Trump has long relied on sports to project strength and fuel his culture wars. But after a crushing midterm defeat, even his UFC ally cannot distract from the political fallout

In the wake of being destroyed in the midterm elections, it was only a matter of time before Donald Trump did something outrageous in an attempt to misdirect public attention away from his catastrophic losses. Before the midterms, published reports suggested the possibility of apocalypse, global or domestic – a nuclear strike on Iran, martial law to suspend last week’s, the invalidation of individual races, such as in Alaska – but Trump opted for banality over Armageddon, offering his vacant press secretary opening to Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White.

It was absurd, and widely posited that a confused Trump had erroneously conflated UFC’s White with the Dana White who made more sense, former Heritage Foundation staffer Dana White. Because the public reactions made him look even more lost, confirming the sentiments of recklessness and disorder, utter chaos and buffoonery that led to the Republicans being routed in the midterm elections, the president said his offer to White was all a joke. As a disciple of the notorious McCarthyite Roy Cohn, who taught Trump one of his main political pillars – never apologize or admit wrongdoing. Ever. – Trump should not, of course, be taken at his word.

Milwaukee’s first World Series championship is a rebuke to baseball’s oligarch class, whose insistence that small-market teams cannot compete has been laid bare as fiction

For the entirety of the 2026 baseball season, the overlords of the game have stood on the single position that what has now happened could not happen, and the result was a year that has been treated like an appetizer for the main course of the offseason: the shutting down of the game until the players, after 40 years of resistance, finally agree to a salary cap. The insistence that the game had been predetermined undermined the Milwaukee Brewers, who spent 149 days this season atop the standings.

Baseball dismissed Milwaukee’s 22-0 demolition of Seattle on 18 August, the 20-0 waxing of Cincinnati a month later, and the comprehensive dusting of their division – their fourth consecutive National League Central title and fifth in six years – by 14 games. Baseball’s owners, at their persuasive best, would have their paying customers believe that the Brewers’ franchise-record 103 regular-season wins also were an illusion, or worse, the dreaded outlier, even though Milwaukee have won 770 games since 2018, the fourth-most in all of baseball. Even when Milwaukee exhaled and made the Dodgers look old in a stirring four-game sweep, ESPN’s Jeff Passan reported the owners’ position remained unchanged.