Striding to the stage at the Republican National Convention on Thursday, Dana White began his introduction of Donald Trump with a clarification. “Nobody tells me what to say,” he said, “and I’m nobody’s puppet.” Rattling with enthusiasm and jabbing a finger at the audience, he had come to Milwaukee to play the hype man, and to vouch for Trump’s bona fides.

“I’m in the tough guy business,” White went on, “and this guy’s the toughest, most resilient guy I’ve ever met in my life.”

The pairing–UFC CEO and Republican presidential nominee–was familiar. Their friendship dates back to the 1990s, when Atlantic City’s Trump Taj Mahal hosted a sport that was then largely considered too violent for the mainstream. As their relationship deepened, each continued to grow in stature and influence. By 2016, when White spoke at the Republican National Convention for the first of three times, he was presiding over a full-fledged empire that had commanded a $4 billion acquisition. In June, shortly after Trump was convicted in his hush-money trial, his first post-felony public appearance was at a UFC fight.

Even by contemporary Trump standards, the former president has recently assumed a new license to claim outlaw status. “A lot of people say it’s the most iconic photo they’ve ever seen,” he told the New York Post on Sunday, the day after his attempted assassination, as he reflected on an instantly indelible image–fist raised, ear bleeding. Some attendees at the convention this week wore bandages on their ears in homage to their leader, echoing the enthusiasm on display among all manner of machismo enthusiasts. 50 Cent, whose early rise was fueled by his own shooting survival, gleefully posted images of Trump’s face plastered over his debut album cover. “If it isn’t apparent enough who God wants to win,” Jake Paul wrote on X. And White, appearing on ESPN this week, and always functioning as a sort of elder statesman for the online-sports-Trump nexus populated by so many young men, made the case most plainly.

“This guy is the legitimate, ultimate American badass of all time,” he told Pat McAfee.

On stage on Thursday, White, speaking shortly after Hulk Hogan and a performance by Kid Rock, struck mostly the same notes for five minutes. “I know I’m gonna choose real American leadership,” he boomed, “and a real American badass.” He was in his trademark outfit of a dark suit and open white shirt, with his shaved head gleaming under the RNC lights. Earlier in the day, as he flew from Italy to Milwaukee for this show of vitality, he wrote on Instagram that he was “19 hours into another fast.”

Since Trump’s election, White has continued to grow his reputation and financial might. He launched Power Slap, a slap fighting competition that, like UFC before it, has been widely condemned as too grotesque to go on. Tickets to a UFC bout at The Sphere in Las Vegas in September are expected to be some of the most expensive in history. At a rally in Georgia in March, hours after attending a UFC fight in Miami, Trump commended his friend’s successes, joking that he hoped White “doesn’t run for office against me.”

In the model of virility White exalted on Thursday, the former and future president would make for a worthy counterpart to his own independent streak. But by this point in the long and symbiotic relationship between the two men, he thought he hardly needed to explain why.

“I’m not telling you what to think,” White told the feverish audience. “I’m telling you what I know.”