“Trump-a-mania run wild”: The messy union of Donald Trump and Hulk Hogan
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Last week’s Republican National Convention in Milwaukee was a coronation for aspiring dictator and God King Donald Trump. It was truly a spectacle that combined the aspects of a rock concert, “Christian” evangelical megachurch service, crime family gathering, bazaar, Mos Eisley cantina from "Star Wars" and a professional wrestling supercard. In total, the Republican National Convention was a fascist monster’s ball.
Using the language and logic of boxing and MMA, the first few days of the Republican National Convention were the undercard where the speakers praised Donald Trump, a man they now fully believe to be some type of superman with divine status following the attempt on his life in Butler, Pennsylvania and the now iconic moment where he rose from the ground, pumped his fist in the air and said “Fight, fight, fight!” as his followers looked on in awe.
Black and brown “conservatives” were trotted out on stage to play their very lucrative roles as professional “best black and brown friends” for a racist and white supremacist Republican Party and MAGA movement.
With Vice President Kamala Harris now poised to formally take the mantle as the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, the MAGAfied Republican Party and its propagandists and agents will take off their masks and hoods even more as they viciously attack the first Black and Asian woman to occupy such a historic position. What is going to soon be unleashed against Harris by Trump and his agents will make Obama-era birtherism look gentle and kind by comparison.
As part of the Republican National Convention’s undercard and other preliminary events, Trump was repeatedly sanctified by an assortment of right-wing Christian theocrats as some type of prophet and martyr who will be a weapon for them in their war on democracy and modernity itself.
The Republican National Convention in Milwaukee also featured public rituals of humiliation. Here, a panoply of Donald Trump’s former critics, such as Nikki Haley and JD Vance (Trump’s vice president choice), took their turns on stage fawning over and praising him. Their humiliation is complete.
Donald Trump is much more than a man, he is a symbol and a character who imagines himself as a superhero in a story that he is writing in real time. After the attempt on his life in Pennsylvania, Trump is even more committed to the belief that he is a great man of history who may be immortal and chosen by God.
During his acceptance speech on Thursday night, Trump fully displayed his persona and identity as a type of professional wrestling heel (villain). As I explained in a 2017 essay here at Salon:
In keeping with that role, Trump has shown a flagrant disregard for the truth, pretends to be a victim when in fact he is the aggressor, is a bully, lords his wealth over others, cheats and has little regard for the rules. Trump's version of the heel professional wrestler is also a bellicose, verbally dexterous womanizer and misogynist. In professional wrestling, the secret to success is often described as "being yourself with the volume turned way up." Donald Trump has taken this maxim to the extreme. There appears to be little to no difference between Donald Trump the real person and Donald Trump the public persona and pro-wrestling-inspired politician.
To that end, Donald Trump was introduced by former WWF champion and hall of famer Hulk Hogan (Terry Bollea), who is one of the most important figures in the modern era of professional wrestling. Hogan, working with Vince McMahon in the 1980s (and then in the 1990s with WCW as the leader of the NWO faction), is one of the main figures responsible for taking professional wrestling from working class (sub)culture to the mainstream of global popular culture. For many in the mainstream news media and commentariat, watching Hulk Hogan introduce the 2024 Republican presidential nominee was unbelievable. For those of us who understand American politics and culture in this era of spectacle and gross distraction, where the American people have increasingly amused themselves to death, such a happening was utterly predictable if not anticlimactic.
Via email, Irvin Muchnick, investigative sports journalist and longtime observer of professional wrestling, explains the origins of the union between Donald Trump and Hulk Hogan:
Despite the pulverizing redundance, it seems important to record that Donald John Trump and Terry "Hulk Hogan" Bollea are kindred carnies. Trump has involved himself in WWE television shticks multiple times over the years, and his defunct Atlantic City casino hosted two WrestleManias. Linda McMahon — wife and principal co-owner, with allegedly depraved serial office sex abuser Vince McMahon, of WWE — was head of the Small Business Administration in the Trump administration. The McMahons were the largest and foundational donors to the fraudulent and self-dealing Donald J. Trump Foundation, which got fined and shut down by New York attorney general Letitia James. For his part, Hulk Hogan was the protagonist in a sex-tape scandal apparently engineered by his former friend, radio personality Bubba the Love Sponge, and his wife; Hogan's lawsuit over the circulation of the video, which put Gawker Media out of business, was underwritten in part by tech billionaire Peter Thiel.
In addition, both Donald Trump and Hulk Hogan have a very troubled relationship to the truth. They have also shown themselves to be racists.
Instead of what was widely expected—an acceptance speech to rival Adolph Hitler and Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda film “Triumph of the Will”—Donald Trump did no such thing. Instead, at more than 90 minutes, Donald Trump gave the longest presidential nomination acceptance speech in history. It was sleep-inducing and contained many dozens of obvious lies. Trump droned on like he was delivering an address to the Supreme Soviet or like some other dictator demagogue detailing his grand plans before an audience that does not believe him but must feign enthusiasm. The corrupt and highly dangerous and now felonious ex-president’s obvious egomania and God complex, energy level, and pattern of speech, again, is more public evidence that he appears to be mentally and emotionally unwell.
Beyond the style and performance, the substance of Trump’s speech was a terrifying vision of an American dictatorship wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross and Bible all under the guise of “unity” and “patriotism.”
Via email David Altheide, who is the author of “Gonzo Governance: The Media Logic of Donald Trump," highlighted the role that the character Hulk Hogan played at this year’s Republican National Convention:
The Republican Party’s spectacle couldn’t get more make-believe until it did. It was Hulk on Trump—meme on meme. A pablum of entertainment and politics stirred by religion was served Thursday night. Terry Gene Bollea (AKA Hulk Hogan) of fake wrestling fame joined Kid Rock, evangelist Franklin Graham (Billy’s boy), and other power-sniffers in endorsing Donald Trump for President. Using biceps to help a flabby candidate with a bandaged ear, Mr. Bollea’s charge was to infuse masculinity into a visually bland gaggle of endorsers and supporters drawn to muscle pornography. Appearing sans spandex like a cartoon character on stage as his real-persona-denying-his-persona and wearing a cross, the aging Hulk gave a fake motivational talk to a room full of “real Americans.” Proclaiming that as an entertainer, “I try to stay out of politics,” the character added “I can no longer stay silent.” A contrived growly voice assured the audience that he really did know “tough guys” and Trump was one of the toughest, “still kicking their butts.”
One can’t be sure if the Trump revelers were becoming Hulkamaniacs. It was sort of working, Hulk Hogan had a little trouble ripping off his outer shirt to reveal a Trump/Vance tank top.
Hulk Hogan was then followed by Dana White, who is the CEO of Ultimate Fighting Championship. During his speech, White praised Trump’s courage and masculinity. White also spoke of his friendship with Donald Trump and how kind, altruistic and selfless he believes him to be. Dana White would also present Trump’s political ambitions as noble, driven by patriotism and love of country.
Communications scholar Reece Peck explains that Dana White’s relationship with Donald Trump is something much more important than friendship: it symbolizes the rage at “the elites” and a type of toxic masculinity that is centered on violence and which is fueling right-wing fake populist authoritarianism in the United States and around the world. Via email, Reece explained to me:
Donald Trump’s more than 90-minute speech at the 2024 Republican National Convention was so rambling and uninspiring that there is not much to say about it. Maybe the most remarkable thing about the speech was who he selected to introduce it. It wasn’t his wife, one of his kids, or a member of his former Cabinet. He chose Dana White, the CEO of the Ultimate Fighting Championship. Let that sink in for a moment. Trump prioritized solidifying his association with an entertainment-combat sports media brand more than any other source of professional or personal legitimation.
White told the audience in attendance, “I’m in the tough guy business, and this man is the toughest, most resilient human being that I’ve ever met in my life.” Other pop cultural icons of the “tough guy business” were recruited to praise Trump’s exceptional virility. Conservative rock/rapper Kid Rock performed his song “American Badass,” and former WWF legend Hulk Hogan addressed the convention and claimed, “Let me tell you something, brother…Trump is the toughest of them all, a 'gladiator.'”
The climax moment of the tanned, bleached blond 70-year-old wrestler’s speech was when he took off his sports coat and broke into his signature shirt, tearing move showing his biceps, yelling, “Let Trumpmania run wild.” Witnessing this spectacle, commentators, including myself, couldn’t help but draw connections to the scene of fictional President Macho Camacho making his State of the Union address in Mike Judge’s 2006 comedic-dystopic film Idiocracy.
Reece offers the following caution about how the MAGAfied Republican Party and the larger neofascist movement are making strategic use of white “working class” identity politics:
For scholars researching masculinity, media, and politics, the RNC convention was “embarrassingly easy” to analyze, to use the words of a close colleague. It is hard to disagree with such a take. But progressives must be careful. They need to separate their critiques of Trump’s cartoonish appeals to hyper-masculinity from the right’s more foundational strategy to align itself with ‘lowbrow’ media genres and their audiences. While the UFC, Kid Rock, and entertainment wrestling represent ‘macho’ media, they are also clearly culturally coded as working-class. This dovetails with themes raised by more serious intellectual thought leaders at the RNC convention, like former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and Trump’s Vice-Presidential running mate JD Vance.
Blending rhetorics about Trump’s “natural” masculinity with more profound ideas about Trump’s “small d,” popular-democratic appeal, Tucker claimed that Trump’s response to the Pennsylvania assassination attempt proved he was an “organic” leader. “A leader,” he insisted, “is the bravest man. This is a law of nature.” Then Tucker pivoted to claim that Trump’s entire political career was driven by a duty to represent the people and the country. “Democracy,” Tucker argued, asserts the “proposition that the citizens of a country, own that country; they’re not renters, they’re not surfs and not slaves, they’re the owners of that country.” Like Vance and Teamster President Sean O’Brien, Tucker framed Trump to be on the side of economic populist policies that help the American working class even though, during his presidency, his only major legislative achievement was a tax cut that benefited the ultra-wealthy. Still, progressives need to be vigilant against this new RNC strategy to present conservatives as the natural opposition to war and corporate power. It is very telling that Vance focused more on the “ruling class” who supported NAFTA and the Iraq Invasion than on Democrats.
After these introductions, Donald Trump finally took the stage. What he did next could easily be featured in a professional wrestling storyline. Trump used Corey Comperatore’s firesuit and helmet as props. (Comperatore was a former fire chief and a real hero who was killed at the rally in Pennsylvania when he shielded his family from the assassin’s bullets). Trump praised Comperatore's sacrifice while standing behind his firesuit and helmet. Trump then put his hands on the shoulders of the firesuit and kissed the helmet. Trump then took a check for a million dollars out of his pocket, donated by one of his wealthy friends, and announced that it would be given to Comperatore’s family. It was all a transparent display of fake empathy and sympathy from a man who has consistently shown that he appears to be incapable of such human compassion and concern.
Serious professional wrestling fans know this storyline very well: Donald Trump the heel has had a change of heart because of some recent event in his life and is now promising to be a good guy and to do right by the fans. The entire time the fans are waiting for the heel to show his true colors and to betray "the babyface" (the hero). Like Donald Trump, with his claims that he is a different man after the assassination attempt and will now seek “unity”, the heel has not changed. When the heel inevitably betrays the babyface—and the fans who gave him the benefit of the doubt—the audience will erupt with rage and boos and hate him even more.
Political scientist M. Steven Fish, who is an expert on political messaging and emotions, believes that Trump’s professional wrestling-inspired speech and performance could be turned against him and the Republican Party by the Democrats in the 2024 election. Via email he explained to me how:
The Republican National Committee’s aim was to have Trump float to the stage for his acceptance speech on a river of testosterone.
The Hulk-Kid Rock-White show wasn’t an effective display of high-dominance politics; it was a parody of the fantasies of lonely, loveless, sexless men. Trump’s own egomaniacal whine of a speech only put the raisin on top of the pile of hormone-jacked Grade C beef the Republicans trotted out to background their nominee.
The question is: Will the Democrats flood social media with memes using these buffoons’ antics to show what a joke the Trumpified Republicans have become? The liberal party has largely forgotten the importance of being both tough and entertaining, and the clown show the RNC put on in Milwaukee for the moral bottom tenth gives the Democrats a raft of great material if they’ll only use it. Owning these harlequins should be a piece of cake, and the woman who spent most of her career sticking it to abusive husbands and predatory bankers could be just the man to get things moving.
Do the Republicans, and MAGA people and other rank-and-file Trump supporters know that they are being “worked?” Donald Trump is a character, the MAGA heavyweight champion of the world, who is playing a role as their hero and defender. In reality, Trump has contempt for his MAGA followers and is using them to get more power for himself. In the end, does the distinction even matter? Do the MAGA people even care that they are “marks” who are being “worked” by Donald Trump?
On this, David Altheide, explains:
Hulk Hogan’s appearance and appeal to “Trump-a-mania run wild” attests to the power of entertainment and the visual and established memes in contemporary politics. Emotional propaganda appeals resonate when audiences internalize established media logic into perspectives, expectations, and language. Audiences are vulnerable to manipulation when marketing images and scripted products morph into everyday discourse and familiarity. Memes are the ultimate standard when a glance speaks volumes, and a chuckle is understanding. Manipulators seek the power of internalized familiarity. This is why a despot’s use of a cartoon-like meme to support a claim that “I will bring back the American dream' can become a nightmare.
On Sunday, President Biden passed the torch to Vice President Kamala Harris. In a professional wrestling storyline that turned frighteningly real, where the stakes are the future of the country and its democracy, the main event in the 2024 election is now "The Prosecutor versus The Criminal." The story that is the Age of Trump has been filled with so many twists and turns as to render it unbelievable (in professional wrestling terminology this would be described as being “overbooked”). But alas, this is where we are. On Election Day we will have control of “the book” and largely decide how the storyline turns out.
