When Donald Trump entered Madison Square Garden on Saturday evening, he may very well have been looking for a safe space. Six days earlier, he attended Game Five of the 2019 World Series. Perhaps expecting a warm response—ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had died a day earlier—he was, instead, booed mercilessly for a very long time. The crowd, twisting his unofficial 2016 campaign motto, even chanted, “Lock him up!”

Madison Square Garden is, of course, in Manhattan—the liberal bastion that Trump has largely avoided over the course of his political career. But it was also hosting UFC 244, a pay-per-view mixed martial arts Ultimate Fighting Championship event. Trump has a long relationship with ultimate fighting. In 2001, he helped save the sport, which was nearing financial ruin, by hosting fights at his Atlantic City Taj Mahal casino. He has deep ties to its president, Dana White, who praised Trump as a “fighter” at the 2016 Republican National Convention. And while UFC fans are not quite as conservative as many expect, there could be no doubt that this was a friendlier audience.



It didn’t make much of a difference. Although some precautions were taken—Trump’s arrival wasn’t announced, as it was during the World Series—he was, once again, enveloped in boos. “The booing began immediately,” wrote Why We Fight author Josh Rosenblatt. “The music on the loudspeakers was turned up, either to herald Trump’s arrival or to stifle the crowd’s displeasure in reaction to it, but the sound of those boos was overwhelming.”



The response to these two incidents has largely fallen under two categories. On the one hand, Trump and his defenders have claimed that the media was manipulating video and audio to exaggerate the boos and mislead the public. On the other, there has been a lengthy back-and-forth about the civility of booing the president and chanting that he should be imprisoned.



But there is another side to these incidents. Both provide visceral, undeniable examples of the president’s enormous and unprecedented unpopularity—and serve as useful contrasts to dominant media narratives about the president and his supporters.

