Longtime MMA analyst Luke Thomas believes the UFC accomplished exactly what it needed to with last weekend’s Freedom 250 card on the White House lawn.
While the event predictably generated controversy for its exorbitant cost, the strange conspiracies around it, and one fighter’s racist remarks, the actual fights delivered. And, Thomas argued in an appearance on The Dan Le Batard Show on Monday, the “pageantry” of the event was huge for the UFC, which he said has been in need of a big spectacle for a while.
“From an MMA fight fan’s perspective, and this does not mean that they’re pro-Trump, either, but you’ve gotta understand, fight fans want this kind of thing anyway,” Thomas explained. “I don’t mean large structures on the White House lawn, but they want pomp and circumstance, they want pageantry, they want big lights, they want atmosphere. And so, on a basic level, that definitely was delivered to them.”
Freedom 250 was an uneasy victory for the UFC pic.twitter.com/BnZaFTZRMs
— Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz (@LeBatardShow) June 15, 2026
Thomas speculated that the sport had been “contracting” in recent years, and that despite initial pushback against the event and strong political overtones throughout the card, Freedom 250 was overall a victory for the UFC.
“If we’re looking at the last few years, evidence is not conclusive, but I have thought there was reason to believe that MMA was contracting,” Thomas said.
“I think they’ve been starving for something like this, so I think they were willing to just take it anywhere they could get it. Again, there are obviously … some big pro-Trump elements in there, but it’s not just that kind of a thing. And I also saw … a lot of people in conservative media saying, ‘Donald Trump delivered this,’ like this is some kind of policy objective and campaign promise that he made good on, rather than just having a party that the UFC itself was tasked with doing event management (for).”
Thomas even predicted that the grandeur and celebratory nature of the event will flip many Republican voters, a surprising portion of whom told Reuters/Ipsos pollsters before the event that they did not support it.
Most of the chatter in media and online following Freedom 250 focused on the negative headlines and the absurdity of the event under the pretense that it could turn even some UFC diehards off, but Thomas, who understands MMA fans deeply after years covering the sport professionally, believes that what came off as over-the-top to the average American actually resonated with the sport’s most passionate supporters.
About Brendon Kleen
Brendon is a Media Commentary staff writer at Awful Announcing. He has also covered basketball and sports business at Front Office Sports, SB Nation, Uproxx and more.