Free Form Friday: 80s Wrestling, the Law and Trump

Free Form Friday is my weekly non-Bowie post. I’ve skipped this feature the last couple of weeks in part because I have a backlog of Bowie content, and in part because, after the U.S. election, I had a lot to say but not enough time to write it all down. And, hey, I’d rather write about Bowie. If you’d rather read about Bowie, come back tomorrow!

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Despite Donald Trump naming former wrestling executive Linda McMahon first to the leadership of his transition team and then, despite her total lack of qualifications, to be his secretary of education, I see very little out there trying to decipher Trump through the lens of 1980s wrestling. Nonetheless, I continue to think that Trump, who featured Hulk Hogan as the equivalent of his keynote speaker at this year’s Republican Convention, looks to 80s wrestling not simply as inspiration, but as a script. Nowhere is that more true than as it has to do with the role of rules in pro-wrestling, which map almost exactly with the way Trumpists see the law.

I watched a lot of wrestling as a teenager, from about 1983 or so until I went to college in 1987. I lost nearly all interest in the spectacle after that point, and I know it went through its own evolution, which at some point directly involved Donald Trump. One of Trump’s closest advisers over the years has been wrestling magnate Vince McMahon, Jr., husband of Linda, who recently stepped down from his leadership role in WWE following allegations of misconduct that included sex trafficking and sexual assault. McMahon (Vince, that is) has dodged and weaved his way through legal problems for years, including allegations of promoting illegal steroid use amongst wrestlers and claims of hush-money payments made to settle sexual misconduct claims and a bunch of other sordid stuff. If all that reminds you of Trump himself, it’s useful to take a look at how the McMahons’ World Wrestling Federation (as it was called at the time) treated the concept of rules, because from their perspective, as well as Trump’s, and for that matter Hulk Hogan’s, the rules don’t apply to them.

Through the magic of YouTube, I went back and watched the fairly brief 1983 match in which Hogan won his first WWF title from the villainous Iron Sheik. Why was the Sheik villainous? Mainly because he was Iranian (he actually was Iranian). The Sheik would come to the ring waving an Iranian flag with a picture of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s face on it. To write this piece, I found an older video of the Sheik going up against the previous champion, Bob Backlund. Before that match, he went through a faux religious ceremony in which he prayed to the Khomeini flag while having the ring announcer ask the fans not to chant “USA USA” while he did so. One of the commentators calling the match said that the Sheik was taking his life in his hands doing this in front of the Philadelphia crowd.

The match against Backlund was interesting in how it was actually uninteresting. The Sheik and Backlund went through about 16 minutes of exchanging holds until Backlund pinned the Sheik. I didn’t notice either of them breaking any rules. Backlund, who had held the title for about six years, was the creation of Vince McMahon’s father, who preceded him as head of the WWF, Vince, Sr. Backlund’s character was an “All American baby face.” A good guy who (usually) played by the rules. In the old wrestling ethos, playing by the rules or cheating was a dividing line between good guys and bad guys. But Vince, Sr. passed the baton to his son, the future advisor to Trump, and things were about to change.

Bob Backlund won the match I (recently) watched but ultimately lost the title to the Iron Sheik when he took on the challenger after being supposedly injured prior to their match. This was enough for the Sheik to get the upper hand and trap Backlund in his signature submission hold, the unbreakable (and stereotypically named) “Camel Clutch.” But true champions never submit, so Backlund lost when his manager threw in the towel. Injured and defeated, Backlund, and by extension, the USA (of the USA USA chant) needed to be avenged. And the aptly named Hulk Hogan was the man for the job.

You can watch the match for yourself in the embedded video here. Really, it only lasts a few minutes. But if you don’t want to watch, here’s what you’re missing:

Hogan starts the match by attacking the Sheik from behind, a tactic that, when the Sheik himself would do elsewhere, would be greeted by the ringside announcer with cries of, “Pearl Harbor!” Instead, Hogan heard only cheers. He then began to strangle the Sheik with his own robes before administering closed-fisted punches, an eye rake, a “deliberate choke” hold, and, once the Sheik was down as a result of all this, a shower of actual spit. To which the announcer said, “And the fans love it.”

Within the fake reality of pro wrestling, none of these tactics were allowed by the rules. Also, within the context of the match itself, the Sheik had done nothing at all other than walk into the ring. The fans loved it because Hogan was, as Trump would say, their retribution. The Sheik deserved all this because he, being an Iranian and a Muslim, was beneath contempt.

To make things interesting, the Sheik mounted a comeback that involved “loading” his (again, stereotypical) curly-toed boot. The Sheik would frequently do this in matches in as obvious a display as possible to everyone in the arena except for one person—the ref, who would never, ever notice. So, boot loaded, the Sheik took it to Hogan and then applied a series of submission holds culminating in the “unbreakable” Camel Clutch. But of course, Hogan broke the hold and won the match.

Unlike the Backlund match, there was little by way of wrestling in this one, especially on the part of Hogan. Hogan did not wrestle the Iron Sheik so much as punch, kick, and throw him around. He did not reverse the Sheik’s holds; he powered out of them. For Vince Jr., might makes right. Hogan was bigger, blonder, and badder than the Iron Sheik. Following the rules had absolutely nothing to do with Hogan’s virtue.

Actually, the rules made no difference to either Hogan or the Sheik. The rules were not meant for them, or for that matter the fans. The fans didn’t like Hogan because he followed the rules—they liked him because he did not allow himself to be stymied by the rules. In Vince Jr.’s world of wrestling, the only one who cared about the rules was the small man in the bow tie—the feckless referee. Not that the ref could really do much about either wrestler’s breaking of the rules—he wasn’t about to disqualify Hogan—no matter what—and he supposedly didn’t notice the Sheik’s shenanigans. Like Jack Smith or Judge Juan Merchan, the wrestling ref’s only function was to either ratify the hero’s success or get in his way. Laws, like wrestling rules, “have exactly as much real authority as a sovereign interpretive power allows them to have.” And the little guy with the bow tie is actually not the sovereign. The real power is behind the scenes, pulling the strings. Everything’s rigged, you know.

By the way, that quote about the “sovereign interpretive power” isn’t from Vince McMahon, Jr., the guy pulling the strings in wrestling. It’s from Nick Land’s book, The Dark Enlightenment, which is basically what a 14-year-old might think is the intellectual foundation of J.D. Vance’s understanding of Trumpism. At some point, I’ll come back to that in a later post. But for a true understanding of Trump’s version of Trumpism, there’s no need to go there—instead, it just helps to understand 80s wrestling.

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