If you truly want to understand American politics and society in the Age of Trump, you need to study professional wrestling.
I have written or said some version of this dozens of times during the last 10 years. But in the wake of wrestling legend Hulk Hogan’s death from cardiac arrest at 71 on Thursday — and with President Donald Trump marking six months in office following a bruising campaign in 2024 — it is clear that even I greatly underestimated professional wrestling’s political and cultural power.
Beginning in the mid to late 19th century after the Civil War, American professional wrestling went from its more “sport”-oriented roots to the regional territories and a more theatrical aesthetic and presentation. From the birth of the television era and into the 1980s with the rise of Vince McMahon’s World Wrestling Federation, for the average person, “professional wrestling” eventually became synonymous with the WWF. (A 2002 lawsuit forced the World Wrestling Federation to change its name to World Wrestling Entertainment.)
WWE’s multiple weekly TV shows, monthly pay-per-view events (or, as WWE describes them, premium live events), Hollywood films, megastars like The Rock and John Cena, video games and a wide range of merchandise have become part of global popular culture, including politics. (In 2024, WWE was sold to Endeavor Group Holding Company, which also owns UFC, for $9.3 billion.)
In the mid-1980s, Hulk Hogan became the most popular professional wrestler in the world. “Hulkamania” was a generation-defining event and was, quite literally, everywhere.
Hulk Hogan, whose real name was Terry Bollea, was an icon. He took to the ring in his signature red and yellow ring gear, boa and headscarf, sporting a handlebar mustache and massive biceps (his “24-inch pythons”), and waving the American flag. His catchphrases — “Eat your vitamins and say your prayers, brother!” — his finishing move, the big leg drop, and his larger-than-life persona and physique played a central, if not indispensable, role in this story. In the mid-1980s, Hulk Hogan became the most popular professional wrestler in the world. “Hulkamania” was a generation-defining event and was, quite literally, everywhere. Good timing, and the unique partnership between Hulk and McMahon, allowed professional wrestling to conquer the world.
Bollea died of cardiac arrest at his home in Tampa, Florida. But Hulk Hogan is immortal. Alas, Terry Bollea, the man, was not.
Last Friday night’s episode of WWE’s weekly television show “SmackDown” featured the traditional 10 bell salute honoring a beloved professional wrestler or other member of the extended wrestling family upon their passing. The faces of the WWE superstars revealed the depth of the community’s pain and shock at Hulk’s sudden passing. As a lifelong professional wrestling fan and “smart mark,” I, too, am in shock.
During Bollea’s decades-long career, he was both a villain (a “heel”) and the ultimate hero (“the face”). In either role, and for most of his career, Hulk Hogan was a megastar.
I grew up during the 1980s in a city where many of the WWF wrestlers and employees lived. Professional wrestling was a kind of civil religion in that working-class community, uniting us on both sides of the color line. (This explains my love of that blue-eyed soul brother, “The American Dream” Dusty Rhodes. His “Hard Times” promo, the wrestling term for an impassioned speech, has gotten me through many dark moments, as I am sure it has many others.)
I remember how someone at school or at the local bowling alley or arcade would, on an almost weekly basis, announce they had seen Hulk Hogan. He was at the supermarket. They saw him driving down the street. He stopped his car to sign autographs for people who were waving at him. Most of the stories were tall tales and urban legends told to entertain or to score some popularity. Years later, I found out that some of these stories were, in fact, true.
All this makes it hard to fully explain to those who are not of that era what it was like when Hulkamania was running wild — and how it felt when Hulk went to World Championship Wrestling, WWF’s rival organization, and turned heel at the 1996 Bash at the Beach pay-per-view event. Hulk Hogan, a heel? Never! But it was true. He ditched his trademark red and yellow for all black, and the NWO (New World Order) was born. The original NWO, which consisted of “Hollywood” Hulk Hogan, Kevin Nash and Scott Hall, were so bad they became antiheroes and immensely popular.
Hulk Hogan turns heel with the NWO at WCW’s Bash at the Beach in 1996
Toward the end of his career, and especially in his later years, Bollea had more downs than ups as he found himself at the center of several public controversies. While he continued to have some great matches — Hulk Hogan’s match with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson at WrestleMania 18 being the best of them — his sex tape scandal, subsequent lawsuit against Gawker for allegedly violating his privacy, racism and other indictments of his character would take a toll on his once near-universal popularity.
Following his death, sports journalist and professional wrestling historian Brian R. Solomon summarized Hulk’s complex legacy in a series of posts on X. “There can be no doubt that Terry Bollea the man did grievous harm to his legacy in recent years, alienating many fans who once loved him. There can also be no doubt that Hulk Hogan the wrestler was the biggest star this business produced in the past 75 years, if not of all time,” he wrote in one post.
In another, Solomon said, “Wrestling history is divided in two parts: Before Hulk Hogan, and after Hulk Hogan…He was larger than life, inspired millions of people, many of whom spent decades being gradually let down by him.”
In what is likely the most bizarre moment in Bollea’s journey, Hulk Hogan would ally with Trump during the 2024 presidential election, seamlessly adapting his trademark performance for the MAGAverse. In a series of appearances — first at the Republican National Convention, then at Trump’s epic Madison Square Garden rally and victory celebration at the Capitol One Arena in Washington D.C., the night before the inauguration — Hulk would deliver a promo to rile up the MAGA faithful, flex his muscles and then tear off his shirt to reveal a Trump-Vance-MAGA shirt beneath it. Trump followed Hulk Hogan on stage as the conquering hero and champion.
It was surreal. The message, messenger, symbols, language, audience, and the meaning and emotions they created together were all one. A type of rare semiotic unity had been achieved. The Democrats had — and continue to have — no real answer for such power.
Want more sharp takes on politics? Sign up for our free newsletter, Standing Room Only, written by Amanda Marcotte, now also a weekly show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
On his Truth Social platform, Trump posted the following tribute to Hulk: “We lost a great friend today, the ‘Hulkster.’ Hulk Hogan was MAGA all the way — Strong, tough, smart, but with the biggest heart.”
I have no doubt Trump was being sincere. After all, he “has been a Hulkamaniac since the eighties,” as Josephine Riesman, author of the book “Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America,” writes in a new essay. “Trump hosted two WrestleManias that Hogan headlined back in his initial run of fame and attended many more shows in which Hogan wrestled. You can see him on the old tapes: the future POTUS leaping to his feet to give Hogan standing ovations and beaming at him like a kid who just saw Superman.”
Just before he accepted the Republican nomination for president last year at the party’s convention in Milwaukee, that same expression “crossed Trump’s weathered face” as Hulk spoke, she writes. “The candidate had spent most of the convention sitting bored in his chair, occasionally falling asleep, or perking up just to leer at his own daughter. But when Hogan cut a promo (to use the jargon of the pseudo-sport that made him famous) in Trump’s honor that night urging America to ‘Let Trumpamania rule again,’ Trump was absolutely riveted. Maybe, if it’s even possible, happy.”
If our hero Hulk Hogan, whose theme song proclaimed himself a “Real American” willing to “fight for the rights of every man,” could embrace a person like Donald Trump — a villain who believes himself to be the real victim — how lost, then, are we Americans as a country and a people?
Trump and Hulk’s alliance irrevocably stained the cherished memories many Americans of a certain age have of Hulkamania. If our hero Hulk Hogan, whose theme song proclaimed himself a “Real American” willing to “fight for the rights of every man,” could embrace a person like Donald Trump — a villain who believes himself to be the real victim — how lost, then, are we Americans as a country and a people?
This betrayal is at the heart of the boos and contempt many professional wrestling fans, and the larger public, came to feel toward Hulk. But the pairing makes perfect sense once you realize how much the two have in common.
Products of an age of hypermedia and extreme spectacle, both are characters and symbols more than they are people. Donald Trump and Hulk Hogan are fabulists with a documented history of telling obvious lies and abusing the truth. Being “real Americans” and “patriots” is central to both of their brands and popularity.
Hulk Hogan, Trump and MAGA all embody the same anti-intellectual, demagogic, juvenile, adolescent male power fantasy: That big muscles, sheer will and violence can fix everything.
To that point, Trump, at 79, routinely shares images of himself online as Superman, a heavyweight professional wrestling champion, a Sith Lord from the “Star Wars” film universe, Sylvester Stallone’s human war machine character “Rambo,” a mafia boss and, of course, a professional wrestler.
On Thursday, I watched a local news story about how Hulk’s fans gathered outside of his store in Orlando and left flowers, took photos and shared their memories of him. Several of the people interviewed were not white, they were Black. They celebrated Hulk Hogan the icon, and they had found a way to forgive, or at least to overlook, Terry Bollea’s racism and other bad behavior. It would appear, at least for them, that the memory of Hulk Hogan, the good deeds he did and what he meant to professional wrestling, was and is much greater than Bollea’s great offenses.
I asked Barry Blaustein, who wrote hit movies including “Boomerang,” “The Nutty Professor” and “Coming to America” — and directed the beloved professional wrestling documentary “Beyond the Mat” — for his thoughts about Bollea’s legacy and passing. He told me this: “Hulk Hogan has been around forever, whether we wanted him to be or not. Wrestling would not be what it is today without his mighty contributions. His legacy will live on forever…both the good and bad sides of a complicated man. May he rest in peace.”
I agree, and I think of this line from “Real American”:
When it comes crashing down and it hurts inside
you gotta take a stand, it don’t help to hide.
Rest in peace and power, Hulkster. For better or worse, this is the world you helped to create, and we are living in it.
Read more
about this topic
