It was less WWE, more WTF. On Sunday night, Terry Gene Bollea, better known as Hulk Hogan, strutted on stage at Madison Square Garden to speak at a Donald Trump rally. Wearing tiny yellow sunglasses that looked as if they’d been nicked off a toddler, Hogan attempted to rip his shirt off. It took a bit of struggling, but eventually the 71-year-old wrestling legend managed it.
The high jinks continued: Hogan treated the crowd to a dance. Notably, Hogan’s dance moves are just like the ones Trump has shown off at numerous rallies. A lot of arm-pumping; kinda looks like they’re milking a cow. (That said, my own dancing looks like a penguin being caught in an earthquake, so I’m not judging.)
“You know something, Trumpmaniacs?” Hogan said, after his jig was up. “I don’t see no stinking Nazis in here.” The wrestler was referencing the fact that the Trump event had drawn numerous comparisons, including from Tim Walz, to a Nazi rally held in 1939 at an earlier iteration of Madison Square Garden. Not an outrageous comparison, considering the 2024 rally was full of racism and nativist language, with former Trump aide Stephen Miller saying things such as: “America is for Americans and Americans only.” As for Hogan, while World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) once fired him for using the N-word, his rally speech wasn’t overtly racist. However, he did appear to make a disgusting oral sex joke about Kamala Harris.
Hogan’s campy costumes and corny catchphrases may make him seem a bit of a joke, but he’s had a serious impact on the political landscape in recent years. Hogan may not have been able to see any “stinking Nazis” in Madison Square Garden, but powerful men with darkly authoritarian views sure seem to see a useful ally in him.
Hogan was certainly instrumental in helping billionaire Peter Thiel kill the media organisation Gawker – a long and sordid saga that started in 2006, when Hogan had sex with the wife of his friend, a radio personality called Bubba the Love Sponge. Bubba filmed the encounter and, in 2012, the tapes got leaked (possibly by a rival DJ) to Gawker. They published the video with the headline: “Even for a minute, watching Hulk Hogan have sex in a canopy bed is not safe for work but watch it anyway”.
Watching closely was Thiel, who had held a grudge against Gawker ever since it published a post with the headline: “Peter Thiel is totally gay, people” in 2007. A book about the lawsuit by Ryan Holiday claims that an acquaintance of Thiel, aware of this grudge, gave him the idea to take Gawker down in 2011. When the Hogan tape came out, Thiel had the perfect opportunity to exact revenge: he secretly bankrolled the wrestler’s lawsuit against the company. Because Thiel has unlimited funds, the lawsuit was dragged out to ensure Gawker hemorrhaged money. Which wasn’t necessarily great for Hogan, who had to make his private affairs very public. Things were even worse for Gawker, though, which was driven to bankruptcy.
Gawker was a brilliant site, but it also did a bunch of indefensible things, outing someone and publishing a sex tape without their consent being prime examples. Nevertheless, an aggrieved billionaire suing a publication into oblivion set a chilling precedent. It ushered in a United States where, as Tom Scocca, a former Gawker writer, put it, “a billionaire can put a publication out of business”.
Hogan, who once endorsed Barack Obama for president, clearly got a taste for hanging around vengeful billionaires after the lawsuit. He’s been a prominent fixture in the Trump campaign for the past few months and had a primetime speaking slot at the Republican national convention in July. Like every aggrieved rich guy in America, Hogan has also flirted with the idea of a political career: if Trump wins, there is a non-zero chance he might get some sort of official position.
But while it may be notable that Hogan has got more Trumpy over the years, perhaps what’s most glaring here is how much Trump’s GOP has become like the WWE. It’s shed any pretence of respectability, morphing into a violent theatre of the absurd, full of caricatures and cheap gimmicks. Unlike wrestling however, the only people really getting hurt are the public.
• Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
