UPDATE, JULY 26:
I spoke further with The Jeremy Vine Show on BBC Radio 2 on Friday about the role of Hulk Hogan and professional wrestling in the rise of Donald Trump to the White House.
The other guest is wrestler Simon Miller.
To listen, you need to be in the UK or use a VPN:
Listen to Discussion from 36:07
ORIGINAL ENTRY, JULY 25: I joined BBC Radio 4’s PM to discuss the career of Hulk Hogan, the pro wrestling icon who died on Thursday, and how he and World Wrestling Entertainment owner Vince McMahon helped create the image of Donald Trump on the path from six business bankruptcies to the White House.
To listen, you need to be in the UK or use a VPN:
Listen to Discussion from 53:43
I chat with host Evan Davis about the rise of wrestling and The Hulkster as a national spectacle in the 1980s, with Trump’s casinos hosting Wrestlemania, and how Trump became a star of the WWE from 2007 to 2009.
Wrestling made Hulk Hogan, Hulk Hogan made wrestling, but both of them made Donald Trump.
I move from Hogan’s shtick to Trump’s to highlight how wrestling’s trash talk and whipping people into a frenzy became a central part of US politics.
Hogan sold all of this in the guise of being, as his theme song put it, a “Real American”.
He could combine celebrity with what wrestling demanded of spectacle with what patriotism demanded of America as it came out of the Cold War.
