On July 18, 2024, Donald Trump officially accepted the Republican Party’s nomination as its candidate for president. While there was no shortage of unconventional speeches at the Republican National Convention (RNC) held in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, one speech stuck out. Merely an hour before Trump capped off his four-day coronation, Hulk Hogan, the former star of Hogan Knows Best and World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) Hall of Famer, delivered an energetic speech that endorsed Trump’s candidacy.
At first blush, the speech may have felt like just another outlandish political moment, almost as if listeners were teleported back to the 1980s as Hogan delivered a nine-minute promo backstage to “Mean” Gene Okerlund. The speech ran the gamut from Hogan’s classic catchphrases and shirt ripping antics of the 1980s to overt threats to all the “criminals,” “lowlifes,” “scumbags,” and “crooked politicians” that dared to stand-up against the Republican Party’s vision for the country.
Hogan’s speech was not just political theater. In many ways, Hogan is an unvarnished version of Trump in relation to the Republican Party. Hogan has deep connections to multiple strands of the Republican Party and the conservative policies it espouses. Furthermore, Hogan and Trump share an affinity for the reality-show aspects of American culture that have increasingly defined the Republican Party, and both claim to fight for “real Americans,” a phrase popularized by Sarah Palin, in many ways a proto-Trump Republican.
The similarities between Hogan and Trump highlight how the Republican Party has not transformed into something new since Trump’s ascension in 2016. It is the same party that celebrated Ronald Reagan’s Hollywood background in the 1980s. Instead, the Republican Party doubles down on its claims to represent American patriotism and family values as it maintains staunch anti-labor policies and close ties to billionaire tech investors.
Television Stars
Like former-president Trump, Hogan is a veteran of television. Hogan had an illustrious career as a professional wrestler. In the 1980s, he was a staple of Saturday morning entertainment for children around the world, and he even faced off against the character Rocky Balboa in Rocky III. Hogan’s RNC speech dripped with the nostalgia of his wrestling heyday with references to championship matches at Madison Square Garden.[i] Hogan’s speech enticed listeners to travel back to the 1980s when America was “great.”
This pivot to nostalgia is nothing new for Republicans. In his 2004 work Happy Days and Wonder Years: The Fifties and Sixties in Contemporary Cultural Politics, Daniel Marcus argues that there was a concerted effort by conservatives and Republicans to juxtapose the chaos of the 1960s with more serene memory of the 1950s. For example, Robert Zemeckis’ Forrest Gump portrays a saccharine childhood for the young Forrest who eventually finds himself engulfed by disorder in the 1960s. Forrest survives the chaos caused by the Vietnam War and civil rights radicals like the Black Panthers, and he eventually settles into a life a leisure in the 1980s after he invests in “some kinda fruit company,” which turned out to be the future tech giant Apple. Yes, the love of his life, Jenny, died from complications with AIDS, but the movie purposely does not name the deadly disease, which also aligns with how Republican presidents managed the epidemic in the late-eighties and early-nineties.
Hogan’s RNC speech does not invoke specific nostalgia for the 1950s; instead, listeners can choose to travel to whatever time in the past they believe America was “great.” Maybe it’s the 1950s. Maybe it’s Reagan’s “Morning in America” as Hulk Hogan wrestles on the living room TV. Or maybe it’s a return to Trump’s America (before the COVID-19 pandemic of course…that year doesn’t count).
Hogan is also an experienced reality-television star whose show crafted a particular image that appeals to conservatives and the Republican Party. Whereas The Apprentice (2004-2017) made Trump look like a successful business leader, Hogan Knows Best (2005-2007) portrayed Hogan as an all-powerful patriarch who wanted to look after his family. Most episodes attempted to normalize Hogan as he promoted strong “family values,” but that message contradicted episodes that addressed his daughter, Brooke. In one episode, he tracked Brooke’s car. In another, Hogan confronted his daughter after finding her birth control pills. While not depicting a picture-perfect “family values” trope, Hogan’s anxiety about his daughter’s bodily autonomy in fact fits perfectly with Trump’s Republican Party in post-Roe America.
“Real American”
Hogan has long draped himself in the American flag and the rhetoric of American exceptionalism touted by Trump. His entrance music is a key example of this. Before any WWE wrestler enters the ring, his entrance music begins to tell the story of his character. Hogan’s classic theme song, “Real American,” would electrify audiences of “Hulkamaniacs” as they anticipated his appearance. Last week, Hogan walked onto the RNC stage preceded by the song. The opening verse and chorus have the following lyrics:
[Verse 1]
When it comes crashing down and it hurts inside
You gotta take a stand it don’t help to hide
If you hurt my friends, then you hurt my pride
I gotta be a man
I can’t let it slide
[Chorus]
I am a real American
Fight for the rights of every man
I am a real American
Fight for what’s right
Fight for your life
The lyrics correlate with the message Trump has run on since 2015, including hyperbolic warnings of societal collapse and deep-seeded anger on behalf of one’s country. The song’s call to “be a man” and to “fight for your life” correspond with Trump’s fist-pumping invocation to “fight” just moments after he survived an assassination attempt. It is still unclear who Trump was calling on his supporters to fight, but the moment invokes the underdog mentality that Hogan embodied during his entrances to the ring. His victories over enemies signaled the strength not only of his “real American character” but also the “rights of every man” in the stands. Trump, who led in the polls at the time of the assassination attempt, promises to be a similarly redemptive figure. His RNC speech accepting the GOP nomination described a “nation in decline” with many Americans facing “depression and despair.” He promised that as president, he would continue the fight.
Hogan’s performed patriotism goes beyond his introduction music. His initial stardom arguably relied on overt appeals to xenophobia. Hogan won his first world championship in 1984 after he defeated the Iron Sheik, an Iranian wrestler whose villain gimmick became incredibly salient following the Iranian Revolution in 1979. By defeating the Iron Sheik, Hogan came to represent the United State’s triumph over its foreign enemies. Somewhat ironically, at the RNC, Hogan ripped off his American flag shirt to reveal a Trump-Vance campaign shirt underneath, suggesting that loyalty to Trump may be more important than respect for the flag.
Dreibelbis, Chris. June 7, 2023. “The Iron Sheik-Hulk Hogan Match That Changed Wrestling Forever.” Pro Wrestling Stories. https://prowrestlingstories.com/pro-wrestling-stories/hulk-hogan-iron-sheik/, accessed August 1, 2024.
Kayfabe Dropped
There’s a term in the wrestling business called breaking kayfabe, where performers stop pretending and reality seeps into the act. Halfway through his speech, Hogan “broke kayfabe” and reintroduced himself by his real, name Terry Bollea. “Hulk Hogan” is just a character, while Bollea is an entertainer. “As an entertainer,” Bollea claimed, “I try to stay out of politics.” Yet Bollea has stronger ties to the Republican Party’s policies and mega-donors than the character of Hulk Hogan does. In fact, Bollea was one of three combat-sport personalities to speak at the RNC. Linda McMahon, wife of Former-WWE Chairman Vince McMahon, spoke about her time as Small Business Administrator during the first Trump Presidency, and Dana White, CEO of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), introduced Trump before his keynote address.
Being Anti-Union
The WWE relies on non-unionized workers. Wrestlers are considered independent contractors, which leaves ample room for labor abuses. There have been attempts to unionize wrestling locker rooms since the 1980s, but Bollea was a major reason why the WWE remained ununionized.
In 1986, wrestler Jesse “The Body” Ventura began talking with his fellow wrestlers about the need to unionize. Shortly after the covert campaign began, then-chairman of WWE, Vince McMahon, held an impromptu meeting with Ventura, in which McMahon threatened to fire Ventura if he continued the unionization talks. It was not until years later that Ventura learned from a legal deposition of McMahon that Bollea tipped off management about Ventura’s campaign. In an interview on the Steve Austin Show, Ventura stated that when he learned of Bollea’s actions, “It was like someone punched me in the face.” “Hogan betrayed me… Hogan called Vince and ratted me.” Bollea was already the highest-paid wrestler in the company. By undercutting the unionization efforts, Bollea remained in the good graces of management and maintained the company’s status quo, which benefitted him for years to come.
Big-Tech Conservatives
Bollea is not just anti-union. He also has ties to the tech billionaires who fund Republican campaigns. Back in October 2012, the online news site Gawker obtained and then released a sex-tape of Bollea and Heather Cole, the wife of Hogan’s best friend, Bubba the Love Sponge. In 2015, Bollea sued for invasion of privacy and won a $140 million judgment that bankrupted the news company.
After the case ended, investigations revealed that Bollea’s suit was secretly funded by PayPal co-founder and billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who long held a vendetta against Gawker for outing him as gay in 2007.
Thiel is no stranger to the Republican ecosystem and has been a large donor to Republican candidates for years. These funding campaigns have intensified in recent years as Thiel tries to elect candidates that gel with his super-nationalistic, tech-utopian views of the future. He tried, unsuccessfully, to help elect Blake Masters to the US Senate in Arizona in 2022. That same year, Thiel donated $15 million to his protégé, J.D. Vance. Thiel’s global investment firm hired Vance in 2017; five years later, Vance went on to win the US Senate race in Ohio. Vance’s recent ascent as Trump’s vice-presidential running mate is another indication of the influence Thiel’s brand of conservatism has on the Republican Party. Trump, Vance, and Hogan may be the figureheads, but Thiel and his allies provide funding behind the scenes.
Hogan concluded his RNC speech with a modification of his signature WWE catchphrase aimed at those who oppose a second Trump presidency: “Whatchya gonna do when Donald Trump and all the Trump-a-maniacs run wild on you, brother?” Let’s hope we don’t have to find out.
[i] Professional wrestling is no stranger to nostalgia. The surprise return of a retired wrestler is a tried-and-true method that invokes a rabid response from the crowd and live-TV audience. Hogan himself had a surprise return to WWE at WrestleMania 35 in 2019.
Featured Image: Julio Aguilar/Getty Images. Bill Chappell and Rachel Treisman. July 18, 2024. “Hulk Hogan, Linda McMahon and Dana White speak in support of Trump on the last night of the RNC.” NPR. https://www.npr.org/2024/07/18/g-s1-11894/hulk-hogan-rnc, accessed August 1, 2024.
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