2. Literature review
2.1 Soft power and sportswashing
The starting point is Joseph Nye, who coined soft power in the early 1990s: the ability to obtain desired outcomes through attraction, not coercion or payment (Nye, 2004). Sportswashing is a specialized application of that logic, the deliberate use of sport's shine to redirect attention and build positive narratives around a political or corporate actor. The founding case most cited in the literature is the 1936 Berlin Olympics, when the Nazi regime used the event's reach to project an image of modernity and efficiency while concealing a repressive policy (Boykoff, 2023).
Grix and coauthors extend the definition beyond authoritarian regimes, including corporations that invest in sport to divert attention from questionable practices in their core operations (Grix, Dinsmore & Brannagan, 2023). Skey adds an important point: sportswashing is not always about hiding a specific controversy, it is frequently about building positive associations that reinforce a desired narrative, regardless of whether there is anything concrete to hide (Skey, 2022). This distinction matters for the case examined in this piece, in which there is no single scandal being masked, but an image being deliberately built for a specific audience.
2.2 The democratic gap
The sportswashing literature focuses almost entirely on authoritarian regimes using mega-events and football clubs to project international legitimacy. There is a twofold gap in what it does not cover well. The first is geographic and political: there is little systematic work on how consolidated democracies use the same logic, and even less on the domestic use of this tool, aimed at the electorate itself rather than international opinion. The second is one of actor scale: the literature deals mainly with states and corporations buying sports assets (clubs, hosting rights, sponsorships), not with an individual candidate using a personal and media-based relationship with a sports organization as a campaign vector.
This twofold gap is precisely the space the Trump-UFC case occupies. Chehabi had already noted, two decades earlier, that sport grants access to audiences and key actors that are hard to reach by other means (Chehabi, 2001), and Murray described sports mega-events as responsible for the largest audiences in media history, which makes them particularly attractive for public diplomacy (Murray, 2012). Neither, however, was writing with a presidential candidate using a podcast hosted by a sports organization to bypass the traditional press in mind. It is this mediation by platform, not merely by sporting event, that this piece argues is central to the case and undertheorized in the literature.
2.3 The fragmented media argument
A second strand of literature, less frequently crossed with sportswashing, deals with the fragmentation of news consumption. The Pew Research Center, in partnership with the Knight Foundation, documented in 2024 that 38% of Americans aged 18 to 29 say they regularly get informed through "news influencers" on social media, against only 8% of Americans aged 65 or older (Pew Research Center, 2024). This figure is not about sport, but it is decisive for the argument of this piece: if the young public has already migrated to podcasts and social media as its primary source of political information, a candidate who appears in these spaces is not necessarily doing sportswashing in the classic sense (redirecting attention from a controversy via sport), he may simply be going where the voter already is. Mattern (2005) had already warned that soft power is not as "soft" as it appears, and that attraction has components of representational force that classical literature underestimates; the same holds, this piece argues, for the distinction between sportswashing and mere strategic presence on a platform.