As something of a professional Republican, April Melton has attended her fair share of ho-hum events in the nation’s capital. But there’s one coming up that the chair of the Black Hawk County, Iowa, GOP is dying to see up close: an Ultimate Fighting Championship extravaganza on the South Lawn of the White House next month.
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“How do we get tickets? Can you get me tickets?” Melton said, her eyes lighting up. She was waiting for Vice President JD Vance to arrive at a midterm campaign rally in Des Moines on Tuesday. “I want to go!”
So does nearly everyone else in the heavily overlapping worlds of President Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again movement and mixed martial arts fandom.
In trademark fashion, the president created insatiable demand for an event — held in conjunction with his 80th birthday on June 14 and a monthslong celebration of the nation’s 250th anniversary — with a limited supply of tickets. Trump is handpicking most of the 4,000-plus spectators lucky enough, cunning enough or rich enough to score a seat on the South Lawn.
“I’m going to make a lot of enemies because it’s impossible to get everyone tickets,” the president said Friday in a telephone interview with NBC News.
Technically, all of the tickets are free, and the UFC is footing the bill for the event. But sponsorship packages that include ringside seats have been selling for $1 million or more, according to a Republican lobbyist directly familiar with the process. One report put the figure at $1.5 million.
The White House directed inquiries about sponsorships to the UFC, which reiterated that it is not selling tickets to the event but did not comment on where the sponsorship money was going.
On an earnings call in May, Mark Shapiro, president and chief operating officer of UFC’s parent company, TKO Holdings, said that the company expects to lose as much as $30 million on the matches and other festivities in Washington.
The cost hasn’t dampened enthusiasm for the fights in the top ranks of the UFC league, and demand for the elite passes to the South Lawn is through the roof.
“It’s crazy. It’s insane,” Dana White, the president and CEO of the UFC league, told NBC News outside last month’s black-tie White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.
“I only took a handful of tickets; I gave the rest of them to President Trump,” White said. “I keep telling people I don’t have tickets.”
That handful represents 200 seats, White said on a recent podcast. Another 200 are controlled by TKO Holdings, which is run by Democratic superagent Ari Emanuel.
The president is splitting up his lion’s share of the tickets among members of the military, VIPs — a set expected to include friends of the president, members of Congress and even foreign dignitaries — and administration staff, White House communications director Steven Cheung said in an interview.
“I get calls, texts or emails every day — a few times every day,” Cheung said of the requests for tickets that he and other White House officials are fielding on a regular basis. Cheung, a former UFC spokesman whose West Wing office is decorated with a replica championship belt and other memorabilia, said he is keeping a list of supplicants.
The UFC is still in the process of preparing an open-air stadium, complete with an octagonal fighting ring, for installation on the South Lawn. Trump has shown renderings of the arena to Oval Office visitors while the UFC works to assemble a set boasting a massive centerpiece, a 90-foot-tall archlike structure, in rural Lititz, Pennsylvania. The pieces of the arena are being broken down and shipped to Washington, where it will take teams nearly a month to reassemble it outside the White House.
The league is also planning for as many as 85,000 people to watch on massive screens from the Ellipse, a patch of turf just south of the White House, and Paramount+ will livestream for subscribers across the country.
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