President Donald Trump has offered the White House press secretary job to Dana White, the chief executive of the UFC, and asked him to bring cage fighters along as assistants. “We need these people to defend us against the Lunatic Left,” Trump wrote Saturday on Truth Social.
White says he will meet Trump at the White House on Monday to discuss it. The previous press secretary, Katie Zacharia, left last month after five days.
Trump’s post named the fighters he wants on the team: Islam Makhachev, Khabib Nurmagomedov, Justin Gaethje, Daniel Cormier, Kayla Harrison and Amanda Nunes. Cormier, a former two-division UFC champion, and Nunes, who is Black and Brazilian, are two of the names on a list Trump cast as a squad to fight the president’s critics. White, in Trump’s words, is “a violent Fighter and Warrior.” He has no government experience and has run the UFC since 2001. The two have been close since White backed Trump’s 2016 campaign.
The timing is the point. Democrats won Congress on Tuesday, with Black voters again among their most loyal supporters. On Friday Trump made Stephen Miller, the architect of his deportation drive, his chief of staff. This week the Justice Department’s top civil rights official, Harmeet Dhillon, announced she is leaving after dropping the federal police reform agreements in Minneapolis and Louisville.
Those are the questions Black readers need a press secretary to answer from a podium: who will enforce civil rights law at the Justice Department, what the new chief of staff plans for ICE, and what the administration will do when a Democratic House starts issuing subpoenas. A press office exists to take those questions from reporters, including Black reporters who rarely get called on.
Trump’s answer is to hire for combat. He has described the briefing room as a place to “defend us” against the left, which means the audience is not the public but the president’s opponents. Putting Black athletes on a list of enforcers does not change what the job would be for.
White has not said yes. The meeting is Monday.
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