UFC fighters celebrate victory with Donald Trump after wins

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Donald Trump scored a knockout at UFC 302 Saturday night, where the former U.S. president was greeted like a rock star by a sold-out crowd at New Jersey’s Prudential Center.

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The presumptive Republican nominee’s appearance came just two days after Trump was found guilty of falsifying business records as part of a surreptitious campaign to illegally influence the 2016 election by disguising hush money payments made to porn star Stormy Daniels, who claimed the two had sex a decade prior.

Trump has maintained he committed no crime and plans to appeal the verdict. He is set to face sentencing on July 11, just days before he will be anointed the Republican Party’s candidate for this fall’s U.S. election.

But at Saturday’s Ultimate Fighting Championship card, the crowd broke into alternating chants of “We love Trump!” and “F*** Joe Biden!”

“Boy, the round of applause he’s getting right now is pretty staggering and you had to imagine that’s what was going to happen,” commentator Joe Rogan said, as Trump made his way to his seat flanked by UFC boss Dana White.

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New York Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers, who was tipped at one point as a potential vice president pick by Robert Kennedy Jr., who is running as an independent, remained in his seat.

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He later shared a photo to his Instagram Story shaking Trump’s hand, captioning it: “Pic with President Trump … Priceless.”

Following Kevin Holland’s submission over Michal Oleksiejczuk with an armbar that appeared to break his opponent’s arm, the middleweight fighter hopped out of the octagon and went over to a smiling Trump, shaking his hand.

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“Dude cracked me with a good shot, somehow we ended up on the ground, left his arm in a little too far. You know what they say, either too out or too in,” Holland said after the fight, via Yahoo Sports.

Meanwhile, UFC star Sean Strickland also hailed Trump after his split-decision victory over Paulo Costa later in the evening.

“President Trump, you’re the man, bro,” Strickland said in a post-match interview with Joe Rogan after his win. “It is a damn travesty what they are doing to you. I’ll be donating to you, my man.”

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After his UFC appearance, Trump joined TikTok, a video-sharing app he once considered banning when he was in the White House. By Monday morning, his first post had racked up over 63 million views and Trump had amassed more than 3.7 million followers.

“It’s an honour,” Trump said in the clip, which featured footage of him waving to fans and posing for selfies at the  fight in Newark, New Jersey, on Saturday night. The video ended with Trump telling the camera: “That was a good walk-on, right?”

“We will leave no front undefended and this represents the continued outreach to a younger audience consuming pro-Trump and anti-Biden content,” Trump spokesman Steven Cheung said in a statement about the the businessman’s decision to join the platform.

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“There’s no place better than a UFC event to launch President Trump’s TikTok, where he received a hero’s welcome and thousands of fans cheered him on,” he added.

Trump’s follower count on the service dwarfs President Joe Biden, who signed up for TikTok in February but has a paltry 345,000 followers in comparison.

Following the verdict, Trump said he was “OK” with idea that he might have to serve jail time or being placed under house arrest following his historic conviction.

“I’m OK with it,” Trump told Fox News in an interview that aired Sunday morning as he weighed his potential punishments. “I saw one of my lawyers the other day on television saying, ‘Oh no, you don’t want to do that to the president.’ I said: ‘You don’t beg for anything.’”

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But Trump warned that his supporters won’t like it if he’s put behind bars. “I don’t think the public would stand it. I’m not sure the public would stand for it,” he cautioned.

“I think it would be tough for the public to take, you know, at a certain point, there’s a breaking point,” Trump added.

Meanwhile, as various pundits debated whether Trump should go to jail, Real Time host Bill Maher warned “MAGA nation will go nuts” if the leader is sent to the slammer. He even went so far as to predict America could devolve into a “civil war.”

“A civil war in this country, I’m sorry to say, becomes a race war,” Maher said (per Fox News). “That’s the sad truth about this country. And if they put him in jail, I mean, the first thing his supporters are gonna say is, ‘Oh, that’s what it is.’ A Black district attorney. You know, all these people who are the district attorneys, they’re black. The judge was not White. This is what it is.”

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