The White House South Lawn will host a mixed martial arts card Sunday night, the first time the executive mansion's grounds have been used for a professional fight, as President Trump marks his 80th birthday and the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence with a UFC title bout between Ilia Topuria and Justin Gaethje.
The event, billed as UFC Freedom 250, lands after a federal judge on Friday declined to halt it, clearing the way for an Octagon enclosed by 92-foot star-spangled rigging to operate a few hundred feet from the Oval Office. The decision allows what the National Park Service told the court was more than $60 million in spending and months of fighter training to proceed, and turns a section of federal parkland into a pay-per-view venue for the evening.
On the card
The White House expects roughly 5,000 guests on the South Lawn, CBS News reported. The National Park Service, in its court filing, said more than 1,000 of those will be armed servicemembers. An additional 120,000 ticket-lottery winners are expected to watch from the Ellipse, the public park immediately south of the White House, where the UFC has organized a weekend "fan fest" and a fight-night watch party.
The main card is scheduled for 8 p.m. Eastern and will stream on Paramount+, which is owned by Paramount Skydance, the parent company of CBS News. Earlier bouts begin at 5 p.m. The headline fight pairs Topuria, the Georgian-Spanish lightweight champion who is 17-0, against Gaethje, the American challenger.
Six undercard matches round out the program, including an interim heavyweight title bout between Alex Pereira and Ciryl Gane and a bantamweight fight between Sean O'Malley and Aiemann Zahabi. UFC chief executive Dana White, a longtime Trump associate, has spent close to a year working with the president to bring a card to the White House grounds.
The lawsuit
Two Virginia residents sued last weekend to stop the event, arguing the administration bypassed National Park Service rules that bar commercial sporting events in federal parks, that Congress never approved the temporary arch overlooking the South Lawn and that no environmental review was conducted. The complaint, as summarized by Fox News, contends the event "has less to do with commemorating American independence and more with promoting the UFC brand."
One of the plaintiffs' attorneys, Brendan Ballou, called the event "a corrupt use of our most sacred national monuments for private gain." The complaint also flags potential financial benefits for Trump and associates including White and Paramount-Skydance chief David Ellison, and cites the president's reported purchase of up to $50,000 in stock of TKO Group Holdings, the UFC's publicly traded parent.
The Justice Department, with Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche on the brief, asked the court to reject the case. "It would be easy enough to simply avert their gazes for the weekend," the department wrote. "Instead, they seek to enlist the power of a federal court to impose their idiosyncratic preferences on the rest of the country and ruin an event designed to celebrate the United States of America." The judge agreed the plaintiffs had filed too late and had not shown harm.
The political reaction
The spectacle has split commentary along familiar lines and across them. On HBO's "Real Time" Friday, host Bill Maher said "the emperor is holding gladiator games on his birthday," called Trump "our redneck president" and argued that the broader 250th anniversary lineup had been hijacked by the White House.
Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat appearing on the same program, said the original commemoration was nonpartisan until "Donald Trump took it over, right, to create a parallel set of events" and that visiting artists "thought that they were going to the nonpartisan effort, and then when they found out that it was just a predicate to a Trump rally, they didn't want to be part of it." Several acts, including Bret Michaels of Poison, Milli Vanilli and the Commodores, withdrew from the related Freedom 250 concert series on the National Mall.
Dana White and the UFC have not issued a public response to the lawsuit.
The counterargument
The administration and the National Park Service argue the suit is a late-arriving effort by two people to override a public celebration months in the planning. The agency told the court that canceling would strand months of training by 14 athletes and tens of millions in committed spending, and the Justice Department brief framed the plaintiffs as outliers seeking to "ruin an event designed to celebrate the United States of America." The White House called the suit "an attempt to derail a properly permitted celebration," according to Fox News.
What to watch
The first bouts ring in at 5 p.m. Eastern, with Topuria and Gaethje set for the main event at 8 p.m. The rigging will come down after the fight, Trump told reporters. The Freedom 250 calendar continues this summer with the Great American State Fair and an August Grand Prix race through Washington, D.C., and the underlying questions about commercial use of the South Lawn, the TKO share purchase and the permitting process now move from a denied injunction to whatever follow-on litigation the plaintiffs pursue.