Dark leprechaun Conor McGregor: MAGA's latest manfluencer

During the ritual humiliation of Irish prime minister Micheál Martin’s pre-St. Patrick’s Day visit to the White House — which I wrote about here last week — Donald Trump was asked to name his favorite Irish person. The president appeared briefly baffled, and witticisms flowed for the next day or so on both sides of the Atlantic. (Does Sean Hannity count as “Irish”? Does Shaquille O’Neal?) His eventual response was “Conor,” meaning mixed martial arts fighter Conor McGregor.

Martin winced and chuckled, but said nothing, which was the basic principle of his entire performance. As he and Trump were both aware, former MMA champion McGregor was recently found liable in a Dublin civil suit for sexually assaulting a longtime acquaintance in December 2018 — the same charge for which Trump was found liable in the E. Jean Carroll case. Although the cases are broadly similar, the two men’s versions of events are different: McGregor admits he had sex with the woman in a hotel room but says it was consensual; Trump says the Carroll incident, in a department-store changing room, never happened at all.

In retrospect, the “Conor” moment in the Oval Office on March 12 looks like a set-up — or, more to the point, like a devious and especially petty work of MAGA-world chicanery. Five days after Martin’s visit, on St. Patrick’s Day itself, McGregor himself showed up at the White House — looking rather too much like an evil leprechaun in his overly tight pinstripe suit — for a series of photo-ops with Trump and Elon Musk and supposed “meetings” with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and other functionaries. Three days after that, McGregor announced his intention to run in Ireland's presidential election this fall, something he’s been threatening for months. 

That’s a bizarre and terrible idea from every point of view, and it almost certainly won’t work — we’ll get to that. (Given recent history, categorical predictions are unwise.) McGregor’s appearance in Washington was framed to look like an unscheduled or spontaneous event, and the White House press corps was only told about it a day earlier, but as later reporting by the Irish Times has made clear, it was nothing of the kind.

McGregor’s visit had evidently been scheduled weeks earlier, long before Martin even received an invitation for the traditional St. Patrick’s meeting between the Irish taoiseach (literally, “leader”) and the American president, which is meant to celebrate the intimate historical relationship between the two countries. In other words, Trump knew he’d be seeing “Conor” in a few days, and his administration had already selected a MAGA-friendly tough-guy celebrity with no official status and a permanently tarnished public image as its preferred avatar of Irishness, over the Republic of Ireland’s democratically elected leader. 

Given the Trump regime’s all-out assault on freedom of speech, higher education, the legal profession and the courts, the McGregor affair wasn’t even the biggest story in Washington on the day it happened, let alone of last week. It’s not even slightly surprising that McGregor — like Andrew Tate, another accused rapist, “manfluencer” and caricature of toxic masculinity — appeals to Trump and, no doubt, to many of his followers. But the fact that Trump or Musk or someone close to them bothered to stage this event serves to illustrate the MAGA vision of full-spectrum dominance in action. 

First of all, this was a transparent attempt to Trump-wash the reputation of a fading global superstar (who remains a highly recognizable figure to millions of MMA fans) by associating him with right-wing “issues.” It’s not clear what McGregor and Hegseth may have discussed in their so-called meeting — perhaps their impressive tattoos, which seem to light Donald Trump’s fire a bit — but the Pentagon later issued an empty-words press release headlined “U.S., Ireland Both Suffer Impacts of Illegal Immigration.” (I couldn't tell you what the defense secretary and a semi-retired fighter have to do with that, even hypothetically. But nothing makes sense anymore.)

That points us toward the second goal of the Trump-McGregor tryst, which was to undermine the elected government of a small nation that is almost entirely dependent on U.S. trade and is clearly considered insufficiently subservient and overly woke. It would have been absurd to make the latter claim about Ireland even 15 to 20 years ago, but it’s now clearly true: In the aftermath of the sexual abuse scandals surrounding the Roman Catholic church, Ireland has legalized divorce, abortion and a full range of LGBTQ+ rights. Of course racism, misogyny and homophobia exist, but expressing such views is generally seen as socially unacceptable; in broad strokes, Ireland has become one of the most open and tolerant societies in Europe.

Over the past few years, Conor McGregor has tried to position himself as the spokesman for “common sense” (i.e., reactionary) pushback against those dramatic changes, and especially as a spokesman for anti-immigrant sentiment, the greatest source of social friction everywhere in the Western world. Ireland is virtually unique among European countries in having no far-right, anti-immigrant political movement of any consequence, largely because Irish nationalism is historically associated with anti-colonial and anti-imperialist attitudes, and often with socialism. McGregor would like to be the guy who creates and leads such a movement; the Trump-Musk team, it would appear, is eager to help. 

That said, McGregor’s presidential campaign is likely to end before it begins, not because he’s an ignoramus and a liar and a misogynist — we now understand those are not impediments — but for baked-in structural reasons. It’s probably a media play aimed at the American market more than anything else. First of all, the Irish presidency is a largely ceremonial and nonpartisan position with little or no political power; it’s a retirement gig for eminent figures, more like being the queen of Denmark than the president of France. The current and widely beloved president, Michael Higgins, was known more as a poet and academic than as a politician. 

Secondly, Irish citizens can’t just decide to run for president and then pour millions in dark money into scary attack ads about trans people (just for instance). It simply doesn’t work that way. The presidential election is effectively a closed shop; candidates must be nominated by at least 20 members of the Oireachtas, or national legislature, or by at least four of Ireland’s 31 elected local councils. It’s almost impossible to imagine the amount of Trumpian transatlantic arm-twisting, coupled with a catastrophic loss of Irish national confidence, that could make that happen for McGregor.

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Social scientist Clare Moriarty noticed an important theme in McGregor’s White House remarks, one which suggested his true audience wasn’t the people of Ireland — for whom he’s very close to persona non grata these days — but their distant cousins on this side of the pond. McGregor has a standard spiel about how Ireland has been so swamped with immigrants that it doesn’t feel “Irish” anymore (a categorically false statement, by the way), but added a particular twist for St. Paddy’s Day in D.C.:

There are rural towns in Ireland that have been overrun in one swoop, that have become a minority in one swoop, so issues need to be addressed and the 40 million Irish Americans need to hear this because if not there will be no place to come home and visit.

As Moriarty acridly notes, the argument here amounts to “we should stop immigration so the descendants of immigrants can have an appropriately nostalgic-feeling holiday destination to visit.” But in a sense, that’s precisely the point: Conor McGregor is only pretending to run for president of Ireland, which is a job he can’t have, doesn’t want and definitely couldn't perform. He’s really running to be the symbolic president of Irish America, or at least of the millions of conservative Irish Americans who are deeply uncomfortable with both contemporary Ireland and contemporary America, and who dream of reverse-engineering a past that never existed. This syndrome, I hardly need to add, is far more general, and is in danger of reducing what remains of our civilization to self-parody and self-destruction.