Originally published at: MAGA’s Infatuation With MMA Is Part Of A Long History Between Combat Sports And The Right Wing - TPM – Talking Points Memo
March 2026 was a big month for anyone keeping tabs on the increasingly important intersection between the Trump administration and combat sports. On March 11, FBI Director Kash Patel announced a partnership between his agency and the Ultimate Fighting Championship. Less than two weeks later, on March 24, the U.S. Senate voted to confirm Mixed…
Wannabe tough guys who are scared little cowards and people like Trump when asked to serve and put themselves in harms way to help their country, show their mantle and hide under their beds.
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Trump tries to MAGA message and “brand himself” as being a macho, tough guy, but the fact that many if not most of his firings of key administration individuals were via tweet, rather than in person, makes him appear more like a weak, cowardly, chicken shit so-called leader. TACO!! Draft dodging Cadet Bone Spurs ain’t no leader!
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Of course DonOLD tries to portray himself as a “manly he-man”, the most “manly of he-mans” that ever manned. Everything DonOLD does is akin to stolen valor. Everything is a performance.
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Despite the right-coding you mention, by the right’s own rules about what it means to be woke, is MMA the wokest sport on the planet? Think about the diverse mix of martial arts disciplines from around the world that are equitably included in its competitions. Which then begs the question if the Trump administration’s various MMA / UFC partnerships violate their anti-DEI policies.
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Kind of to the side of the topic, am I the only one who sees what Iran is doing is analogous to bottom control in the ground game in MMA?
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Many thanks for a fascinating overview of the martial arts/right wing connection and you couldn’t be more correct in seeing Trump’s destruction of the Republican primary jabronies in 2015 as peak Trumpian kayfabe, and WWE- style shit-talking as a key part of his toolkit. I’ll say as a 14 year aikido practitioner that this particular art seems more center/left coded…
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OT
Excellent article on the disastrous effects on petroleum-related prices Operation Epic Fiasco will have in the near to long term. Well worth the read!!
This year’s Oscar surprise was in the documentary category: Mr. Nobody Against Putin. Everything takes place in a copper-smelter town and follows a couple years of events at the Karabash primary school school where the protagonist, camera operator/director works. It is a lovely insight into Russian character today and so relevant to what is happening in the US at the moment. The genius of the work is how its maker, Pavel Talankin, kept things small and real. Our world is already becoming strange and unreal.
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Once I witnessed an MMA bout, I immediately ignored it. It’s nothing but street fighting with no rules.
Of course that would infatuate MAGA and the First Felon. They want a world with no rules.
I always wondered how Trump could have cultivated a “cult-like following.” I thought, “How could people be that damned gullible?” I have since been convinced, especially if MAGAts can think of a person who wears orange make up daily, has Aqua Net, bird’s nest hair, an undisciplined, flabby waist line, and is so easily manipulated (TACO?). If his followers can think of him as being a symbol of masculinity and macho, I guess he has a perverse hold over their thinking processes. Conclusion: Yup, it’s a cult!
Is any of this even a question? The same jocks, bullies and goons who terrorized my high school are now running the country. Of course MAGAts like “manly” brutality for entertainment. It’s the latest entry into the Annals of No Shit, Sherlock!
Transcript
Has the US military already been Kudlowized? Hi, I’m Paul Krugman. I’ll explain what I meant by that in a couple of minutes.
It’s Friday morning. The war is continuing. A lot of what’s happened in the Iran war has sadly not come as a surprise. The fact that there was no planning, that there was no plan B in case a decapitation strike didn’t do the job, that Trump’s people didn’t seem to have gamed out at all what would happen if their fondest wishes did not come true — unfortunately, that’s par for the course.
There was a famous book in the Vietnam years about how all that went wrong, about how all of the sort of brains trust around LBJ led us into that disaster, and it was called “The Best and the Brightest.” In this case, it’s obvious: Everybody knows that we’ve got the worst and the dumbest. So we knew that the thinking about strategy was going to be nil, that it was going to be all very ill-conceived.
The surprise, and it’s an unfavorable surprise, is that the U.S. military has not been doing too well either. I mean, obviously, you know, they can blow up anything they want. There’s no question that the U.S. has unchallenged superiority in all of the conventional aspects of warfare. There’s no Iranian Air Force for, you know, there’s no Iranian Navy in any conventional sense. Unfortunately, it’s not that kind of war. The failure to have a prepared response to the modern world of drones and inferior powers which nonetheless have the ability to do a lot of damage, has been a bit of a shock.
Now, admittedly, that is something that I, like I think a lot of people who are amateur followers of military affairs, was worried about watching developments in Ukraine. You couldn’t help but wonder whether the U.S. military, with its emphasis on overwhelming force, with its historic superiority in technology, was actually ready for this new world of kind of democratized ability to inflict damage. And there were some straws in the wind suggesting that we were not, that maybe just the historical record of overwhelming dominance had made the US military complacent. But it still comes as a shock to find that U.S. bases in the region appear to be sort of completely unprotected, unhardened, that the U.S. went into this thing sending, you know, multimillion-dollar interceptors to shoot down multithousand-dollar drones.
It’s been really kind of shockingly overwhelmingly, I’m not sure incompetent, but unprepared. It’s just shocking how unready the world’s greatest military seems to have been for a war that was in many ways prefigured by what’s been happening in Ukraine for several years now. So how did that happen?
I was motivated to do this video by a report in The New York Times about what Pete Hegseth has been doing to the military, about the passing over of promotions for officers who happen to be black or female. It’s just been this shocking sort of anti, reverse DEI, otherwise known as racism and misogyny. But in general, I think it’s pretty clear, not just that Hegseth doesn’t like women, doesn’t like non-whites, but also he doesn’t like smart people. He doesn’t like people who are competent at their jobs. He wants people who are into lethality and dumb shows of force, which is not a good thing in a 21st century military. But I had thought that this would take longer.
And I’m wondering whether this is just Hegseth or whether this is a process that has been underway. And of course, it’s now accelerated drastically under current management.
And so let me explain about Kudlowization. In places where I do know something, do know what I’m talking about, which is economic policy making, economic discussion, there has been a long-standing dumbing down on the right wing, a dumbing down of economic thinking, dumbing down of economic discourse. Which is a little odd because for an academic field, economics has a lot of conservative people, not extreme right-wingers, but kind of small government, low tax, deregulation.
That kind of comes with the territory. It’s not that it’s necessarily right, but the simplified models that we use in economics do tend to point you that way. We like simplified models in which the market is always right, and in some ways the line of least resistance is to say that the models are right, the market is always right. So there are plenty of people who, at least by conventional, by historical standards, would be considered conservatives. And some of them have spent, over the course of my professional lifetime, have spent a lot of time trying to be part of the Republican policy apparatus, have sought appointments in Republican administrations. But more and more, and totally in recent decades, have been frozen out.
It turns out that the modern Republican Party doesn’t want, say, Greg Mankiw. They don’t want moderately conservative, technically competent economists. They want people who have no idea what they’re doing. They want ideologues, not even ideologues, but loyalists, people who will say whatever it is they want, the party wants them to say. They want Larry Kudlow, Stephen Moore. They want the often wildly incompetent but reliable people who are reliable in part because they’re incompetent. Somebody who has a professional reputation, a professional skill set might be tempted to actually someday take a stand on principle, and that’s unacceptable.
So we have this kind of real extreme, not just political extremism, but complete lack of ability to do the job, which is almost, in a sense, incompetence is a job requirement.
And I’m starting to wonder if that hasn’t started to infect the military as well. Certainly the people that someone like Hegseth wants are people who believe in warrior ethos, who believe in lethality, who believe in muscles in an age when war is largely waged by guys staring at video screens. And it’s a technological war in which all of those things matter not at all. But anybody who is likely to think that is not this regime’s, this movement’s kind of guy.
Now, what worries me, I mean, how much damage could they have done in just 14 months? Well, maybe quite a lot, but when I talked with Phillips O’Brien a while back, he said that this rot has been underway for a while, that there’s actually a kind of a MAGA-esque faction even within the professional officer corps.
And we certainly seem to be seeing that. So it looks as if the worst and the dumbest are not just at the top of the political leadership. They’re not just on the diplomacy and strategic policymaking end, but even in the cutting edge of the military. And it’s terrifying. America as we knew it may just not exist, even in our military forces.
On that happy thought, have a great day.
this is the manifestation of virtually every sadistic school yard bully I have ever encountered - demented poorly controlled rage - aimed at individuals that they could dominate.
and it was all permeated with some of the strangest homo-eroticism imaginable.