How Bud Light Won Back MAGA

On April 4, 2023, Kid Rock donned a white MAGA hat, blasted three cases of Bud Light with an AR-15-style rifle, flipped his left middle finger and shouted “fuck Bud Light, fuck Anheuser-Busch!” into a camera.

The hail of bullets punctuated a full-on crisis for the beer brand and its parent company, as conservatives launched a Bud Light boycott over its “woke” advertising deal with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney.

Flash forward to Sunday night on the White House’s South Lawn: Advertisements for Bud Light ringed the Ultimate Fighting Championship octagon for a cage-brawling festivus on President Donald Trump’s 80th birthday.

While Bud Light’s return from MAGA oblivion shocked more than a few Trump supporters, the brand’s prominent play at what Trump described as “one of the most exciting days in the history of our fabled White House” was in part a product of Anheuser-Busch’s unblinking commitment to its long-game political influence efforts.

That push — marked by increased lobbying and a new approach to campaign donations — extended directly into the brand’s relationship with Trump’s beloved UFC.

In October 2023, while still reeling from declining sales related to the Bud Light boycott, Anheuser-Busch inked a reported nine-figure, multiyear deal for Bud Light to become UFC’s official beer, buttressed by a television ad campaign featuring football — another Trump obsession — and patriotic themes.

The UFC deal coincided with Trump turbocharging his presidential campaign efforts by filing for New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary and emerging as the clear front-runner to win the 2024 Republican nomination.

It also immediately followed Trump personally attending the UFC 287 event of April 2023 in Miami and the UFC 290 event of July 2023 in Las Vegas. During both fights, Trump appeared with longtime supporter and UFC President Dana White.

“We all know he’s one of my very good friends,” White told the Las Vegas Review-Journal at the time about Trump.

Trump, for his part, began signaling in early 2024 that Bud Light might be on the path toward redemption.

“Anheuser-Busch is a Great American Brand that perhaps deserves a Second Chance? What do you think?” Trump said in a February 2024 post on his social media platform, Truth Social, while citing several company actions — spending on American farms, employing Americans, scholarships for military families — he deemed redeeming.

Back in Washington, Anheuser-Busch busied itself in other ways that might appeal to Trump.

For example, the company’s political action committee, which had donated a nearly even amount of money to Democratic and Republican candidates during the 2018, 2020 and 2022 election cycles, tilted toward Republicans during the 2024 election cycle, according to federal campaign finance data compiled by nonprofit research organization OpenSecrets.

Anheuser-Busch InBev, the parent company of Anheuser-Busch and Bud Light, also spent more than $5 million each year on federal lobbying efforts in 2023, 2024 and 2025. That represents three of the company’s four most expensive annual lobbying campaigns of all time, according to federal lobbying records.

The White House ranked among the company’s lobbying targets on topics that included tariffs and “competition in the beer industry,” federal records indicate.

During the first three months of 2026, Anheuser-Busch spent $1.43 million on federal lobbying efforts, putting it on an early pace toward its biggest one-year federal lobbying effort in history.

All the while, Republicans in Congress began growing increasingly quiet about Bud Light, their once-incessant social media posts and television news rants of 2023 fading as time passed.

Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-North Carolina), in September 2024, was the last member of Congress to insert a discouraging word about Bud Light into the Congressional Record when she warned that the “final frontier of the woke mind virus is the banks and capitalism themselves.”

In doing so, Foxx offered up a Wall Street Journal review of author Charles Gasparino’s book “Go Woke, Go Broke,” which argued that “Middle America revolted” against Bud Light for its wokeness and “stopped buying the beer, heretofore branded as a manly beverage.”

Responding to questions about Bud Light’s participation at the UFC event, a White House official emailed: “UFC funded and paid for this entire event. … The White House has not been involved in any cost negotiations or sponsorship discussions.”

Representatives for Anheuser-Busch did not respond to requests for comment.

But don’t expect Trump’s UFC fight to be the last time Washington is peppered with Anheuser-Busch messaging.

The company this month said its “iconic Budweiser Clydesdales” will appear at a “variety” of events on and around July 4 in the nation’s capital.

Anheuser-Busch’s marketing and influence tack is “a back-to-the-base move, and it tracks the main lesson from the boycott research: know your core customer,” said Song Yao, a marketing professor at the Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.

“Bud Light’s trouble was that it sat in the political middle, where any stance alienates the other half. Leaning into sports and patriotism re-anchors it with the drinkers it lost. As damage control, it’s sensible,” Yao said. “But this space is crowded.”