Donald Trump is set to mark his 80th birthday with a UFC spectacular on the White House lawn, and as the President leans into the showmanship, one man who knew Trump as a teenager is offering a sharply less flattering portrait of the future commander-in-chief.
UFC co-founder Art Davie, who once shared a room with Donald Trump at a New York military academy, has described the young Trump as an unapologetic 'egomaniac' obsessed with proving he was the best at everything.
White House confirmed plans for a full-scale UFC event on the South Lawn, complete with a cage, staging and thousands of temporary seats. For those only now catching up with Trump's long association with combat sports, it is worth remembering that his links to mixed martial arts date back decades, through promotion, appearances and close ties with UFC president Dana White. Davie, who helped create the Ultimate Fighting Championship in 1993, has seized the moment to revisit a much earlier chapter, when both he and Trump were teenage cadets competing for status in upstate New York.
Donald Trump, The 'Egomaniac' Roommate
Davie says he first met Trump at 15, when he arrived as a new private at a private military school about an hour north of New York City. Trump, already 16 and a supply sergeant from Queens, was entering his third year and, according to Davie, was already consumed by his own image.
'He was an egomaniac when he was 16,' Davie recalled in an interview with the Daily Beast. 'He was a great flag-waver for himself. He wanted everyone to recognise he was the GOAT in everything he did out there.'
The two boys shared quarters, and Davie remembers a teenager fiercely determined to dominate every field, from the classroom to the playing fields. In his telling, Trump repeatedly insisted he was the standout in nearly every sport, from baseball to soccer, keen to walk away as the undisputed star.
POV you walk to the Octagon at #UFCWhiteHouse 👀
— UFC (@ufc) June 11, 2026
[ UFC Freedom 250 presented by @CryptoCom and @RamTrucks ] pic.twitter.com/XWVBlYjfnx
Davie does credit Trump with genuine athletic talent, particularly on the baseball diamond, where the future president was widely praised at the school. The friction, he says, came when Trump tried to extend that claim of supremacy to football codes where, in Davie's view, the facts did not quite match the boast.
'I remember Trump and I getting in an argument about the fact that he's the GOAT when it came to soccer,' Davie said. 'I said, No, in baseball, you could say you're the GOAT.' According to Davie, some of the academy's strongest soccer players came from South America, and he bristled at what he saw as Trump's refusal to acknowledge that.
The claims are impossible to independently verify six decades on, and Trump has not publicly responded to Davie's account. Nothing is confirmed beyond Davie's own recollections, so his character sketch of young Trump should be taken with a measure of caution.
From 'Cadet Bonespurs' To UFC Birthday Bash
Beyond games on the sports field, Davie paints a picture of a cadet who believed he was being held back by the school's leadership. Trump, he says, resented not being promoted quickly enough through the ranks.
'He was very upset and frustrated that the school did not recognise that he should have been promoted faster,' Davie, now 79, told the outlet. The comment fits neatly with the image of Donald Trump that his critics like to present, but it also reflects a familiar adolescent grievance at a rigid, hierarchical institution.
Davie left after his first year and finished high school in Manhattan. Trump stayed on and graduated in 1964, then went on to receive five draft deferments during the Vietnam War era after a Queens podiatrist diagnosed him with bone spurs. In 2018, the doctor's daughters alleged the diagnosis was given as a favour to Trump's father, property developer Fred Trump, an accusation the Trump family has denied in other contexts. Davie says the episode fed into a cruel nickname that circulated among academy alumni, who referred to the former cadet-turned-president as 'Cadet Bonespurs.'
That history now collides, a little awkwardly, with the spectacle planned for Trump's milestone birthday. On the South Lawn, renderings show a fenced UFC cage erected in front of the White House, surrounded by an expansive patriotic stage, giant video screens and banks of seating.
The DOJ is urging a federal judge to reject a lawsuit seeking to stop the White House's UFC event scheduled for this weekend, attacking its plaintiffs as "two people who believe they have superior taste and want to spoil the event for everyone else." https://t.co/1Wnn5kpVTy pic.twitter.com/NaEQuq2LXE
— ABC News (@ABC) June 10, 2026
Trump has promised an atmosphere more reminiscent of Las Vegas than Washington. He told supporters the set-up would feature 'a 5,000-seat arena right outside the front door of the White House.' The UFC, for its part, is preparing to release tens of thousands of free tickets, according to Trump, in an attempt to turn the president's residence into the world's most exclusive fight venue for one night.
'I have never seen anybody want anything so much as people want those tickets,' Trump said recently, relishing the apparent demand for access to the event. 'That's gonna be something.'
For a man Davie remembers as a teenager desperate to be seen as the greatest at everything, an 80th birthday party built around a cage fight on the White House lawn might feel less like an oddity and more like a straight line.
