Trump Turns White House UFC Cage Match Into Massive Cash Grab

Tickets to President Trump’s planned UFC fight on the White House lawn are going to cost a hefty amount.

NBC News reports that even though the UFC is paying for the event and tickets are technically free, sponsorship packages, including ringside seats, are going for $1 million-plus, with BBC Sport putting them as high as $1.5 million. Neither the White House nor the UFC has said where the sponsorship money is going.

Trump is personally selecting most of the 4,000-plus spectators for the event, to be held on June 14, which happens to be his eightieth birthday.

“I’m going to make a lot of enemies because it’s impossible to get everyone tickets,” Trump told NBC Friday in a telephone interview.

Trump will likely reward people who have given him political or business favors in the past, or those who are willing to pay up to attend. White House communications director Steven Cheung told NBC that Trump was splitting up his tickets among administration staffers, military servicemembers, and VIPs. The last group could include anyone Trump wants, including members of Congress and foreign dignitaries.

“I get calls, texts or emails every day—a few times every day,” Cheung, a former UFC spokesperson, said of the ticket requests he and other White House staffers are getting. UFC’s own president and CEO Dana White said last month that he only had taken about 200 tickets for himself and gave the rest to Trump, while TKO controls another 200.

An unnamed Trump adviser told NBC that the event is “his show, and it’s being treated that way.”

“The process has been absolute chaos,” the adviser said. “It’s hard to overstate how many requests have come in, but there is no doubt the people President Trump wants there will be there, and those he does not will not be.”

The president and CEO of UFC parent company TKO Holdings, Mark Shapiro, said in an earnings call earlier this month that the company expected to lose as much as $30 million on the event.

Knowing Trump, he’s going to take whatever money he can from the fight, and Republicans in Congress will work to ensure that there is no transparency (possibly in exchange for tickets). The spectacle will essentially be a circus, trading off the presidency, with Trump as a monarch watching people fight for his amusement in the octagon or to get a seat by his side.

Democrats asked the Supreme Court Monday to block a state judiciary ruling that upended their redistricting effort.

The Virginia Supreme Court ruled Friday that the proposed maps were essentially invalid because state Democrats did not follow proper procedure. In Virginia, the General Assembly is required to pass a constitutional amendment not just once, but twice. The first vote must be conducted during a regularly scheduled legislative election, while the second vote has to take place after, before the question is put to voters.

The court ruled last week that, although state Democrats complied with those regulations, the timeframe in which it was conducted was compromised since early voting on the matter was already underway. The party’s unsuccessful counterargument turned to long-standing decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court, which has held that even if early voting is underway, an election does not happen until Election Day itself.

Virginians narrowly passed the referendum last month, despite a 2020 state policy that relegated redistricting to 10-year intervals aligned with the national census. Roughly 50.3 percent of the state voted in favor of redrawing the voting map, giving their representatives a chance to squeeze more Democratic seats into the U.S. House at midterms.

The new maps were expected to alter the state’s congressional split to overwhelmingly favor Democrats, switching from a 6–5 split to 10–1.

“The Court overrode the will of the people who ratified the amendment by ordering the Commonwealth to conduct its election with the congressional districts that the people rejected,” wrote lawyers for Virginia Democrats and the state’s Democratic Attorney General Jay Jones, in a statement obtained by the Associated Press. The attorneys added that “the irreparable harm resulting from the Supreme Court of Virginia’s decision is profound and immediate.”

The judicial decision was a major setback for the national liberal party, which had placed enormous weight on Virginia to offset successful Republican redistricting efforts in other areas of the country, such as Texas and Florida. The Supreme Court filing is an act of desperation as the party grasps for various solutions to offset the national Republican advantage heading into the midterm election cycle.

On Saturday, lawmakers met with Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries to discuss other potential solutions in the wake of the Virginia decision, including a bank-shot proposal to redraw the state’s congressional lines anyway.

President Donald Trump accidentally just handed Democrats another sound bite they can use to destroy him.

During an appearance on Fox News Monday, White House spokesperson Anna Kelly was asked to explain Trump’s thinking about high energy prices.

Kelly claimed Trump was “clear-eyed” about the rising gas prices, adding that Iran had been “incredibly decimated” militarily and “totally crippled” economically.

“The president is not in a rush—he has all the cards at his disposal, because he knows that Iran is getting weaker and weaker by the day, while the United States is getting stronger and stronger,” she said.

Kelly’s insistence that Trump is in control of the disaster he created in the Middle East is at once both deluded and damaging.

Shackled by sycophancy, Kelly insisted that Trump maintains a mastery over world events, including the economic disruption that is hurting Americans. He could end our suffering with a snap of his fingers, but he’s “not in a rush.” In reality, Trump’s demonstrated inability to strike a deal with Iran after more than two months shows just how out of control this situation has become.

Meanwhile, the average price of gas in the United States reached more than $4.50 per gallon Sunday, according to the AAA motor club. U.S. households are expected to pay at least $876 more on gas this year than last year, according to Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee.

But speaking in the Oval Office Monday, Trump claimed that there was no cause for concern, because gas prices would “drop like a rock” as soon as Iran relinquished its grip on the Strait of Hormuz.

It’s not clear this will be anytime soon, as reports suggest Trump has spoken hyperbolically about the extent of destruction in Iran. A recent CIA analysis suggested that Iran could survive another three to four months under the U.S. military blockade without experiencing severe economic hardships. The president has also overstated the damage to Iranian military assets while the Pentagon has downplayed the extensive damage to U.S. military assets.

Jeffrey Epstein associate and former child actor Brock Pierce was a guest at one of Donald Trump’s Florida golf courses last week, helping to unveil a golden statue of the president.

Pierce was a business partner and friend to Epstein for nearly a decade, helping him invest in the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase while emailing him about women. In 2012 Pierce told Epstein, “I had a great time with the girls. Hope they had fun too. Thanks.”

Also that year, Pierce sent Epstein dozens of pictures of a Ukrainian woman named Anastasia, writing that “Ukraine is now my favorite country,” after Epstein asked him to “take photos and find me a present.”

In 2018, Pierce emailed Epstein about how he had “a boat in Antigua full of amazing Ukraine’s finest” waiting for him.

This is the man who was cutting the ribbon for the golden statue at the president’s resort last week.

Senator John Fetterman has aligned himself with one more MAGA talking point.

The Pennsylvania Democrat appeared on Bill Maher’s Club Random podcast Monday, laughing alongside the “anti-woke” comedian as the pair mutually praised Donald Trump’s “honest” treatment of the press, including an instance in which the president called a female journalist a “piggy.”

“The things that he says aloud, the way he just voices his interior monologue—there is something not exactly psychologically normal about someone who just voices their interior monologue—but it gives him an authenticity that no one else can possibly match,” Maher said.

“I saw his interview with Norah O’Donnell after the shooting, the next day, and she quotes the assassin who called him a pedophile, Hitler, whatever he called him,” Maher continued, referring to the attack on the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and taking a moment to suggest that Trump is not a pedophile. “But his reaction immediately was, to her, ‘You’re a terrible person.’ And he didn’t just think it—like any politician, that’s exactly what they’re thinking. He just says it.”\

“It’s at the same time horrifying and also kind of like, refreshing. It’s shockingly—the honesty, as someone who loves honesty and has made my career about it as much as I could, it is—there’s some level of it where you tip your hat and you go, ‘Wow, total honesty,’” said the longtime political satirist.

Amused, Fetterman responded: “Yeah, the ultimate—‘Quiet, piggy.’ That’s the president of America.”

Trump routinely insults reporters in order to evade their questions. The moment Fetterman referred to took place in November, when Trump ended a line of questioning about the Epstein files by barking at a female Bloomberg News reporter, “Quiet! Quiet, piggy.”

Fetterman has displayed a penchant for Trumpian politics since he moved to Washington, despite the fact that he ran on the progressive ticket. Since Fetterman entered office in 2023, he has sided with Republicans dozens of times, frequently leveraging his position to advance Trump’s agenda.

He also voted to confirm several of Trump’s Cabinet selections, including Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin as well as the last Homeland Security chief, Kristi Noem, who was transferred to work in a relatively unknown section of the government in March following a string of embarrassing scandals.