During a recent episode of his live broadcast, MMA analyst Luke Thomas responded to a viewer question about whether MMA journalist Ariel Helwani had openly endorsed Donald Trump ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
The question came in through the live chat and accused Helwani of supporting Trump and Israel, while also suggesting Thomas had avoided taking a strong stance against him publicly.
Thomas first addressed the idea that he was somehow hesitant to criticize Helwani. “I have seen the suggestion that for some reason people are under this impression that I’m like afraid to get sideways with him,” Thomas said. “What would I be afraid of? First of all, I already spent a portion of my life sideways with him publicly on this channel. It’s not like I haven’t even done it before.”
He went on to explain that the two had already gone through a period of public tension in the past before eventually resolving things privately.
“I did it for a while,” Thomas continued. “I had a talk with him and we ironed, I think, what we could out of it and I was happy to walk away from it under those terms, and that’s what that was.”
Addressing the specific accusation that Helwani endorsed Trump, Thomas admitted he had not personally seen any evidence of it.
“I’m not sure if he openly endorsed Trump. He might have. I didn’t see that,” he said. “But certainly I’ve seen that he’s been very, very supportive of Israel. I could never be if my life depended on it. I could never be.”
Later in the broadcast, another viewer informed Thomas that Helwani had reportedly said he supported neither Trump nor Kamala Harris during the election cycle.
“I’m being told, by the way, by somebody who might be in the know here that Ariel did not support Trump,” Thomas said. “He said he couldn’t support Trump or Harris.”
That led Thomas to question how reliable some of the information being sent to him during these discussions actually was.
“So this is the other part, too, like how much of the information that’s being relayed to me in these kinds of incidents are accurate?” he said.
