A Republican strategist argued on MS NOW this weekend that President Donald Trump's planned UFC fight at the White House is such a flop that he is racing to sign a weak deal with Iran just to knock it out of the headlines.
Susan Del Percio, a GOP strategist and MS NOW political analyst, made the case on "PoliticsNation" with Rev. Al Sharpton on Saturday, a day before Trump is set to host the first UFC bout on the White House lawn.
Asked whether the fight might win back supporters who have cooled on Trump's "America 250" celebration — the run-up to the country's 250th anniversary, which has been dogged by headline acts dropping out of its concert series — Del Percio said it would not.
"It's not going to bring them back into the fold if they've already been disheartened with him, for sure," she said. The trouble, she argued, is that the event was never really about the country. "What does MAGA — 'Make America Great Again' — stand for? They wanted a celebration of America, not a celebration of Donald Trump," Del Percio said. "So even some of the folks who voted for him, core, core supporters, people who supported him and consider themselves even MAGA, are turned off by all of this."
Then she tied the spectacle to Trump's foreign policy. Del Percio claimed the president agreed to sign what she called a "bad deal" with Iran on Sunday precisely to push the struggling UFC event off the top of the news. The fight, in her telling, is "a failure" Trump is scrambling to bury under a bigger story.
The timing tracks with the diplomacy. Trump and Iranian officials have signaled in recent days that a memorandum of understanding to wind down the war and reopen the Strait of Hormuz could be signed within days, with Sunday floated as a possible date.
Del Percio's co-panelist, Democratic strategist Juanita Tolliver, piled on. She pointed to a recent Reuters poll she said found just 16 percent of Americans believe the White House cage fight should be happening at all — including fewer than a third of Republicans and only 11 percent of independents. Tolliver argued the stunt could drag Republicans down at the polls in November.
Both analysts flagged the same underlying detail. The fight falls on Trump's 80th birthday, which they cast as the real occasion behind all the "Freedom 250" banners.