From the moment President Donald Trump spoke into existence the idea of a UFC event at the White House, the hype for a fight card for the ages seemed too good to be true. In many ways, it was.
The bouts were built up to be a logjam of the sport’s top stars, poised to deliver on Dana White’s 25-year-long project of elevating the UFC from the fringes of sports to the mainstream of pop culture.
“They’re going to have eight or nine championship fights, the biggest fights they’ve ever had,” Trump told reporters in December at the Kennedy Center Honors. “Every one is a championship fight, and every one is a legendary type of fight. (White is) actually holding back fights right now for six months so he can do it for 250.”
Instead, Freedom 250 has seven fights in total, headlined by two title bouts that aren’t the most prestigious or most star-driven matchups the UFC could have showcased.
President Donald Trump has attended numerous UFC live events over the years, most recently in April. (Photo: Tasos Katopodis / Getty Images)
Ilia Topuria is a heavy favorite against Justin Gaethje in their headlining lightweight title bout. Yet Topuria himself said he expected a more challenging test against Islam Makhachev, which could have been a showdown between the top current pound-for-pound fighters. In the co-main event, Alex Pereira of Brazil is moving up to heavyweight to try to win a belt in his third weight class. But his clash with Ciryl Gane of France is for just an interim title because Tom Aspinall, the division’s undisputed champion, is injured and angling for a new deal.
Also absent are Jon Jones, whose most recent public move was asking for a release from his longtime UFC contract, and Conor McGregor, who is by far the biggest star in mixed martial arts but is fighting in July instead.
“I was disappointed,” Bryce Bury, 15, said Friday night as he watched the bizarre scene of a UFC news conference complete with fighter faceoffs at the base of the Lincoln Memorial. “I mean, we were promised like 10 title fights, a lot.”
Bury and his mother, Linda, who lives in the Washington area and said her son was training in mixed martial arts and hopes to go pro in three years, stood at a barricade in front of hundreds of fans who waited through stormy weather to get a glimpse of the fighters verbally sparring. Bury’s voice was hoarse and he was optimistic about the heft of Sunday’s event even as he lamented that he wouldn’t get to see fights with McGregor or Jones.
“It’ll be monumental. It’s going to be very big and very popular. It’ll be all over the news and stuff,” Bury said. “I just think it’s because of how crazy the idea was of hosting a UFC event on the South Lawn.”
White has called Freedom 250, which falls on Trump’s 80th birthday, the most important event in the company’s history. Videos displayed during the news conference on Friday night showed historical UFC highlights, from the 1990s to the modern era, digitally superimposed over Washington’s most famous structures, including the Capitol, the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial.
“We are going to pull off the boldest idea in sports history,” White said in one of the sizzle reels that will likely be broadcast to millions of viewers with the fights on Paramount+.
It will certainly be a curiosity, thanks to the unorthodox setting and the planning made possible largely because of the friendship between White and Trump. The UFC and sponsors spent some $60 million on the showcase, according to White and court filings in a lawsuit that attempted to block the event, which failed Friday.
Yet the fights themselves, barring a major surprise or a transcendent moment, will have a harder time lifting Freedom 250 to the top of the year’s sports calendar, which is likely to be defined by the men’s World Cup, the Winter Olympics, and NBA and NHL finals that have been much stronger than expected.
The yearlong UFC hype train has been tempered by the realities of today’s fight game: fighter negotiations and injuries, newfound competition from outside the UFC, and built-in incentives for the most dominant promotional machine in mixed martial arts to spread its big fights throughout the calendar year.
Fans hoped this mainstream spotlight would set the stage to rival the heydays of the wildly popular McGregor and Ronda Rousey, the judo specialist who incentivized the UFC to develop women’s divisions.
The Freedom 250 news conference on Friday was held at the base of the Lincoln Memorial. (Photo: Al Drago / Getty Images)
Rousey, incidentally, was in the mix for a recent UFC return, she has said, but made that return to the sport with the Jake Paul-led promotion MVP instead. And Jones, who danced in front of Trump at UFC 309 in November 2024 to revel in a knockout victory following Trump’s win of a second presidential term, said he was offered $15 million to fight on the White House card, a claim White disputed days later.
McGregor, Jones and Rousey are examples of how White and the UFC have cultivated a reputation for backing stars and helping the brightest among them appeal beyond mixed martial arts circles.
On Saturday, Makhachev told a Russian MMA reporter, Adam Zubayraev, that he accepted a spot in the Freedom 250 main event against Topuria, but the bout fell apart after Topuria demanded $20 million. Gaethje was inserted as a last-minute replacement, as he revealed later that he was initially told, “You’re definitely not fighting on the White House card.”
Topuria himself has blamed Makhachev for their showdown not happening.
Still, devoted fans are right to be excited to see the undefeated Topuria, who has pledged to knock out the popular Gaethje in the first round, and another powerful puncher in Pereira, who recently starred in an action movie. Topuria has finishes in six of his last seven fights en route to two division titles. Pereira also earned two titles and has 10 wins in the last four years.
Jon Anik, the UFC’s play-by-play commentator, said that if not for the White House opportunity, the fight promotion would have separated Topuria and Pereira so they could each headline separate events. “You would never be doing that in any other scenario,” he said Saturday.
But Anik did acknowledge the circumstances that kept Freedom 250 from being the super-card it was hyped to be. The women’s bantamweight champion, Kayla Harrison, he said, “absolutely would be on this fight card” if she was not injured.
“I actually don’t think it was ever out of the realm of possibility that, in a perfect scenario, you would have had three or four undisputed title fights on the same card,” Anik said. He added: “There is just so much circumstance and so many variables in the fight game.”
Anik said he and the broadcast team learned the full White House card in the dressing room right before it was announced mid-broadcast at UFC 326 in March. He admitted he was surprised by some of the names, such as Aiemann Zahabi, Kyle Daukaus, and the matchup of Steve Garcia and Diego Lopes.
Back in January, Anik said some of the stars he was most excited to watch in 2026 were Tom Aspinall, Merab Dvalishvili and, if he had to pick a name to headline the White House, it would have been Khamzat Chimaev. The juggle to fill a fight calendar is a reminder that the UFC doesn’t need the stars of today to sell pay-per-views like the needle-movers of yesteryear.
The UFC octagon built on the South Lawn sits underneath a looming claw structure, decked out with 800 lighting modules, sound equipment and camera equipment. (Photo: Saul Loeb / AFP via Getty Images)
When White announced on Instagram Live during MVP’s Netflix event that McGregor would return in July, fans began looking past the White House. UFC supporters are known to relentlessly ask what’s next. “I think the fan base largely is always going to want more,” Anik said.
Freedom 250 is rounded out with names the UFC wants to become stars, like the bantamweight Sean O’Malley with his colorful hair and Bo Nickal, a former NCAA wrestling star who keeps getting ripe chances despite mixed results. But July’s event, an annual Las Vegas showcase known as International Fight Week, has bigger box office draws like Max Holloway and Paddy Pimblett, plus a hyped prospect, Gable Stevenson, making his UFC debut.
On Sunday night, the biggest spotlight will be on the White House, the birthday feting of Trump and nods to the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. There will be military flyovers, the United States Marine Band and a watch party for fans at the Ellipse, a park just outside the South Lawn of the White House. For star power, there’s Trump and White and the certainty of celebrity VIPs in the audience.
Paramount+ will likely be happy, and its stakes are massive with its $7.7 billion, seven-year agreement with the UFC, an arrangement that ended the days of expensive PPVs in favor of a monthly streaming subscription. Paramount+, with a reported 79 million viewers in February, is betting on core fans and those just keen on the glitz or learning about the sport.
But the newcomers will not be seeing the greatest UFC card of all time, as White and Trump promised. It might not matter, according to its biggest star.
“The White House is going to hit no matter what, who the f— gives a f— who we put on it?” McGregor said in an interview with the MMA podcast “Undefeated & Undisputed” in March.
“And then wheel McGregor out for the second one, and we’ll double our economic intake.”
