In the grand, sprawling circus of modern governance, one must periodically check the news just to see which clown has tripped over the tent ropes. Over the weekend, Donald Trump took to social media to urge Dana White, the pugilistic impresario of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, to assume the mantle of White House press secretary. Shortly thereafter, the former and future commander-in-chief assured the trembling commentariat that he was only kidding. It was a joke, you see. A lark. The tragic part, of course, is that hiring a mixed martial arts promoter to manage the West Wing podium would have been the single most intellectually honest administrative appointment in decades.
The Washington press corps naturally reacted with its customary clutching of pearls, as if the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room were a sacred temple of Aristotelian logic rather than an overcrowded tax-funded sandbox where partisans lob verbal spitballs at government functionaries. The establishment treated the proposal as an affront to democratic norms. But let us be frank about our dear, embarrassing Leviathan: the state is essentially an erratic uncle who blew through his retirement fund, moved into your basement, and now demands you respect his authority while he tries to appoint his favorite bar bouncers to official positions.
F.A. Hayek famously dedicated an entire chapter of The Road to Serfdom to explaining why the worst get on top in centralized political systems. When authority centralizes, virtue rarely ascends; instead, the machinery of government selects for people who possess a singular talent for demagoguery and administrative obedience. By that metric, Dana White would have been an upgrade. In the UFC, when two men step into a chain-link cage, there is an unspoken baseline of integrity: the participants are paid by consenting adults who voluntarily purchased a pay-per-view broadcast, and within fifteen minutes, reality asserts itself with a swift kick to the jaw.
Washington, by contrast, operates under the opposite premise. It is a monopoly that charges you before you even enter the arena, demands you applaud the choreography, and threatens to audit your small business if you change the channel. The traditional White House press secretary does not exist to convey objective facts to a waiting republic; the office exists to manufacture consensus, evade accountability, and dress up the fatal conceit of centralized planning as dignified civic service. To place an unapologetic promoter of bare-knuckle violence at the lectern would have stripped away the suffocating layer of bureaucratic pretense that currently protects the state from its own absurdity.
Consider the sheer economy of it. Right now, taxpayers spend millions of dollars funding the administrative apparatus that facilitates these daily liturgical exchanges between the executive branch and credentialed court stenographers. The reporters ask pre-approved questions designed to elicit viral clips; the spokesperson reads non-answers off a meticulously scripted binder provided by thirty-something deputy assistant directors of communication. Everyone involved pretends this charade is vital to self-governance. White, at the very least, would have told someone to stop crying and sign a bout agreement, potentially cutting the federal public relations budget in half by replacing three dozen media consultants with a single timer and a bucket of ice.
Therein lies the fundamental difference between commerce and governance that our political class fails to grasp. Dana White runs an enterprise sustained entirely by voluntary consumer surplus. If people tire of cage fights, the UFC goes bankrupt, investors swallow their losses, and life continues unabated. The federal apparatus possesses no such corrective feedback loop. When the Department of Defense loses an audit or the press office dissembles about the macroeconomic fallout of trade tariffs, the perpetrators do not go out of business. They request a ten percent budget expansion for the next fiscal year and write memoirs about their courageous devotion to the public good.
Walking back the invitation as a joke was the real cowardice. Washington is terrified of vulgarity not because it offends high-minded ethics, but because vulgarity threatens the velvet drape hanging over the iron fist of regulation. If the state begins acting openly like an aggressive, televised cage match, the governed might finally notice that it has been behaving like one all along. Instead, we will undoubtedly receive another polished operative steeped in the dark arts of public administration, ready to smile gently while defending the expansion of regulatory overreach. It is a pity. If we are doomed to finance an endless, unconstitutional spectacle with our tax dollars, the state could at least have the decency to give us a proper knockout.