Paul Fennessy

DURING THE 2016 Presidential election campaign, there were just two people whose phone calls Donald Trump would take alone rather than in front of an audience.

One was Mark Burnett, producer of the hit television show ‘The Apprentice’ that Trump starred for 14 seasons — claiming to earn $214 million in the process.

The other was Vince McMahon, the then-CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE).

That anecdote is one of many interesting insights from ‘Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America’ by Abraham Josephine Riesman.

The 2023 biography explores how McMahon emerged from rural poverty to build a vast media empire, becoming probably the most influential figure in professional wrestling’s history.

The book also documents McMahon’s close friendship with Donald Trump, who along with his wife Linda, is a major Republican donor.

Linda also served in Trump’s cabinet as United States Administrator of the Small Business Administration, and the presidential candidate has played host to WWE Wrestlemania events and been involved as a character in its storylines.

The relationship has arguably been as beneficial for Trump as it has been for the McMahons.

As far back as the Republican debates almost a decade ago when Trump emerged as a presidential candidate, his brash speaking style and tendency to insult opponents felt more akin to a wrestling character than a traditional politician.

It figures as Trump has been a wrestling fan since childhood.

“We have stories from him growing up in Queens and having childhood friends that they all watched wrestling,” Riesman tells The 42. “And not only that, it was McMahon family wrestling, because that was the McMahon territory. So he grew up watching [Vince's father] Vincent James McMahon’s style of wrestling, and was an early addict.”

And their affiliation does not end there. In March 2018, WWE reportedly agreed on a 10-year deal to produce shows in Saudi Arabia, with each co-sponsored event estimated to be worth over $40 million.

Riseman writes: “It’s no secret that MBS [Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud] sought to curry favour with the Trump administration and every expert I spoke with took it as a given that the WWE initiative was part of that. Access to Vince meant access to both a cabinet member and a president.”

Riesman started writing her book in early 2020, around the onset of the pandemic, when “the whole world seemed to be going to hell in a handbasket, but no one was paying attention”.

“The first line of the book is: ‘We begin at the end of the world,’ and it really felt that way at the time,” she adds. “And maybe it was the end of a world, at least, but it was something that I wanted to write about, the something being Vince McMahon’s life story.

“The thing I’m always fascinated by is broadly speaking, there are two stereotypical paths into the American right.

“There are the elites who end up in there, the rich kids, the Nepo babies who want to hold on to what they’ve got. And then there are the aspirational, often people who are poor and frustrated. And what’s interesting is that Vince was both of those people.”

Wrestler Stone Cold Steve Austin, centre, watches closely as Vince McMahon, right, World Wrestling Entertainment president, pushes on the nose of Donald Trump at a 2007 press conference. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo

McMahon grew up in an impoverished family in North Carolina. His life changed at 12 when he met his biological father, who he eventually bought WWE from (or WWF as it was then known).

McMahon Sr granted his son access to a life of privilege in contrast to the upbringing he had become accustomed to in his early childhood.

Riesman, therefore, feels McMahon in some ways represents two primary categories of Trump supporters.

“Vince had the experience of being a frustrated, poor white in the south, but also had the experience of being able to ride on the success of his parent.”

These two rich, successful and super-famous businessmen consequently have plenty in common but there are some differences too.

“Both of them had difficult fathers, who they spent a lot of time trying to gain the love of and never really succeeded at it. And both of those fathers were in industry, and they’ve never been able to keep their personal and professional lives separate.

“I think Vince has, or at least in his heyday, had a little more cognitive processing ability than Trump.

“Trump, even at his best, was like a large language model. He would tell you what he thought you wanted to hear, whereas Vince took bold stances that were unpopular, and then willed them into popularity over time.

“And I think they both share a lot of political impulses, by which I mean they are both men who want to be the top dog in the room, and that informs how they approach politics.”

She continues: “Vince, I think, would love to see a Trump America that resembles the McMahon WWE, a totalitarian dictatorship where there’s no room for dissent, no unions, no worker protections and an agenda to shock and confuse.

“That’s the essence of wrestling, especially in the modern era — to get people to feel shocked and on some level, confused about what’s real and what isn’t, to grab their attention.

“And that’s something that Trump is exceedingly good at. I don’t know how much he’s even aware of how good he is at it, because I don’t know what he’s aware of.”

For many years Vince was regarded by many in wrestling as a genius who revolutionised the industry.

There was an obsessiveness about McMahon that led many pundits to predict he would never give up control of WWE and only death could end his decades-long stranglehold over the business.

Yet a series of controversies led to his retirement announcement in 2022 while in February 2024, The Wall Street Journal reported that federal authorities in New York had launched an investigation into sexual assault and sex trafficking allegations made against McMahon.

The logo for World Wrestling Entertainment, WWE, appears above a trading post on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, Sept. 13, 2019. Shares of TKO Group, the new company that houses WWE and UFC, opened at $102 per share in their first day of trading on the New York Stock Exchange on Tuesday, Sept. 12, 2023. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo

In 2023, WWE and UFC officially merged in a $21.4-billion deal for a new company, TKO, which meant McMahon was no longer the majority shareholder.

And following the latest allegations, TKO executives convinced McMahon to resign from the board.

The 79-year-old had survived several controversies in the past. As far back as 1992, former WWE referee Rita Chatterton alleged that on July 16, 1986, McMahon attempted to force her to perform oral sex on him in his limousine.

Yet Riesman believes McMahon’s days as a public figure are not necessarily over amid recent reports he plans to launch a new entertainment company.

“There’s very much a world where Trump wins and the DOJ [Department of Justice] investigation against Vince gets dropped, and Vince wants to be back on TV.

“And who’s going to stop him? He doesn’t have any financial interest in the company. But if he’s Trump’s best friend or at least a close associate of Trump, if Linda McMahon is the proposed transition co-chair for Trump, and presumably would remain close in the Trump orbit, I think you’d see a lot of corporate courtiers at WWE suddenly changing their stance on McMahon and saying: ‘Well, the old man had some good ideas. Let’s have him back on TV.’”

Like Trump and several other famous billionaires, McMahon is perceived as an eccentric.

But Riesman is not convinced that all his idiosyncracies are genuine.

“Vince, at a certain point, figured out that it was advantageous to him to present an air of inaccessibility and eccentricity, because you hear all these stories from the past 20 years: ‘Vince hates it when you sneeze in the office.’ Or ‘he didn’t know what a burrito was’.

“There are all these weird anecdotes about Vince being a strange man and not knowing what certain things are in the world, or having weird proclivities.

“And I think a lot of that was manufactured. I think he realised it keeps people on their toes. You talk to people who knew him throughout the full stretch of his life or people who only knew him earlier, they never say anything about him, hating sneezing or not knowing what [certain] words are.

“I think that was mostly a put-on, or at least it started as a put-on, and now the big change that’s happened in the past couple of years is he’s in poor health. And honestly, we don’t know what the implications are, because he has entered this black box since he no longer had to be reported on by a publicly owned company.

“It’s hard to find out what’s going on with Vince right now, even for veteran Vince reporters, and I don’t know what’s happened. But in his few public appearances, he has certainly changed his look.”

Beyond the sexual misconduct allegations, there have been countless other controversies since WWE’s popularity exploded.

Many wrestling stars, such as Jim Hellwig, better known as The Ultimate Warrior, have died tragically young. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo

McMahon has denied any responsibility for the issues that didn’t directly involve him, such as the infamous ring-boy scandal in the 1980s (which has come back into the news recently) as well as the many tragic and untimely deaths of well-known stars.

“Wrestling itself is an ecosystem that thrives on amorality and immorality,” says Riesman. “I love the art form of wrestling, but the wrestling industry is a cesspit. And Vince is a product of that cesspit.

“You have FBI recordings of his father bragging about how he threatened one of his wrestlers if the wrestler didn’t lie under oath about an investigation that was happening. And that’s the ’50s.

“This is the guy that’s teaching the ropes to Vince McMahon. I mean, Vince’s telling of how he got his [first] job was that his predecessor as the ring announcer, asked for a raise, and Vince’s father said: ‘Nope. You know what? You’re fired, just for asking for a raise. You’re gone.’

“‘I’m going to install my son who has no experience to have him do it.’ And that’s the kind of guy Vince Senior was, and that you pick up stuff from that, that level of power and control is very seductive for wrestling promoters, because wrestling is the last little bubble of 19th-century robber baron capitalism.

“And one of the reasons wrestling is surging in popularity right now is because we’re re-entering an era of robber baron capitalism, and you have a lot of industries following the wrestling model.”

McMahon and other promoters benefitted from wrestling not being taken seriously by authorities for a long time.

Consequently, there was no federal regulation and a lack of media scrutiny.

It was in the owner’s interests for his organisation to be perceived as a carnivalesque sideshow rather than an industry that requires genuine athletic ability, discipline and talent.

“A lot of companies find it advantageous to partner with this organisation that can crank out an incredible amount of content. And how are they able to crank out all that content? They have no union protections.

“No one gets to say ‘we’re working too hard, we’re not working for enough money’. They pay them whatever they feel like, and end up with a lot of injuries and misery and drug addiction.

“But a lot of content comes out, so networks want to partner with [WWE], streamers, studios… They’re an attractive item at the party, and it’s because they work cheap, and they work cheap because they are abusive.”

Netflix earlier this year agreed a $5 billion deal to screen WWE content. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo

Last January, Netflix made a $5 billion (€4.6 billion) deal to screen WWE’s Raw programme over the next decade, while the streaming service’s recently released docuseries on McMahon has sat near the top of its ‘most-watched’ charts for weeks.

All of which suggests pro wrestling remains extraordinarily popular, despite all the behind-the-scenes controversy.

“It’s hard to parse an individual message from wrestling because it tries to be all things to all people and offer a little bit of something for everybody, as any good carnival sideshow does.

“So you have at once this art form that is beloved by a lot of fascists, white supremacists, and misogynists, but also it’s beloved by queers, trans people, weirdos and outsiders. And I see those as the twin engines of what’s powering wrestling back into the public consciousness these days

“You have the real chauvinists and right-wingers who love wrestling for their own reasons, and then you have people like me who are trans and they love it for the exploration of gender and the exploration of performance of identity that it implies.”

McMahon has left the business (for now, at least) but his legacy remains. Several high-profile wrestlers have referred to him as a ‘father figure’.

Even stars who have bitter real-life feuds with McMahon invariably return to work at WWE, especially as for a long time, the organisation had a virtual monopoly on the wrestling industry after buying out main rival World Championship Wrestling in 2001.

Just as many voters keep going back to Trump, wrestling stars and personalities returned to McMahon despite having been screwed over in the past.

“When I was writing the book, my spouse, who was doing the frontline edit of it, eventually started telling me: ‘You’ve got to stop repeating the same old sob story about how such and such wrestler was abused or abandoned by his father and then developed a father relationship with Vince because it’s just becoming redundant.’

“And I laughed, but it’s true. Over and over again, you get these stories of guys who gravitate to Vince McMahon after having had incredibly difficult or abusive relationships with their fathers or stepfathers. As any victim of abuse can tell you, it’s easy to fall back in with your abuser if they are charming or powerful enough.

“That does not negate the victim’s pain, and it does not mean we should doubt their stories just because they cosied back up. Trauma works in really mysterious ways, and a lot of times you can find yourself going: ‘Well, the only way I can conceive of how much pain I went through was that I deserved some of it, or at least that the father who hurt me didn’t mean it or loved me most of the time.’

“These are the justifications that you do for people who you were vulnerable with and loved and put your life into the hands of, who then betrayed you. That betrayal can be so hard to deal with that you have to push it aside to an extent and say: ‘Yeah, that happened, but mostly they loved me.’”

McMahon may be persona non-grata in the wrestling world, but Trump’s ties with the industry remain significant.

Hulk Hogan speaks at a Trump Rally in New York last month. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo

Hulk Hogan, the man widely attributed as the most influential superstar in WWE’s ’80s surge in popularity, has not only endorsed Trump for president but spoken at his rallies.

Trump also recently appeared on the podcast of another wrestling legend — Mark Calaway, better known as The Undertaker.

“It’s fascinating because you watch most interviews Trump does at this point, and it looks like his brain is leaking out of his ears, and he couldn’t be arsed to wake up for it. But for The Undertaker interview, he was on the edge of his seat — so perky and sharp. He was like a kid talking to one of his heroes

“And it was so eerily similar to the questions that lawmakers would ask Vince and Linda McMahon when they tried to get wrestling de-regulated in the 1980s.

“Instead of asking the substantive questions about worker protections or anything like that, they would ask: ‘Okay, come on, tell me some secrets about wrestling. What parts are real and what parts aren’t? And it’s a somewhat irrelevant question in all of these cases when it comes to policy.

“But that’s what Trump wanted to know. He turned the interview on its head and started interviewing The Undertaker. And all these questions were like: ‘Do you ever get really mad at the guys? What if a guy lost it on you and started wailing on you?’ 

“But you go far back, even to his hosting gigs with Wrestlemania in the mid-to-late ’80s, and he is so bowled over, so flattered to have even been asked. That’s the crazy thing — you never see Trump look deferential. With wrestlers and Vince McMahon, he is deferential.”

One of the most disturbing aspects of McMahon’s story was detailed in a 2001 interview with Playboy magazine. The former WWE owner alleged he was the victim of physical and sexual abuse when growing up, accusing his stepfather of the former and remarking: “It’s unfortunate that he died before I could kill him.”

Riesman concludes: “As a biographer, never underestimate the degree to which child abuse is a force multiplier for evil in the world.

“If there is one thing I have learned from my years of reading and writing biographies, it is: ‘Don’t abuse your kids, because there is never a scenario in which the presence of child abuse is better than the absence of child abuse.’ No child benefits from getting hit or getting yelled at in an abusive way.

“Vince McMahon is a great example of somebody who was hurt, so intensely, by three parental figures. You see him working out that trauma decades later in his product. You can draw a parallel to Trump, Elon Musk, or other powerful individuals. Once they have a lot of people in their gravitational pull, they take those people into the zone of their weird fetishes, psychosexual anxieties and horrors.

“And this is the problem with dictatorship — it becomes this world where a lot of people are trapped inside the mind of an abused child, and that’s a dangerous place for a country to be in.”

‘Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America’ by Abraham Josephine Riesman is published by Atria Books. More info here.