Trump Was Booed Again, This Time at a UFC Fight
Less thank a week after he was greeted with boos and chants of “lock him up” at a Washington DC World Series baseball game, Donald Trump attended another sporting event Saturday night. And he was booed there, too.
Trump took in an Ultimate Fighting Championship match at New York’s Madison Square Garden, where he appeared alongside his sons, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., and congress members including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. His reception at MSG was more mixed than it had been at Nationals Park, with some cheers and applause mixing in with jeers.
But Trump and some of his supporters insist that the president had far more fans than opponents in the audience, and the debate over whether or not the president was booed has quickly begun to resemble the equally-ridiculous inauguration crowd size saga.
"Walking into Madison Square Garden last night with [UFC president Dana White] for the big @UFC Championship fight was a little bit like walking into a Trump Rally," the president tweeted Sunday. "Plenty of MAGA & KAG present. Great energy." He later called reports of booing "fake news."
Both Eric and Don Jr. took to social media to insist that we ignore our lying ears. "Despite the bullshit from blue checkmark Twitter, when we walked into the arena it was overwhelmingly positive,” tweeted Don Jr.
Responding to a BBC headline reporting “more boos for Trump,” Eric Trump tweeted, "What a joke. You are the most dishonest people. The audience was chanting 'Donald Trump, Donald Trump' followed by 'USA USA.' Dana White said it was the greatest entrance he has seen into a UFC. I can’t wait until we win again in 2020 to further embarras [sic] your profession #FakeNews."
Trump himself retweeted a video from mixed martial artists Tara LaRosa, who’s a Trump supporter. "Pres. Trump arrives at Madison Square Garden to a positive reaction from the crowd,” wrote LaRosa—above a video in which boos could be clearly heard.
Trump is a longtime UFC supporter, and helped the league find national footing by allowing its access to his Atlantic City casino in 2000. "The Trump Taj Mahal was the only venue that would take us and accept us at the time," said White, according to Vice. "[Trump] saw this thing before anybody else did."
Forbes editor Randall Lane shed a bit of light on Trump’s perspective when it comes to the widespread public antipathy towards him. During the 2015 election, he was near the future president as he was booed by a crowed in New York:
I figured the candidate, like most politicians, would laugh, take his lumps and glibly shrug it off. Instead, Trump turned to me. “Ninety percent positive,” he immediately said. “Ninety percent is pretty good. You’ll take that in an election right away.”
He said it so quickly, with such conviction that I doubted my own ears. My audio recorder, however, was running and it had far less doubt: through a smattering of applause, the boos overwhelmed…Which begs a key question of the Trump presidency: Did he hear what everyone else heard—and merely lie reflexively? Or did he actually hear the cheers?
"Acknowledging that you’ve been booed would be hard to do when it’s only cheers that can register in your head,” Lane concluded.
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