While most of the people in attendance were fearing for their lives and running for cover, UFC president Dana White appeared to be having a great time while a gunman attempted to assassinate President Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner Saturday night.
After the chaos had calmed down, White said the experience was “f—— awesome.”
“All of a sudden it just started getting noisy, tables getting flipped over,” he said. “Guys running in with guns. They were screaming, get down. I didn’t get down it was f—— awesome. It was a pretty crazy, unique experience.”
Not everyone thought Dana White’s reaction to someone attempting to assassinate the President at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner was cool.
While speaking to the media ahead of his UFC 328 fight against Khamzat Chimaev, former UFC Middleweight Champion Sean Strickland said he believes Dana White is either a “sociopath” or “psychopath.”
Strickland may have been trying to make light of Dana White’s unusual reaction to the attempted assassination, but another person familiar with the UFC president, former UFC fighter Matt Brown didn’t think it was funny.
Matt Brown explains why he is upset with Dana White’s reaction to the White House gunman
Brown was at the Damageplan concert in 2004 when a gunman climbed on stage and killed guitarist Dimebag Darrell and three others before being shot and killed by a police officer.
“I’m absolutely flabbergasted,” Matt Brown said on MMA Fighting’s The Fighter vs. The Writer. “It took me completely blindsided when he come out, when I saw the short little clip of him saying that was ‘awesome.’ I think I have a little bit more of a justification in criticizing that, being that I’ve been in a mass shooting before. […]
“I’ve been there when there was a shooting going on, which most people probably haven’t,” Brown continued. “It is not ‘awesome’ in any sense of the word. It is not f—— cool one bit. For him to say that, I did not appreciate that. Not that my opinion matters, whether I appreciate it, but there’s people whose lives are at risk there. […]
“That really blows my mind that someone would say that s— like that was ‘awesome.’ A dude got shot; okay, maybe he survived, but got shot. That’s a traumatic experience for him. There’s not a single f—— thing awesome about that. People don’t need to be going around shooting people, and there’s nothing cool about that. I don’t know why anyone would even say that was awesome. That’s the weirdest, most oddball thing I’ve ever heard anybody say.”
Matt Brown discussed the trauma caused by a mass shooting
Brown went on to say he saw the gunman at the Damageplan concert “get his head blown off.” He also talked about the trauma the officer who shot the gunman must have gone through, and how it was a traumatic experience for a lot of other people, too.
“I don’t really bring it up,” Brown explained. “It’s not something I want to go around preaching about, but it is something that happened to me, so I’m also not ashamed or awkward about it. It happened, and you live through it, but I can’t wrap my head around why you would even say that.
“I’m not one to criticize what people say a lot of times. Dana says a lot of stuff, I think, that we could all have opinions about. That’s what he does very well. He gets a rise out of people, gets opinions, gets people talking. We talk about what he says all the time, but I’m not very critical of it. I’m like: ‘He’s promoting a fight, what do you expect?’ He’s promoting two people going in a cage and [trying] to beat each other up in front of a bunch of drunk fans. What do you expect from the guy?
“But that one, I don’t have a lot of respect for that. You can’t say that. It was very tone-deaf. You just don’t say that. You can say anything, just about, except for that. There’s a million simple things to say. You don’t say that. Even if you somehow oddly feel that, it’s just not what you say.”