Dana White will not be taking questions from the White House briefing room. Donald Trump says the whole thing was a bit.
“Donald Trump says he was ‘only kidding’ about offering Dana White White House role,” The Mac Life wrote on X on Monday morning, and the New York Post carried the same line in Trump’s own words: “I was only kidding.” Several outlets, including LowKickMMA and Modern Ghana, framed it as a backtrack. Modern Ghana’s headline went with the word “JOKE” in all caps.
If you missed how we got here, it escalated quickly. According to The Independent, Trump shared a Family Guy-style cartoon depicting White as press secretary, with UFC fighters going after journalists. LowKickMMA reported that Trump had gone as far as naming UFC fighters as White’s assistants before he walked the idea back. The sources don’t spell out which fighters made the imaginary staff, so I won’t guess. I’d pay real money for the org chart, though.
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White is the CEO of the UFC, which is a full-time job with a fight calendar that doesn’t pause for cartoons. He has a long public relationship with Trump, and that history is why a lot of people took the offer half-seriously for a minute.
The joke also produced a genuinely funny side plot. Bloody Elbow reported that White praised his female namesake after she responded to confusion over the press secretary role. Anyone looking up the press secretary story over the weekend apparently got more than one Dana White, and at least one of them had to clear up the mix-up publicly.
Not everybody laughed. Howard Bryant wrote in The Guardian that it was “Trump’s pathetic Dana White gambit” and argued it “could not mask his midterm humiliation.” That’s Bryant’s read, and it’s an opinion column, but it shows the bit landed well outside the fight bubble.
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What happens now
On paper, nothing. White keeps his day job, the podium stays empty of UFC brass, and the fighters reportedly penciled in as assistants go back to cutting weight instead of cutting press credentials. Trump announcing a job and then calling it a joke is a familiar pattern by now, and I’ll take it over a cryptic emoji any day.
The one thing I’d watch is White’s next press scrum. He gets asked everything after fight nights, and somebody in that room is going to ask about the cartoon. He tends to answer straight. That’s the quote worth waiting for.
