The heavyweight MMA fighter Josh Hokit is flailing badly, sweating and in pain. His UFC cage fight on the White House South Lawn is still four days away, but here onstage at Media Day, in the somewhat gloomy basement ballroom level of the JW Marriott, the pressure is on. It’s because he has, for some reason, chosen to do a comedy bit for the reporters. But it’s a confusing and unsuccessful bit. He tells a joke about photographing an overweight woman “and the picture’s still being printed,” and a joke about another overweight woman making French toast who “got her tongue stuck in the toaster.”
With each punch line, the room remains chillingly silent. No one even politely chuckles. It’s the kind of hellish silence that would haunt a comedian to the grave.
“Fuck,” Hokit says. “I’m bombing. Guys, wake up.” He pauses. “Give me something…someone ask me a question.”
So a few reporters kindheartedly do
And so a few reporters kindheartedly do. One of them, I read on his lanyard, is named Anik Subramanian, and he’s here creating content for the Swedish MMA site Kimura. “What do you think the crowd wants more on Sunday night?” he asks Hokit. “Derrick Lewis to take his pants off [Lewis, Hokit’s opponent, famously did this after winning a 2018 fight in Las Vegas], or you to get on the microphone?”
“Me take my pants off and get on the microphone,” Hokit replies. “Throw the cup at Donald Trump.”
He mimes removing his groin-protecting cup and hurling it at the president.
It’s actually quite a shock. He clearly realizes he’s made a mistake because he immediately recants. “Maybe I won’t do that,” he stammers. “Um, yeah.”
I arrived in DC only this morning,
I arrived in DC only this morning, but something is already clear: These fighters—assembled to celebrate the 250th birthday of the USA, on the 80th birthday of President Trump—are a bag of cats. Dana White, the UFC’s president and CEO, allows them the freedom to say whatever they like, but with unwieldy mavericks come difficult consequences. I watch Hokit exit the ballroom, looking worried by his faux pas.
“Tough crowd,” he murmurs.
At 6 a.m. the next day, 100 or so reporters gather on the steps of the Eisenhower Building, on the White House grounds. We’re about to become the first people in the world to inspect the Claw, the great structure that’s been built to house Sunday’s fights. This dawn visit is primarily attended by those reporters who haven’t been granted access to the South Lawn on fight night and who can instead watch on a TV in the JW Marriott’s inauspicious basement. Only a tiny handful of lucky reporters will be permitted to stand among the luminaries. One of them is me. Which means I’m basically slumming it here with the shutouts.
A UFC organizer yells for the content creators and videographers among us to form a line to the right and the print journalists to step to the left. What ensues is a vast exodus to the right. Ninety-eight percent of us are, it transpires, content creators. The print line is basically me, the Toronto Star, Business Insider, and The New York Times.
I glance over at the heaving content-creator line
I glance over at the heaving content-creator line. They aren’t all UFC superfans—some are shooting video for mainstream sites—but I’ve never seen a press pool with so many neck tattoos, nor one where so many ripped men hug, fist-bump, and call each other “brother.” Legacy-media press pools tend to have a very different vibe: We basically hate each other and want each other to fail.
I arrived in DC with a positive outlook. If Patti LaBelle can perform on the South Lawn, why not the UFC? But now we’re led around the corner, and it is a surprise. The Claw, a towering hunk of metal and lasers, has been built startlingly close to the White House—practically blood-spatter close. I can imagine bits of cartilage ending up on the Truman Balcony.
All around me, content creators live-stream their first impressions. A narrative has formed among the mainstream media, first advanced by Joe Rogan, that Sunday night’s very rare outdoor bout is destined for disaster: “Severe thunderstorms are predicted….” they say, and “concerns about bugs….” Everywhere I walk, I hear doomy evocations of blood and bugs and storms and fighting men. It’s like a Nick Cave song. But standing among them is one content creator who is not carping. He’s awed.
Four years ago I started my MMA journey,
“Four years ago I started my MMA journey,” he’s saying into his phone’s camera. “How grateful am I to be on the South Lawn. We are blessed. Work hard. Take risks. Chase your dreams. If you’re crazy enough, they might come true. Thank you guys for all the support….”
It’s Subramanian, the man who kindly tried to help Josh Hokit out of his hole yesterday, before Hokit dug himself deeper. I want to understand the happiness he’s deriving from this and so, once we’re escorted away from the White House, I watch a 2024 interview he gave fellow MMA content creator Mario Alyas, where he outlined his origin story.
Subramanian’s MMA journey began during COVID. “All my favorite sports just stopped,” he said. But then the UFC resumed fighting, so he watched that instead, and got into it. And that was his origin story.
“What an amazing story!” his interviewer enthused.
I frown. That isn’t an amazing story, I think.
Yes, it’s always nice to see content creators
Yes, it’s always nice to see content creators affirm each other. But that was, by any yardstick, a banal origin story. I message Subramanian, we meet in the JW Marriott basement, and I tell him so.
“Your story,” I said, “is not amazing enough.”
Subramanian looks taken aback by my bluntness. “Yeah, no,” he says. He decides to take it as a compliment. “Thank you,” he says.
But I believe he’s holding something back. Mixed martial arts is clearly very emotional for him. It really matters. I ask him why.
It’s the only sport where you can truly
“It’s the only sport where you can truly be yourself,” he says. “These guys, they’re fighting at the White House in front of the president, but they could get seriously hurt. This is true fear. So they put in a lot of blood and sweat.” Which is why during yesterday’s Media Day, “we got to see these raw emotions. Dana White lets them say what they want, which leads to good and bad. But it’s raw, it’s unfiltered.”
“So the people who think this is vulgar misunderstand it?” I ask. “They don’t realize how honest it is?”
He tells me that that’s “a beautiful way” to put it. “This sport saves lives just as much as it endangers them,” he says.
Like Derrick The Black Beast Lewis, who—prior
Like Derrick “The Black Beast” Lewis, who—prior to joining the UFC—was raised among drug addicts in New Orleans and was a prolific street fighter before being imprisoned on a probation violation following a 2004 aggravated assault charge. “Last time I fought outside, they locked me up three and a half years,” Lewis said during yesterday’s Media Day. That was after Trump’s drug czar, Sara Carter, climbed onto the stage to award him a lapel pin for “choosing to remain drug-free.”
“On behalf of President Trump,” she said, “congratulations, congratulations, congratulations! I can’t say it enough…. That’s incredible…thank you.”
“What the fuck was that?” Lewis muttered once Carter had left the stage.
He got big laughs. Unlike Hokit, he’s naturally funny and charming. Subramanian looks proud as he describes the UFC as a place for scrappy outsiders to thrive and be their true unvarnished selves.
Friday night, the public press conference
Friday night, the public press conference on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Thousands of fans have waited hours in the sweltering heat to glimpse the fighters. Thunderstorms swirl. Lightning forks the sky. The big screens flash “Seek Shelter.”
The event finally starts, and it’s a mess. When Martin Luther King Jr. made his “I Have a Dream” speech on these steps in 1963—“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”—a report the next day spoke of how he’d “moved the crowd” and “caught their mood.”
Tonight, it’s Josh Hokit’s turn to orate from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and the truth that he holds to be self-evident is that fighter Ilia Topuria “married a stripper from Miami” and is “so short he can’t see himself in the bathroom mirror.”
Unlike King’s audience, this crowd is not moved,
Unlike King’s audience, this crowd is not moved, not least because the accredited content creators on the podium are completely blocking its view.
“Sit the fuck down!” the people chant. “We can’t see shit!”
But this chaos is more than made up for on Saturday at the Fan Fest on the Ellipse lawn, a public park between the White House and the Washington Monument. It’s very well organized and fun, like a parallel-universe Coachella where instead of Chappell Roan, it’s activities related to punching. More than a hundred thousand fans will compete in boxing arcade games, pose for photographs in a UFC Octagon, have their faces morphed by AI into fighters’ faces in a tent run by Meta.
“Touch that freedom!” the event’s emcee, Laura Sanko, yells as she runs through the crowd with a replica championship belt, encouraging fans to touch it.
“What’s going on, fight fans?” she shouts.
“Everything!” a young man next to me shouts back.
Saturday’s wildly impressive highlight is the real, live
Saturday’s wildly impressive highlight is the real, live bald eagle that, from nowhere, soars over our heads so low its talons practically touch us. My first thought is that we’re in the midst of an actual bald eagle situation. Then I realize it’s a rare homing bald eagle. They’re hard to train—they aren’t pushovers like falcons—and I’ve never seen anything like it.
Then a lady near me gasps again, clapping her hands together, as if lovestruck. It’s because fighter Sean O’Malley’s face has appeared on the big screen.
With his bright dyed hair and wiry frame, O’Malley is a UFC heartthrob—mysterious and complicated. In one breath he’ll speak of how journaling helps with his anxiety and depression, and in the next he’ll recount how a stranger once challenged him to a fight and he body-kicked the guy so hard “he just shit right out of his shorts. It was fucking hilarious.”
Sean O’Malley contains multitudes.
As it happens, I was permitted a one-on-one
As it happens, I was permitted a one-on-one with O’Malley during Wednesday’s Media Day. There was much I wanted to ask him—difficult questions about his mental health struggles and open marriage—so I eased him in with one about his fighting technique.
“You talk about breaking people mentally as well as physically,” I said. “How do you mentally break someone?”
“By not getting hit,” he replied. “Someone’s coming at me, but they’re not hitting me. I’m mentally breaking them by taking their hope and their confidence away. They start doubting themselves a little bit.” And when they do, “I punch them in the chin over and over and over until they fall.”
I asked him if he tries to mentally
I asked him if he tries to mentally break people in the outside world, too, and he said no. “Just fighting. I don’t try to break people on a day-to-day basis.”
That was all I had regarding fight technique. My allotted 10 to 12 minutes were ticking away fast, so I hurriedly peppered him with questions about his various darknesses and struggles. It was like a psychological–turmoil quick-fire round.
“One minute you’re talking about how journaling helps with your anxiety and depression,” I said, “and then the next you’re recounting how hilarious it was when you hit a guy and he shit himself.”
“Oh yeah,” he said. “That happened.”
“That’s sort of, I don’t know, a dichotomy,” I said.
Just because I appreciate a morning routine
“Just because I appreciate a morning routine and meditate and journal and do my cold plunge doesn’t mean I’m not goofy,” he said.
“You have an open marriage,” I said. “Surely that doesn’t work.”
O’Malley has frequently boasted on podcasts about his arrangement with his wife, Danya—how he can have sex with other women though she isn’t allowed to have sex with other men. His rationale, he told Bradley Martyn’s RawTalk podcast in 2023, is “I’m a king. I pay for everything. I treat Danya like a queen. If I get a little pussy on the side, what does that have to do with anything? I got testosterone running through my veins. I mean, Andrew Tate explains it well. It’s status. I’ve got status.”
But now he turned glum. “It worked while it lasted,” he told me.
His open marriage is, he revealed, over. “I’m still with my wife. We’ve been together a long time. We have two kids now. I put her through hell a little bit. But we got through the other side.”
“Put her through hell because of the open marriage?” I asked.
Yeah, he said. I mean, that’s not easy
“Yeah,” he said. “I mean, that’s not easy to deal with for anybody. It worked out while it did, and then it got to a point where it’s like, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore.’ And my option is: Leave or try to change.”
“What happened to make you stop?” I asked. “Was it a result of a conversation you had?”
“It was a result of me pushing the boundaries,” he replied, looking sad and perplexed at this change in his fortunes.
“What did you do?” I asked.
“She would rather me not talk about it,” he said.
The failure of O’Malley’s open marriage is,
The failure of O’Malley’s open marriage is, for me, interesting. I’ve just finished writing a book, The Castle, about how various men—feeling unglued from society and tossed around in a sea of conflicting ideas about what being a man actually means—have become like separatists. They’ve created strange, fake worlds for themselves inside which they don’t have to interact with other people except on their own terms.
Some of them look to the UFC fighters’ lifestyles for inspiration. But here in DC, I’m seeing evidence that though being a wayward, boundary-less maverick might sound good in theory, it often doesn’t work out well in real life.
Like Josh Hokit, who, I suspect, is currently agonizing over his unwise comments about throwing his groin cup at President Trump. Then there’s Sean O’Malley’s ultimately unsuccessful attempt at imposing a one-sided nonmonogamy rule into his marriage. These men are trying to create utopias within which they can behave however they want, but it feels like the experiment is failing.
Toward the end of Saturday’s Fan Fest,
Toward the end of Saturday’s Fan Fest, the big screens display a video montage celebrating great moments from presidential history. There’s Roosevelt’s “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” and Kennedy’s “Ask not what your country can do for you….” And Reagan’s “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” The montage skips Biden. As I watch, I wonder what they’ve chosen as Trump’s moment.
It turns out to be a painting of that photograph with the blood on his ear and his fist raised in defiance as he shouted, “Fight! Fight!” Blood and strength.
Sunday. Fight night. Due to the Secret Service’s stringent screening process, we few reporters who’ve been permitted to watch from the South Lawn arrive at 2:45 p.m.—six hours before the first punch will be thrown. Once we pass security, we’re sequestered inside the White House press briefing room, a corridor-shaped space connecting the Executive Residence to the West Wing. Despite its legend, it’s tiny and cramped and there are only two activities to pass the time: having your picture taken at the lectern and using the vending machine.
GQ has commissioned the celebrated 79-year-old photographer Bruce
GQ has commissioned the celebrated 79-year-old photographer Bruce Gilden for this story. It’s a genius idea: a scrappy, maverick street photographer photographing scrappy maverick street fighters. He flew in last night. He’s dressed differently from everyone else. We’re all in suits. He wears a utility vest and a bucket hat.
One member of the embedded press corps, happy to see a new face, offers me a tour. He takes me to what he calls the Lavateria—the minuscule area that houses the kitchenette and the toilet. “We get to smell the food and smell the toilet at the same time,” he says.
The only fancy item in this kitchenette is a state-of-the-art coffee machine. It was a gift from Tom Hanks. He once visited the press room and was horrified by the slumlike conditions; soon afterward, the coffee machine arrived.
“The problem,” my guide says, “is that nobody knows how to fucking work it.”
The hours here pass slowly. Until suddenly something happens.
Trump is having a prefight birthday dinner
Trump is having a prefight birthday dinner. Usually his visitors would enter through a gate far from the press room. But it’s closed today, meaning they all have to walk right past us.
This, I’m told, never happens. Once we cotton on, a few of us head outside and lean nonchalantly against the wall so we can photograph, and perhaps briefly interview, the passing luminaries. There’s Dr. Oz. There’s JD Vance. There’s Speaker Mike Johnson. There’s Kash Patel.
I hear a commotion behind me. It’s Bruce Gilden, the photographer. He’s clutching hold of a man’s shoulders. They’re right in each other’s faces, inches apart, and are laughing delightedly. Gilden snaps a photograph. The other man is, I realize, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy. They’re having a fantastic time and so, after Duffy leaves, I ask Gilden, “Do you know each other?”
No! Gilden growls. But I know people. He
“No!” Gilden growls. “But I know people.” He points at his head. “I know people, see?” Gilden says.
Now, Stephen Miller is walking in our direction. Gilden—clearly emboldened by how well it had gone with Sean Duffy—does exactly the same thing. He lunges at Miller, grabs his shoulders, and laughs delightedly in his face.
This time it doesn’t go well. Miller smiles gamely, but his entourage looks alarmed. White House staffers gather, and what appear to be urgent discussions ensue about whether to kick Gilden out.
Who is he? I hear them murmur
“Who is he?” I hear them murmur. “Is he supposed to be here? Did he come over the wall?”
If Gilden wasn’t 79, I think he’d have been flung to the ground by now. I stomp away, putting as much distance between us as possible.
I’ve been reporting all week, I think, and Hunter S. Thompson here is fucking it all up for me.
I also recognize that this moment reflects somewhat
But I also recognize that this moment reflects somewhat poorly on me: I’ve been wayward many times in my career, whereas today, here in the White House, I’m being obedient.
Gilden is not kicked out. But as a result of his actions, none of us are allowed to stand outside anymore. We’re herded back indoors and watch grumpily through the window as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Cheryl Hines walk past.
Later, Gilden and I dissect the incident. “I think Sean Duffy hugged me first,” he says.
I only saw you mid-hug, I reply
“I only saw you mid-hug,” I reply. But I concede it was possible. Duffy did seem tactile.
“Yeah, he hugged me first, and he was really cool,” Gilden says.
He adds that, despite appearances, he was reading the room: “I’ve been areas in the world where if you make the wrong move, you can have a serious problem. So you have to read people.”
As evidence he reminds me that he didn’t try to hug the noticeably cranky Kash Patel. Whereas with Stephen Miller, “I didn’t know what the hell was going to happen. But he gave me a smile, his wife smiled, so I felt comfortable, okay? He hugged me and I hugged him, and he smiled and he was really nice.”
I’m pretty certain you hugged Stephen Miller first,
“I’m pretty certain you hugged Stephen Miller first,” I say. “I don’t see Stephen Miller as initiating a hug.”
“You may be right,” he says. “I don’t remember. Look, I do things maybe other people aren’t comfortable doing, but I felt comfortable and I trust my instincts.”
He acknowledges that “nobody is immune to misreading a situation” and that because of him we were all forced back indoors, but he blames Miller’s entourage for not checking with their boss on whether he minded being hugged.
If you take pictures candidly in the street,
“If you take pictures candidly in the street, you can’t worry about what everybody else is thinking,” he says. “If you feel that way, you’re in trouble.”
Gilden is like a UFC fighter—a scrappy outsider who can’t be controlled. But, as with Hokit and O’Malley, reality sometimes pushes firmly back upon the boundary pusher. On the other hand, his photographs are very good.
We have been back in the press briefing room for an hour when a woman appears and urgently tells us to follow her. “Quickly!” she shouts. “Quickly!”
We’re bustled outside, then in through the White
We’re bustled outside, then in through the White House Palm Room. It happens so fast I can only make out a blur of beautiful pale greens and creams before we’re bustled outside again to the South Lawn. Which is…basically Vegas. The music pumps—“The boys are back in town!”—and the lasers swivel. Every one of the 4,300 ticket holders has a perfect view, whether they’re Mark Zuckerberg or the 1,300 military personnel who’ve been selected after—according to a leaked Pentagon document—meeting military body-composition standards, i.e., none of them are fat.
What follows are seven fights over five hours. Each one tonight ends in a knockout—the first time that’s happened in the UFC’s 33-year history. A fan later theorizes to me it’s because the fighters’ adrenaline levels are spiking due to the gravitas of the occasion.
The only time I’ve ever been to anything like this was the Lennox Lewis–Evander Holyfield bout at Madison Square Garden in 1999 that ended in a controversial split draw. I found that fight very difficult to follow. They both seemed to punch each other a similar number of times. With the UFC, it’s a lot easier to figure out who’s winning: It’s the man punching and kicking the hell out of the man cowering on the floor. Like everyone else, I rise to my feet with the tension of it all.
Sean O’Malley handily wins his fight
Sean O’Malley handily wins his fight. He leaps out of the cage to pay homage to Trump. They shake hands and, for a moment, Trump tenderly pats his punching hand. It’s a very imperial moment.
“Happy birthday, Mister President!” the audience yells during lulls.
The most interesting demographic here is the Mar-a-Lago crowd, some of whom have reportedly paid up to $1.5 million in sponsorship packages for a ringside view. From their expressions, my guess is some are only tolerating it for the greater goal of pleasing the president. One fellow nerd in his 50s gives me a smile that’s at once baffled and empathetic. We are not bros. We don’t belong.
Josh Hokit easily beats the far more beloved but also nearly 13-years-older Derrick Lewis. He, too, leaps out of the cage to pay homage to Trump. But—perhaps overcompensating for his unwise groin-cup comments from earlier this week—he surpasses O’Malley’s deference by placing his gold chain over Trump’s head. Back in the cage, he ratchets up the deference even more. “Shout out to Trump for having the balls to put this shit on!” he yells. And, “Michelle Obama is a man. Am I right, America?”
Tomorrow, it will be reported that Trump half-smiled
Tomorrow, it will be reported that Trump half-smiled at this comment, while others in the crowd burst into laughter. But I don’t hear any laughter. All I hear is the silence of many people evidently thinking, That wasn’t a good idea.
Trump looks displeased. He removes Hokit’s chain. Hokit has broken the golden rule. He’s made the night all about himself. He stole the UFC’s thunder and the thunder of the wayward outsider-in-chief too. Had Hokit not made that comment, I don’t know what the naysayers would have latched onto. As it is, tomorrow the content creators will barely mention the incident, while the mainstream media will barely mention anything else.
The last fight of the night, around 12:30 a.m., is by far the most brutal. Justin Gaethje beats Ilia Topuria into a bloodied pulp, pummeling his face into the floor, fracturing the bones around both his eyes, his right one severely. The ringside doctor tries to stop it, but the crowd roars their disapproval.
“Let them fight!” they chant. “Let them fight!”
Despite being caked in blood, Topuria indicates
Despite being caked in blood, Topuria indicates that he wants it to continue. His medical team allows it. And so it does, for five minutes more.
In front of me, a very wealthy-looking woman in her 70s stares intently at the big screen, clutching her husband’s shoulder with skeletal fingers, as Topuria’s face is beaten worse and worse. She doesn’t move. She just stares, her face etched in concentration and curiosity.
“USA!” the crowd roars, louder and louder, as the blood pours from Topuria. “USA! USA!”
The night was perfect
“The night was perfect. If you take Josh Hokit out of it, the night was absolutely perfect.”
It’s 12 days later, and I’m on the phone with Dana White. “It sucks when you put so much effort into something,” he tells me, “and you have a moron…. Listen, I’m a big free speech guy. When you feel something to your core, and want to say it, and other people don’t like it, too bad. It’s America. Say whatever you want. That was not one of those moments.”
It was, White’s saying, just shtick on Hokit’s part. He didn’t even mean it.
Why does he act in this annoying
“Why does he act in this annoying and self-defeating way?” I ask. “No one likes his characters. He doesn’t get a single laugh. I don’t know if it comes from insecurity. Maybe he was overcompensating for his remark about throwing his groin cup at the president.”
“I don’t know, man,” White says. “Listen, I’m a lot of things. Psychologist isn’t one of them. Who the hell knows? You said it. It’s some type of weird insecurity. Or it’s a mental illness. I have no idea.”
I ask White if I can interview Hokit. There must, I say, be a human buried deep within the idiot, “and if anyone can tease that out of him it’s me.”
Sure, sure, he says
“Sure, sure,” he says. “We’ll set that up. And if you can do it, I’m gonna fucking hire you away from GQ and have you come over here and be my therapist for all the knuckle-heads I got.” (In the end, despite several attempts at reaching out to Hokit through the UFC, I am told Hokit is unavailable for comment. So I guess the thought of talking to me intimidated him in a way that fighting Derrick Lewis hadn’t.) “I understand where you’re coming from about free speech,” I say, “but it causes you a shit ton of problems. Do you never think you should control them a little bit more?”
“No,” White says. “I don’t believe in telling grown men and women what to do. If he came to me for advice, I’d say, ‘I think it’s fucking stupid. You’ve already proved yourself. You’re obviously a good fighter. Why do you keep acting like this?’ But the great thing about my business is, eventually, someday, you’re going to see him get his ass kicked.”
Jon Ronson is the author ofThe Castle, out September 1 from Riverhead Books.
A version of this story originally appeared in the September 2026 issue of GQ with the title “My Big, Bloody (Momentarily Wholesome?) Week at the White House”
Source: www.gq.com
