When Donald Trump emerged as a Republican presidential hopeful in 2015, I remember thinking: this is just like wrestling. Not competitive Olympic wrestling, but professional wrestling, the circus-like spectacle consumed by children of my generation in the 1980s and 1990s, and still popular today. Trump had it all: a preposterous appearance, a knack for put-downs of rivals, and the mix of hyper-masculinity and camp theatricality so distinctive of the World Wrestling Federation (latterly renamed World Wrestling Entertainment) and other less successful promotions.
But more than anything was the sense that Trump was playing a part; that the whole campaign was, to use wrestling jargon, an “angle” (a fictional or quasi-fictional storyline) or indeed one long “work” (an elaborate lie designed to excite an audience). None of this was surprising: Trump had been immersed in the strange milieu of professional wrestling for decades, from hosting early instalments of the flagship WrestleMania event, to becoming an actual in-ring performer in the 2000s. It would be a stretch to say that professional wrestling is what created the Trump presidency, but not unreasonable to assume that it influenced him as a performer.
Ringmaster, an engaging new biography of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) impresario and Trump confidant Vince McMahon goes further, and illustrates that wrestling’s lurid carnival can tell us something about why so many people now respond to politics based on the performance of division.
McMahon’s product was tailor-made for Reagan’s US: cartoonish jingoism and simplistic fables of good and evil embodied by muscle-bound heroes such as Terry “Hulk Hogan” Bollea
Abraham Riesman’s book uses the story of McMahon to track the history of modern wrestling. The two narratives are in fact inseparable. At the time McMahon bought his father’s New York-based promotion (acquired, not inherited: the complicated paternal relationship is central to this story), wrestling was divided into agreed regional territories. This effective cartel protected local monopolies, with one promotion refraining from organising shows in another’s territory and local television markets strictly defended.
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McMahon destroyed this model in barely two years, aggressively expanding into neighbouring territories and presenting local promoters with a stark choice: sell up to the WWF or face going out of business. His product was tailor-made for Reagan’s US: cartoonish jingoism and simplistic fables of good and evil embodied by muscle-bound heroes such as Terry “Hulk Hogan” Bollea.
As McMahon’s operation expanded to become a mainstay of pop culture, so did the size of his performers, with rampant steroid use in the 1980s and 1990s, including by McMahon himself. The question of whether he was instructing his wrestlers to use steroids, or indeed actively distributing them, was the subject of a federal prosecution of McMahon in 1994 (he was acquitted).
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Notwithstanding the outcome of that trial, it is clear that steroid use was systemic in the wrestling organisation. Riesman’s book contains extensive interviews with high-profile wrestlers such as Canadian Bret Hart, who explained how McMahon not-so-subtly communicated his preference for a muscle-bound aesthetic that usually required pharmaceutical assistance. “I like my wrestlers to spend a lot of time in the gym,” the owner told Hart, who understood a clear inference that he needed to look more like “a human basketball”.
Steroid abuse goes to the ethical heart of the questions surrounding McMahon and his world. Even if not meeting a standard for criminal prosecution, and even though not in fact a sport where there is a competitive outcome to be affected, the widespread abuse of drugs is one reason why life expectancy among wrestlers is atrocious. Looking through lists of world-famous wrestlers I followed as a child, it is striking how many died middle-aged, often after massive heart attacks, a common consequence of long-term steroid abuse. Such abuse was intensified by routine reliance on cocaine, alcohol and painkillers to endure remorseless schedules of 200-plus shows per year.
As with Donald Trump until he became president, people have largely not taken this strange form of entertainment seriously
But while the WWF/WWE has become more corporate, securing blue-chip sponsorship and ultimately a stock market flotation that made McMahon an even greater fortune, he has assiduously ensured that his business remains as unregulated as the carnival sideshow it evolved from. He long resisted any attempt at unionisation by his wrestlers, a group of workers operating at extremely high risk but with minimal protections.
As far back as the 1980s, he and his wife Linda (latterly a Republican politician and Trump cabinet member) conceded wrestling’s ultimate, though obvious, secret (that its matches were predetermined) in order to secure freedom from even loose requirements for medical oversight previously imposed in some US states. He even recently made a comeback to lead the WWE again at 77, less than a year after being forced to resign following numerous allegations of sexual harassment and assault, and using company money to pay off his accusers.
All this has been possible because, as with Donald Trump until he became president, people have largely not taken this strange form of entertainment seriously. It is, after all, absurd. Grown men dressing up in strange costumes, shouting at one another as crowds alternately cheer and boo – not unlike a Trump rally. As we’ve discovered over the past seven years, absurdity can be compelling, not least when it is a mask for darker things.
