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.
“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.
But lawn tickets are the big score, and even the president’s family members are hearing from friends eager to get ringside.
“It’s so funny because the only thing for the past four months that anyone has asked either of us for is a ticket to this UFC fight,” Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law, said of herself and her husband, Eric. “I mean, it is the hottest ticket in town. This is going to be maybe the event of his presidency, if I’m being honest.”A contractor who was doing work at her home offered to do the job for free if she could get him inside the White House gates for the fights, she said.
Bernie Moreno, a Republican senator from Ohio, is a car collector. Naturally, he said, he is more excited about the Freedom 250 Grand Prix of Washington, D.C., an IndyCar-style road race in August, than the UFC matches.
But that hasn’t given him protection from people “coming out of the woodwork” to ask for his help in securing tickets. His friends, especially the new ones, seem to think he will have an allocation of thousands of ringside seats.
“Which I kind of laugh at,” he said, because “I don’t even know that I have a ticket. So, I don’t know that I’m invited.”
Moreno said he’ll attend if he’s asked.
“President Trump is somebody who really understands what Americans want to see and what’s on their minds,” he said. “And I think it’ll be probably just the absolute hottest ticket in the history of tickets.”
The reality is that Trump will curate the crowd, according to one Trump adviser and a senior Republican aide on Capitol Hill who spoke to White House officials about access to the fights.
“The process has been absolute chaos,” the Trump adviser said. “It’s hard to overstate how many requests have come in, but there is no doubt the people President Trump wants there will be there, and those he does not will not be.”
The adviser added that the Trump birthday spectacle is “his show, and it’s being treated that way.”
With the combination of demand, scarce supply and his control over ticketing, the UFC fights have become another vehicle for Trump to collect money from wealthy donors and corporations seeking to curry his favor.
Donors who want to give large sponsorships to the event are getting credit with the Trump administration in the same way that they would if they give to Trump-aligned entities like super PAC MAGA Inc., the East Wing ballroom, or the Kennedy Center renovation, according to people familiar with the back-scratching.
“The Trump fundraising team is raising money for it,” said a Republican lobbyist directly familiar with the process. “It’s basically been added to the list of approved entities to give undisclosed money to and get credit with Trump.”
Sponsoring the event puts donors in line for tickets and in the good graces of the president. And it’s working, the lobbyist said.
“They are raising a s--- ton of money and have used it as another unofficial vehicle for corporate donors to give,” the lobbyist added, “and gain favor with Trump.”
Presidents have long showered favors and gifts on contributors to their campaigns and pet projects. President Bill Clinton caused a major stir and allegations of wrongdoing when it was revealed that high-dollar donors to his campaign were rewarded with overnight stays in the White House’s Lincoln Bedroom.
Lisa Gilbert, co-president of Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy group, said the practice may be more unseemly than illegal — and that Trump has made something of an art of finding new lures to attract those who want to seek favor.
“It is unsavory if once again there is a connection to access to the president to do something special, to be seen as an insider,” Gilbert said. “What makes it more suspect in this moment is how clearly aligned with industry, whether it’s the ballroom money or arch money or the ‘Please come to my meme coin dinner.’ Over and over, we’ve seen how they pander to corporate donors and how they engage with the K-Street class.”
Gilbert added that “seeing what comes from this — what sort of pandering and sitting near luminaries at a UFC fight on the White House lawn leads to will be where the real investigation and uncovering will occur.”
For most UFC fans, and folks who would just like to rub elbows with the president, the South Lawn will be out of reach, said one well-connected Republican lobbyist who said he has been granted two seats.
“I’d say if you don’t have a pretty close relationship with Trump or his organization, save yourself the pain,” the lobbyist said. “It’s not going to happen.”
Trump, a veteran UFC spectator who is personally close to White, the head of the league, has been talking more publicly in recent days about his expectations for the matches. On Wednesday, he appeared in the Oval Office with four fighters on the June 14 card behind him: Ilia Topuria, Alex Pereira, Justin Gaethje and Ciryl Gane. Pereira’s hand “was like a baseball glove,” Trump said in the Friday-morning interview with NBC News, marveling at the fighter’s handshake.
Trump suggested he’s well aware of the demand for access to seats with a prime view of the octagon. “Hottest ticket I’ve ever been involved with,” he said. “It’s a tribute to the country. There’s never been anything like it — and I’ve had big events.”
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