Was Trump Joking When He Offered Dana White the Press Secretary Job?
Yes. By the president's own words, the offer was a joke. President Donald Trump told reporters in West Palm Beach, Florida, on Sunday that he was "only kidding" when he announced a day earlier that UFC chief Dana White had been offered the job of White House press secretary. "It was just a little fun," the Associated Press reported him saying, before he boarded Air Force One for the White House.
The plain reality is that nothing about Saturday's announcement read as a joke, and nobody around it treated it as one. The post was written in the formal language of an appointment — "I am pleased to announce" — it named the man, it named the staff he was to bring with him, and it ended by asking him to take the job. The White House itself treats the president's social media posts as official statements. Dana White treated it as real: he told a London press conference he was flying to Washington that night for a Monday meeting about it, and shared a picture of himself at the briefing room podium captioned "On to the next chapter." CNN reported on Saturday that White had already turned the job down. Men do not decline offers that were never made, and they do not fly across an ocean to discuss them.
Trump's claim, made on the tarmac on Sunday, is that the joke was there for anyone to see. The giveaway, he said, was the undercard: the post asked White to bring UFC fighters Islam Makhachev, Khabib Nurmagomedov, Justin Gaethje, Daniel Cormier, Amanda Nunes and Kayla Harrison with him as assistants, to "defend us against the Lunatic Left." He said people should have known he was having a good time, that White loves the idea anyway, and that once he floated it, people told him it was actually a pretty good idea.
"I will tell you, I was only kidding, but Dana loves the idea. And there's only one Dana. He's great."
The common-sense principle is plain: an announcement is what it says it is until the man who made it says otherwise. A job offer written like an appointment, naming a real man and real assistants and asking him to accept, is an offer — the whole country, including the man it was made to, can only go on the words in front of them. If the words were a joke, the joke was built to be mistaken for the real thing, and for a full day it was.
The consequence is sitting in an empty briefing room. The press secretary's job has stood vacant since October 16, when Katie Zacharia was removed after five days, and the weekend's events did not fill it — they spent it. White still comes to the White House on Monday, but Trump says the meeting is now about other matters, and no real search for a press secretary has been announced. If a presidential job offer can be withdrawn the next day as a bit of fun, how is anyone — the man offered it, the reporters who cover it, the public reading it — supposed to know which announcements to believe?
The details fill in how far the joke travelled before it was called one. Saturday's post called White "a violent Fighter and Warrior" and closed: "Dana will be a Press Secretary like none other. Dana, please take the job!" Our report of the offer is here, and our report of White's plan to fly in and discuss it on Monday is here. White, smiling in London, joked that he has a lot of jobs already. A White House aide told CNN the president had been kidding. The announcement landed in the middle of a real shake-up: on Friday, Trump replaced his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, with Stephen Miller, so by Sunday the press secretary post was the second top job in a week to be filled and then unfilled in public. Trump gave the fullest version of his explanation on the tarmac: "Of course, I was kidding, and you could see that because I put all of the great fighters as his assistants that they're all going to come with him. But it was just a little fun."