Trump begs UFC boss Dana White to take press secretary job
Public plea follows predecessor's firing, promoter who spent quarter century turning hostile press conferences into content would inherit the briefing room
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The White House briefing room has a vacancy, and Donald Trump has a promoter in mind. At a press conference, Trump said he has offered the job of press secretary to Dana White, chief executive of the UFC, and appealed to him in front of the cameras: "Dana, please take the job!" The plea came after the previous occupant of the post was fired.
Trump described White as a "violent fighter." White's actual profession is staging fights, and for a quarter century he has run an organization whose product includes its own press conferences — events where participants taunt each other in front of reporters who then broadcast the taunts as promotion. Under White, the UFC turned media coverage into content, and content into the billion-dollar Paramount deal. Nothing about that skill set is incidental to the job now being offered.
The press secretary's post has drifted in the same direction for decades. Briefings are televised, clipped and circulated within the hour; the room functions less as an interrogation chamber than as a stage on which each side performs for its own audience. A promoter's craft — controlling the card, deciding who gets the microphone, manufacturing confrontations that draw viewers — maps onto the modern briefing with unusual precision. Previous occupants of the job came from politics, communications and television commentary. Trump's casting choice states plainly what the administration believes the room is for.
The manner of the offer fits the method. Rather than a quiet approach through intermediaries, the president lobbied a private executive publicly, the way a promoter teases a matchup before any contract is signed — building anticipation for an arrangement that may not yet exist. White appeared at the press conference at Etihad Arena in Abu Dhabi, a venue that hosts exactly the kind of spectacle both men are in the business of producing.
The job offer was announced the way White announces a fight: in front of cameras, before anything was agreed.