Luke Thomas used a recent episode of his show to work through the contradictions in Sean Strickland’s political commentary, sparked by Strickland’s sit-down interview with Shawn Ryan.
Responding to a listener who suggested he and Strickland could have a productive conversation given the athlete’s history of training and military-adjacent respect, Thomas laid out why Strickland remains one of the most confounding figures in the sport to analyze politically.
Thomas credited Strickland’s working-class background for giving him a real understanding of how power structures affect ordinary people.
“He has sort of like a keen sense of how much the working class gets run over and how power structures are designed to mess with people,” Thomas said, adding that Strickland’s rise to wealth has not changed his outward presentation. “Look at him on that interview with Shawn Ryan. He looks like he just came off a construction site.”
That same instinct, Thomas argued, has led Strickland to some unexpectedly clear-eyed statements about Donald Trump.
“You hear him on this thing where he can see Trump for who he is now and he could see Trump’s adoration for what it is now. He’s clearly reasoning through it and he’s alarmed by it,” Thomas said, noting Strickland even invoked history’s darkest turns. “You can hear him say like, ‘I can see how H*tler happened for crying out loud.'”
But Thomas said that clarity collapses when the topic shifts to ICE, which Strickland has praised as one of Trump’s achievements. Thomas rejected that view outright, calling the agency “a private paramilitary group” that uses volunteers and surveillance technology “to enforce an ethnostate at the expense of the country’s health.”
He questioned how Strickland could distrust Trump on the Epstein files and an affordability agenda yet still trust “an unaccountable paramilitary force that only answers to the executive.”
Thomas also pointed to Strickland’s comments about gay people and racial minorities as evidence the inconsistency runs deeper than any single issue.
“It’s just it’s like, oh my god, dude. How are we in both of these places?”
Ultimately, Thomas stopped short of declaring Strickland fully broken from Trump or MAGA politics, framing him instead as someone still working through his views in real time.
“He’s got some views that are surprisingly heterodox from the world he comes from and then another one’s just like as retrograde as possible,” Thomas said. “It’s frustrating.”
