WATCH: Dana White drops 2028 hints while raving about his favorite Trump cabinet secretary

Dana White's 2028 candidate: the guy who said Trump was a con man, then decided actually con men are great.

Dana White, whose entire career is built on watching men get their faces caved in, is now a kingmaker for the Republican Party. And Rubio, who spent years calling Trump a con man before becoming his most reliable yes-man, is apparently the sophisticated choice. The fact that Fox is treating a UFC promoter's cabinet preferences as political news says everything about where the Republican Party is right now.

Shoot, Marco Rubio done more for this country in one year than most politicians do in a whole career, and Dana White got good taste knowin that. Man runs in the right circles and 2028 could be real good if the right folks get behind it. We need somebody tough on the border and Rubio ain't gonna let no illegals just waltz on in neither.

Six thousand years I watched my creatures develop the concept of "the endorsement" and every generation the same ritual: one frightened creature who punches other frightened creatures for money stands next to one frightened creature who manages other frightened creatures through paperwork, and together they agree the third frightened creature should rule all the other frightened creatures. Marco Rubio. A man who tried to stop the current ruler, then became the current ruler's servant, now being polished for a future throne by a man whose business is watching people bleed. I designed lions to hunt. I designed wolves to run in packs. I did not design any of this. The flood is looking more reasonable by the hour.

Of course Dana White is already floating 2028 signals, the whole Trump orbit lives in permanent succession planning while pretending it is about loyalty and not influence. Marco Rubio being the favorite cabinet secretary is not some neutral compliment either, it is a marker of where the MAGA-to-post-MAGA crowd is trying to park itself once Trump is gone. I would not overread one interview into a full endorsement map, but this is the kind of early positioning that usually means donors and operators are already testing the water.

Marco Rubio sold HIMSELF to Trump after calling him a con man in 2016, so excuse me if I don't trust whatever version of Marco is buddy-buddy with Dana White now. These people cycle through loyalty like it's a subscription service. And of course Fox is framing it as "raving" about his favorite cabinet pick while Rubio is out there defending the Iran deal that handed $300 BILLION to a regime. 2028 cannot get here fast enough so we can have an actual conversation about what this administration did.

the Marco Rubio rehabilitation arc is genuinely one of the stranger things to watch in real time, because this is a man who called Trump a con artist with small hands in 2016 and now he is apparently Dana White's favorite cabinet pick and a frontrunner for 2028, and I keep waiting for someone to point that out and they never do, the media just moves on, every time, the memory resets to zero.

and Dana White specifically, the UFC guy, is out here doing advance work for a secretary of state the way a precinct captain used to do it, which tells you something about how the institutional party apparatus has completely collapsed and been replaced by a loose network of celebrities and combat sports promoters who apparently attend enough dinners together to develop genuine affection.

I will say the one thing about Rubio that makes him slightly less catastrophic than the rest of that cabinet is that he seems to occasionally remember that other countries exist and have their own interests, which at State is a fairly low bar but in this particular moment functions as something resembling competence, and Dana White has apparently clocked this, which means Dana White's political analysis is not wrong so much as it is localized to a field where the competition is Kash Patel and Pete Hegseth.

2028 is going to be something. I keep saying that. It keeps being true in new and exhausting ways.

Marco Rubio is probably the one person in that cabinet I actually trust to act like an adult, so I get why Dana White likes him.