UFC Releases Teddy Roosevelt AI Ad Ahead of White House Event - and It Completely Nails the Moment

The Sunday Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) Freedom 250 event at the White House has already been pretty epic, and the festivities are just getting started. 

As RedState reported, the leftist fools who attempted to sue in order to stop it were thrown to the floor and defeated, which pretty much reflects the heart of this event: to dare greatly, and to enter the fight with the aim of winning.

UFC telegraphed this in an ad released a day before the South lawn brouhaha. The AI-generated video was a gauntlet thrown down, featuring not UFC champions, but Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th President of the United States. Like President Donald Trump, Roosevelt was a very active and physically present commander-in-chief. Roosevelt was also one of our most physically fit presidents, so he is a perfect symbol of what the UFC seeks to accomplish with these games. 

For those thinking, "What does Theodore Roosevelt have to do with UFC?" here's a bit of a history lesson on one of my favorite presidents. 

While Roosevelt's passion for sparring and contests didn't translate to an entire spectacle on the South lawn, Roosevelt did bring sport to the White House, much to the chagrin of the elitists of his day. 

Sounds familiar.

According to historians, the president took every opportunity at the White House to box, wrestle, and train in mixed-martial arts, specifically Judo. Apparently, he challenged anyone to a grapple, even a foreign head of state.

Once he was in the White House, though, Roosevelt was back to doing whatever he wanted athletically, proving that wrestling, boxing, and judo were all proper Presidential amusement. “Roosevelt wasn’t exactly shy about his hobby,” Jenny Drapkin write in Theodore Roosevelt: Mojo in the Dojo for Mental Floss. He lined the White House basement with training mats, and he practiced with anyone who was willing to tussle—including his wife and sister-in-law. Once, he even brightened a boring state luncheon by throwing the Swiss minister to the floor and demonstrating a judo hold, to the delight of his guests.”

Very Trumpian, and since President Donald Trump is the president who has not only reinstituted the Presidential Fitness Test, but cheerleads HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s Make Americans Healthy Again (MAHA) focus, I believe Trump would have wholeheartedly approved of Roosevelt and his methods. Both presidents are also similar in this: They boldly enacted change and innovated in ways that had not been seen before in the role of the President of the United States.

In other words, Trump and Theodore shook things up and raised hackles, fully understanding that it was needed for their moment in time.

WATCH:

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When Roosevelt was governor of New York, he gave an 1899 speech titled "The Strenuous Life." In the speech, Roosevelt opined:

I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life, the life of toil and effort, of labor and strife; to preach that highest form of success which comes, not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but to the man who does not shrink from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil, and who out of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph. We admire the man who embodies victorious effort; the man who never wrongs his neighbor, who is prompt to help a friend, but who has those virile qualities necessary to win in the stern strife of actual life. 

It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed. In this life we get nothing save by effort. Freedom from effort in the present merely means that there has been stored up effort in the past.

It is because of the strenuous life and the sacrifice of rough and ready men that we can enjoy the brazen, daring, and fearless representations of American prowess, power, and grit on the White House lawn. 

UFC gets it. Now we get a chance as well.  

WAKE UP! IT'S FIGHT NIGHT. 🇺🇸🥊 pic.twitter.com/hJyQPWz5fr

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) June 14, 2026