Dana White Says Donald Trump Saved UFC. Insiders Tell a Different Story.

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One night in February 2001, the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City played host to the Ultimate Fighting Championship’s first event under new ownership. The promotion company’s freshly installed president, Dana White, was on hand to inaugurate the changeover. Sammy Hagar, the former Van Halen vocalist, sat ringside as the premier celebrity guest.

But according to James Werme, the lead executive and producer of the event who introduced White to the audience as the show’s on-air announcer and interviewer, there was no sign of the venue’s namesake.

Donald Trump “wasn’t in the building,” Werme tells Vanity Fair. “And I know that because I was there.”

“Have you ever seen a picture or video clip of Trump at the shows at Taj Mahal?” he went on. “If it existed, you would have seen it a million times.”

It is a very different account from the one that White, now the CEO of what went on to become an Ari Emanuel-backed sports behemoth, has been offering in the lead-up to a bout at the White House on Sunday. UFC Freedom 250 will serve as a celebration of America’s birthday—and Trump’s—as well as a marker of the potent alliance between White and the president on the grandest possible stage. “He showed up from the first fight of the night and stayed till the last,” White told Rolling Stone last month in the course of a press tour ahead of the event, offering nearly a verbatim account of the evening to the New Yorker and Boardroom, the media network owned by NBA star Kevin Durant and his agent Rich Kleiman.

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To hear White tell it over this series of interviews, Trump saved UFC from the cultural margins, the threat of John McCain, who infamously described the sport as “human cockfighting” amid his campaign to ban it, and dire financial straits. It is an echo of the speech White gave at the 2016 Republican National Convention after Trump’s political star had begun to rise. “Arenas around the world refused to host our events,” White told the audience. “Nobody took us seriously. Nobody. Except Donald Trump … I will always be so grateful to him for standing with us in those early days, so tonight I stand with Donald Trump.” (Trump, for his part, said in the Oval Office this year, “They couldn’t get any arenas because it was so violent. I was able to give them the first four or five fights.”)

Amid the influx of attention on White and Trump’s relationship, Werme has been making the case on social media, along with a vocal corner of UFC aficionados and journalists, that it was never so straightforwardly fruitful. “Former head of UFC PR here,” Ant Evans wrote on X last month. “Trump’s name didn’t appear in a single press release, one-sheet briefing, talking point, UFC-produced document, book, or piece of content before 2016 … [White’s] narrative is simply false.”

“Dana says Trump called and bailed them out by offering the Taj to host their first show,” Werme told me. “Complete nonsense.” (“What is the point of this story?” White House spokesman Davis Ingle said when reached for comment. “Does someone need to attend every single event to have a relationship?” A representative for the UFC didn’t immediately return a request for comment.)

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Werme’s history with the sport stretches back to 1995, when the promotion was owned by the defunct pay-per-view company Semaphore Entertainment Group (SEG), and he stayed on when Zuffa, a holding company owned by Las Vegas casino magnates Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta, acquired UFC in January 2001 and appointed White as president. (Zuffa sold UFC to Emanuel-led buyers for $4 billion in 2016.) Not only had the February 2001 show at Trump’s Atlantic City casino, Werme told me, been arranged months prior to Zuffa’s acquisition—and prior to White assuming his new UFC role—but SEG had had another show at the venue the year prior. “Dana says when they bought the UFC they had nowhere to do the show as arenas did not want the event,” Werme says, describing this too as “complete nonsense.” (In February 2001, UFC was banned in 36 states, but New Jersey was not one of them, and as Werme tells me, SEG did shows throughout the country as well as in Brazil and Japan.)

“In all the meetings with the Taj Mahal hotel, arena, casino,” Werme says, “I never met, saw, or spoke with Donald Trump. He had no involvement nor did he attend.”

There is no doubting the significance of the contemporary connection between White and Trump. White, as he has recently recounted in several interviews, paved the president’s path to Joe Rogan and other influential podcasters during the 2024 campaign—Rogan is a friend of White’s and longtime MMA enthusiast who started working as a UFC broadcast interviewer in 1997—and at Trump’s Palm Beach victory speech, White thanked the boisterous crew of online personalities who had introduced their audiences to a pop culture-friendly side of the candidate. After the January 6 Capitol riots, and during his 2024 Manhattan criminal trial, UFC events provided welcoming spaces where Trump was greeted as a hero, entering the arena with a walkout worthy of a star fighter and sitting ringside. “He’s not a racist. He’s not a fascist,” White told the New Yorker last month. “He loves this country. And if you’re an American—race, religion, whatever it is—President Trump is on your team.”

So what does it matter, I asked one former UFC executive, if White has been getting the details wrong about Trump’s first fight? Does it really make that big a difference if it was UFC 32 at the Meadowlands where the president sat ringside with Melania for the first time in June 2001, and not UFC 30 at Trump Taj Mahal in February of that year?

“It’s a snowstorm in a fucking glass,” the executive said.

“It’s another way for Trump to aggrandize himself,” he continued. “Well, not only did he do this, this, and this, and can heal the sick with his bare hands like Jesus, he also invented the UFC, which obviously is one of the greatest sporting success stories of the last 75 years … a $7 billion business that has been built from nothing within the last 25 years, but now it’s something else that now has to be laid at the altar of Trump.”

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The executive said the narrative that the new owners alone turned a “barbaric” company into a “proper sport” was internally referred to as the “Zuffa myth.” One particularly confusing aspect of White’s account of Trump’s role in this supposed turnaround, as noted by several of its critics on social media and in interviews with VF, is that Trump backed a rival MMA promotion, Affliction, in 2008. “Dana fucking was laughing,” the executive said. “He goes, ‘Oh yeah, I’m sure fucking Trump’s going to fucking turn that into a big success.’ … He said, ‘Oh, they’ve got Oscar De La Hoya and Trump, what a brain trust.’” (Affliction’s promotion folded the following year.)

Another former UFC executive I spoke to, Campbell McLaren, who co-founded the promotion in 1993 before hiring Rogan a few years later, had a more charitable view of the dynamic. When McLaren gave Marla Maples, Trump’s then-wife, her on-air singing debut alongside David Hasselhoff in 1994, he found her husband “absolutely charming.”

While McLaren took issue with media depictions of White taking UFC from the fringes to its current heights—he noted that during his own tenure, he worked out of a Park Avenue office—he did think that Trump’s support played a meaningful role in bringing the sport to the mainstream.

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“When Zuffa takes over, they’re sort of between a rock and a hard place, right?” McLaren said. “It’s quasi-legal and they’re trying to get it respected by commissions and so on, and that’s a hard job.”

“I’m really trying to think of anyone that stood up for the UFC in that time period and I really can’t think of anyone,” he continued, adding, “I think [Trump’s] interest in MMA helped.”

What about the Sammy Hagar ringside appearance? I asked.

“I think that sums it up,” McLaren said. (Hagar had left Van Halen for the first time a few years prior.)

For Werme, the dispute over Trump’s presence at that Atlantic City fight speaks to a broader political reality of the modern era. White’s account, Werme said, makes for “a better hero story,” even if it’s not totally true: “Sadly, that might be the times we live in.” Dismayed as he was by the way his story was now being told, he could still allow himself to be amazed at the idea of a UFC fight at the White House—and he could see the appeal of the narrative spreading in the lead-up to it.

“Everyone wants everyone to think they’re a tough guy,” Werme said, “and the easy way to do that is to associate with tough guys.”

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