. It is, after all, to be held on his birthday, funded by donors looking to curry favor with the administration, with a guest list curated by Trump himself and VIP tickets doled out to his allies. “The whole reason you look at something like this is that it’s very important to the president,” says a source familiar with how companies are negotiating to fund the UFC fight and other 250th events. Firms with business before Trump’s government know the rules of the game: “There’s an expectation that everybody’s going to come in.”
According to White, Trump has 1,000 tickets to give out, while he and Ari Emanuel—the superagent whose company TKO Group Holdings owns UFC—have 200 apiece. Trump has been handpicking allies to attend with some help from chief of staff Susie Wiles, according to the official, while ringside seats have reportedly gone to those willing to pony up more than $1 million on sponsorship packages.
White has said that UFC is shouldering most of the costs, which Mark Shapiro, the president and COO of TKO, pegged at around $60 million in total.
As the money flows in, there’s been a battle brewing behind the scenes over who will actually handle the festivities for America’s 250th anniversary, with America250 (the bipartisan group formed a decade ago to handle the proceedings) and Freedom 250 (Trump’s competing group established last year) both organizing celebrations—and raising money to do so. But many of these events are struggling under the weight of Trump’s personal brand. A concert series on the National Mall, featuring a lineup of performers including a member of Milli Vanilli, Bret Michaels, and Flo Rida, fell apart this week after nearly all of the acts pulled out. Some explicitly cited Trump’s partisanship as the reason for their withdrawal.
The president, as if trying to prove the point, said he would replace the concert series with a campaign rally. In a series of posts in which he called the artists “Third Rate,” Trump wrote: “We should have a giant MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN RALLY, for 250, instead of having overpriced singers, who nobody wants to hear, whose music is boring, and yet who do nothing but complain.” (He promised the rally would be “Wild,” perhaps unwittingly echoing his 2021 tweet encouraging his supporters to descend on Washington for the protest that would end up becoming a riot at the US Capitol.) Even some pro-Trump voices found the idea of a MAGA-fied 250 discomfiting.
