President Donald Trump is planning to bring the UFC into the White House later this year. But the brawl on the South Lawn is not the only way mixed martial arts has become a part of his administration.

Trump, like many other right-wing leaders before him, has a long history with combat sports.

Yesterday afternoon, John Light, Hunter Walker and Joe Ragazzo got on Substack Live to talk about how martial arts has become right coded. It’s a cultural phenomenon with troubling effects that stretch from D.C., to Saudi Arabia, and the white supremacist fringe.

Check out their full conversation below.

One of Layla A. Jones’ insights when she joined our team last year was that you could measure the destruction that DOGE wreaked on the federal workforce by looking at the D.C.-area economy, and, specifically, the housing market. Her first piece for us examined those indicators. Now, a year after Elon Musk and his youths began their slash-and-burn rampage through the executive branch, Layla finds the damage lingering — and, in some ways, worsening — with the middle class, once propped up by government workers and contractors, falling behind a growing wealthy elite. That story is here.

We’re starting to see House Republicans complain that, even as the administration prepares to ask for huge sums to keep the war in Iran funded, it’s leaving lawmakers in the dark about what, exactly, the money is for. “We want to know more about what’s going on, what the options are, and why they’re being considered,” House Armed Services Chair Mike Rogers (R-AL) told reporters yesterday.  “And we’re just not getting enough answers on those questions.”

Rep. Joe Morelle (D-NY), the vice ranking member on House Appropriations and a member of its Defense subcommittee, goes into great detail this morning with Hunter Walker and Josh Kovensky about how bad it really is. “I don’t think the American public appreciates it, and it’s certainly not a way to conduct your conversations with Congress,” he says. “Even in classified briefings where we don’t talk about what we learn, there’s literally no actionable intelligence that you get from him.” 

Read that here.

Following up on the question we posed yesterday — will right-wingers actually buy an attempt to “pass” “the SAVE America Act” through budget reconciliation? — we are beginning to have some indications that, no, they will not.

Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) has been on a tweeting spree, campaigning against the idea by, for example, comparing the voter suppression legislation to a fine cut of beef, urging his colleagues not to “settle for cheap imitations” of the sort necessitated by budget reconciliation. It is perhaps an imperfect metaphor.