The Press Box - Sports in the Age of Trump With Bryan Curtis (Ep. 300)

Episode Date: April 25, 2017

The Ringer's Bryan Curtis is joined by BuzzFeed's Joel Anderson to discuss Donald Trump's impact on the NFL, the price of Colin Kaepernick's protest (6:00), Trump's ideal athlete lifestyle (11:00), and the political climate within football locker rooms (17:00). Then, The Ringer's Kevin Clark joins to discuss the similarities between CNN and ESPN (23:30) and the intersections between sports and political coverage (31:00). Finally, The Ringer's David Shoemaker joins to give his thoughts on professional wresting in the world of Trump (36:30). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hey there, it's Brian Curtis, editor at large of The Ringer here, and I feel this was one of those weeks, I guess, if not one of those years, where sports and politics, or maybe sports and Donald Trump, have basically been inseparable. So I wanted to get some of my favorite writers to jump in and talk about this stuff. We're first going to talk to BuzzFeed's Joel Anderson about athlete activism in the age of Trump. Then we'll have the Ringer's football writer, Kevin Clark,

come on and talk about how CNN has becoming, ESPN. And finally, David Shoemaker, the ringer's very own masked man, will talk about how Donald Trump and pro wrestling are alike. On the phone, Joel Anderson is an ace buzzfeed writer, sports guy, and most importantly of all, a Texan. Here he is. Joel, how are you? Yeah. Good to talk to out of Texan. How are you doing, Brian? Just great. Just great. So we're like 100 days nearly into the Donald Trump administration. In terms of athlete activism that you've seen, how close is it to what you experience? expected at this point? I would argue that we haven't seen much in the way of activists.

A few Patriots did to show up last week. But it's not like we have people that are, you know, loudly talking about, you know, the attempts have been some people that have, you know, spoken up. I mean, but, you know, I think he was interviewing a really animated character guy. And he asked him. He was like, yo, like, would you go? And he basically passed. Like, you can't answer that question.

That's, see, that's amazing. And do you think that's what it is? It's that they don't feel they can talk about it. They don't want to talk about it. What are we encountering here? Well, I think there's a few things, right? I think there's in people that the people that they do business with, they're all people that speak up or say anything or sort of deal with what kind of is.

You know, I'm looking at one. It's one of the more valuable. You guys in the league and still, you know, the reasons for that. But he doesn't have a job. And it will, you know, I'm, you know, what Adrian Peterson used to be. Yeah, especially when the president is taking credit for Colin Kaepernick's unemployment on Twitter, right? So if he whether or not he did it, he certainly taking credit for it.

It's not like Donald Trump doesn't have friends and the NFL owner buy. I mean, you know, I mean, you know, yeah, like probably better for a lot of, restrict to sports than you would probably say, right? There you go. No, and it's funny because I think like one of the biggest, one of the most surprising story this week to me was we had 10 NFL owners, I think the stat was, that donated a million dollars each to Trump's inauguration. One of them was Shad Khan of the Jaguars

who came out against Trump's immigration ban. And it's a nice reminder that these guys' lives are very complicated, probably a nice word for it, right? But there are all these sort of interests tugging them in different ways, right? One is to their employees, one is to whatever their personal politics are and probably the biggest one is to whatever their business is. And it makes great business sense to give in their mind, perhaps, a million dollars to Donald Trump's inauguration. So there you go. And that's the way they're going to go.

Yeah, right. I mean, a million dollars is on a token, but it's the sort of thing that can kind of, you know, keep the spotlight off of him or, you know, I mean, he also is out of northeast Florida. Yeah. You know, I mean, you said complicated, but in a way that could be sort of compromise. I mean, you know, being, just that you think about. It's not just that, you know, somebody. Absolutely. Absolutely. To quote the famous Charles Barkley line. The, I think it's funny. I mean, you know, there's been Trump, of course, puts pressure on every part of American life just when he wakes up in the morning. Right. He's just all over. And so sports is no different from the weird Super Bowl we witnessed where he's rooting for his

pals on the Patriots and then leaves the Super Bowl party early. I think my two favorite moments, though. While he's trying to pass a Mideast slash Muslim travel ban, he is at an African American museum in Washington, D.C. admiring a quote by Muhammad Ali, the most famous Muslim athlete of all time.

Right. Oh, my God. Yeah. Imagine how much he would hated Muhammad Ali. Right. Right. He would have hated Obama. Absolutely. And the second one was that ESPN extended him the invitation to fill in the NCAA bracket, which they did with Barack Obama at eight years, right? And Trump decided that he could fake his way through a presidential debate without studying much of it all.

But he couldn't fake his way through an NCAA bracket. That's where the line was drawn right there. I mean, it's so weird because he's clearly like a sports fan, right? I mean, he owned the New Jersey generals, and not a lot of people know what that is. I mean, he ran a football league into the ground. And I mean, he hung out with boxers, you know, all of those casinos for years. And yeah, it's just like what, you know, he just doesn't, it's like he keeps enough of an eye on sports that he has a presence there, but he doesn't engage with it in the way that like, you know, our, you know, golfing every weekend. I don't necessarily count that.

But, yeah. No, that's business. You know, and I think, I think you're right. Like Obama, Obama at heart was a nerdy sports fan, like he was a nerdy everything else, right? He was a scholarly sports fan. Trump, one of his pals told me was, you know, he's a fan boy. basically, you know, he's like, oh, the fabulous Shaquille O'Dill, one of my great friends, right?

That's his, that's his involvement. Yeah, right. But he watches. Yeah, what would they call him a jock sniffer, right? I mean, if you wanted to, yeah, if you wanted to, you know, go lowbrow there, yeah, he'd be a jock sniffer. But, like, Barack Obama was like a dude who, like, really geeked out, you know, when the white socks.

I mean, he claimed that he was a white sock fan and, you know, all that other things, he was a bull's fan. And so, yeah, I mean, like, he actively identified with what we think the sports. Like, he just wants to hang out it is. He just wants to be near celebrity. Yeah, and I think he wants to live like an athlete, right? Like, there's something about him that he thinks that his lifestyle was fabulous like an athlete's lifestyle was. You know, and there was like this other great story that he blamed when Derek Jeter and Arod either got injured and went to a slump.

He blamed them moving out of Trump properties as a slump. Oh, really? Yeah. So you're not quite living like me. No wonder you're not performing on that. the baseball field. Yeah, that's so great. You know, I mean, you know, if he dig back a little, I think, you know, reading some

stories about his life, I mean, he was, like, supposedly a pretty good athlete. Yes. Baseball player. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. And so, I mean, he's kind of, I mean, to the extent that, like, you know, the, what

is it, the John Hughes version, and it would be Trump. Like, you were, like, supposedly a lot of those characters were sort of based on Trump like God back of the day. So, yeah, like, he is like this jock, but he just doesn't, you know, like, he likes the, he'd be like what we think Joe Johnson is. But he's just like, oh, man, I like the, you know, sports are cool, but like, you know, being on boats are better. Let's put it out there that, that, and this is not going to be the 1960s, right, in terms of athlete activism. We're not, we are not rerunning that era. Mohamed Ali isn't walking through that door, as my boss likes to say.

But is this as close as we're going to get to the. that golden age of athlete activism, what we have now for better or worse, do you think? Interesting, because I don't think so. I think what we're going to hear have a lot more tools at their disposal. So, like, we can hear from, wouldn't have been able to hear from the, you know, team spokesperson or team peer. Like, we may hear a little bit more from them, you know, putting your career on icing, you know, to get some sort of political or social.

We just won't really see that. we haven't seen that. We've seen, I mean, and I hate to bring up Tappardiff again, but I mean, we've seen him, but like who else has actually done that? Like, I mean, we see charity. We see, you know, you know, being involved in your community. LeBron James getting behind. Like, who is that guy? Who's done that? Is there anybody? Am I missing them? I don't know. In terms of like the major sports, right? Yeah. Well, nobody. First of all, one of the reasons there's not a lot of activism right now is it's baseball season, not to put too fond of it.

That's true. But in football, you know, it's interesting, right? Because people like Malcolm Jenkins, I think, have been talking about it this offseason. But until you get a big skill position guy, right, who comes out and is all in, as you say, at the risk of their career, not just, you know, kind of, you know, talking about it on the margins, but really is all in. I think it's really hard to get anything like a mass movement of people that are really committed to this kind of stuff. Thanks, right? Like, who who was out there is more unprobably going to go down as he, you know, he plays and it's the rest of the country. Sure.

So, like, Tom Brady risk nothing, you know, by being out front about his political beliefs, so, like, what he thinks should happen. And he won't, right? Like, he had a fan. I mean, you know, maybe we should believe him that, you know, his mother is ill. And apparently that's true. But he seems to be sort of hiding. And that's a guy that doesn't have to hide, you know. So I think that's what he says something.

You played football, unlike most of us who are talking about this stuff. I hear when we talk about, so Mike Freeman has written about this on Bleacher Report about how somebody like Trump plays inside a locker room where you could have in the same locker room five lockers apart, people who think he's making America great again. And people who think he ran an ethno-nationalist slash racist campaign. for president, right? How does a locker room, I think most of us think about this in a Hollywood way in a Friday night lights kind of way, can a locker room deal

with something like that that's that divisive and still in football and still kind of play on? Well, I mean, like, I think like if you just sort of and like having friendships, so, you know, my friend, so like, why would you ever if you didn't have to? So I mean, yeah, I think these are your brothers.

And, you know, you're There's nothing supposed to be bigger than our bond, bigger than the team and bigger than whatever they're, like, impervious to fleece at each other. I was like, man, that's really interesting that they got these guys up there. Yeah, and isn't it? So it's something, even as divisive as Trump, someone is divisive as Trump, you, two teammates might never talk about it. Even if you knew the other guy was on the other side of that issue, it may never come up. That's not, that's feasible. Yeah, and football seems to, like, you know, pretty segmented.

Like, if you're, if you're a running back, I was a running back in college. It's like you're with your running back. And, you know, like, I mean, you know, there's not a lot of, you know, the indivision to, you know, around running backs receiving. It's like you're not even going to get that. Yeah. Every seat together. Right.

You're not going to be doing that in the middle of bull in the ring and drill. Yeah. Yeah. Right, right. And think about this, too. Like, I kind of thought about this. Like, Rishi Ancognito is one of the few guys that I can think of. What Ritchie Incognito was sort of accused of doing.

in his previous NFL life, like, using racial slurs, bullying people, whatever. Maybe guys are going to. But, like, so he's just kind of like, he just kind of slink. I mean, guys won't draw lines with players that hit women assault. Yeah. I don't know. I'm killing the point there. Yeah.

It's like if you tolerate the presence of somebody who actually did some of the things we're talking about, why wouldn't you tolerate the presence of someone who voted for someone who did some of the things we're talking about? Exactly. Exactly. I mean, yeah. It's just we want athletes to be more than what they are. If you and your buddies... Before you go, give me...

What's one thing you'd love to see happen over the next couple of months in terms of activism? What would you... What would you, if you had a blue sky thing you'd like to draw up and see this being engaged with or somebody coming forward? What would you like to see? You know what? I mean, I would love to see... Because, like, the NBA...

Like, the NBA is so different and so unique in that, like, all... All of its players are sort of like their own industries. It's like he's LeBron and like kind of like, you know, sort of rallied behind. You know, like Jeff Sessions, a lot of it involved in the screen. I wouldn't mind like saying, you know, LeBron or, you know, even Steph Kerr. People watch some people with them to them. And they're sort of beyond the reach of like, you know, like nothing has to happen. And LeBron is already.

Right. So it wouldn't really, he wouldn't risk that much to, you know, I wouldn't tell him that these guys, maybe you and I and a few other people that are in the media, like, we feel comfortable talking about stuff. Like, we deal with it and gaites it every day. They don't. Just, you know, and, you know, LeBron, you know, I know you guys want to talk about shit. You know, we don't stand for this. But, right?

There we go. We got our battle plan. Joel Anderson. Yeah. Thanks for coming on today. I really appreciate it. Hey, Brian. My pleasure. Thanks for having me on.

Talk to you soon. All right. So I'm here with the ringers, Kevin Clark. NFL writer extraordinaire. Kevin, thanks for stopping by. Happy to be here. Our watering hole today. This is what I want to talk to you about.

This is this idea in the universe that CNN and ESPN have basically become the same thing in the age of Trump. That's a very interesting take. I mean, I think the weirder thing is this idea that ESPN invented the debate, which is now like this new thing. The debate started in 2004. I mean, like, I mean, people yelling at each other, especially over politics, is a pretty old thing. I mean, even on TV, you know, there's the great documentary, I think it's on Netflix, about Gorvadoe and William Buckley, about, you know, the 1968 convention. They just put those two guys on stage and had them yell at each other every night during the 1968

convention. And that was the original first take. I mean, that was the original skip Stephen A. Actually, and actually more offensive than any episode of first take. Significantly more offensive. The insults exchanged on that program. Significantly more heated. I mean, it was real. But I mean, That's what's so bizarre to me, this idea that CNN somehow borrowed from ESPN. Yeah, and I think what's so, this started with a couple of things. Jeff Zucker of CNN told Jonathan Maller, The Times Magazine, the idea that politics is sport is undeniable and said that he'd arranged those bizarre CNN panels kind of in the spirit of ESPN. And then there was a wonky Vox video, needless to say, wonky Vox video the other day,

that basically blamed everything bad on CNN, that is somebody yelling at Jeffrey Lord, on ESPN and sort of traced it back to those things. I mean, it's, it is funny. As you say, it's obvious that ESPN did not invent the debate show. Crossfire starts in 1982, and I think it's 2004 when John Stewart goes on Crossfire and says, this show is terrible. You're hurting America, yeah. This show is absolutely terrible.

But do you think they have become, let's put aside chicken in the egg for a second, do you think they've become more similar when you watch the two of them? Yes, I think the biggest debate, the biggest difference, between the two is that Trump has surrogates, whereas on ESPN, it's not like they're going to have a Cubs story and they're going to bring on, you know, the Cubs journalist who's then going to defend the Cubs. I mean, so everyone takes different sides. You know, when Wilbon and Cornheiser debate, they're going to take different sides in every single debate. It's not going to be like, I'm going to take this side. You're going to take this side. So I do think there's a little bit

of difference as far as that goes. We know what Jeffrey Lord's going to say every single time he goes on there. And that's the main difference for me. But I do obviously see some similarity. just as far as the panels go, sure. Yeah, and there's the countdown clocks, right? We're always a big event. I think they both also realized at the same time that the reason people are going to watch is live events, right?

So CNN says, well, if we have a Trump speech or we have a town hall or we have a debate, that's a thing, right? If we have people yelling at each other about politics, that's sort of less of a thing. Politics also borrowed the thing from sports where you have just 50 people on a stage and they just each talk for 20 seconds. That was sort of an NFL pregame show thing.

It's like the scene that we are, the naked gun, you know, and Dr. Joyce brothers, you're right, and go down the whole line of analysts. No, that's absolutely true. I think there is something kind of funny, though, that there's this idea that, by the way, in terms of pundits, though, I think it's also funny. Why doesn't CNN have pundits who are in the bag?

I mean, ESPN. Why don't we have some of the big teams? You are the pro-cowboys guy, and you come on every time there's a cowboy's thing and just give basically the big spin. I mean, even Skip Bayliss says, my cowboys now, right? He's kind of our cowboy surrogate in the world. And it could do have a cub surrogate.

get and stuff like that. Wouldn't that play well on television? I mean, it would be, let's assume it would be kind of ludicrous, but wouldn't it sort of play well on television? So it's interesting. So in England, they actually have something called Fanzone. Are you familiar with this? No. Fanzone is some great YouTube videos here. Fanzone is this thing where fans, the loudest, most brash fans of a team are in the booth and they yell and they basically break down the game as color analysts together in the same booth. So if Arsenal plays Tottenham, it's an Arsenal fan and a Tottenham fan,

they're watching the game, they're screaming at each other. And it is some of the most entertaining stuff you'll ever see in your entire life. I mean, you can really get down to YouTube rabbit hole with this. However, it gets old after about five minutes. I mean, it's just so, I think the nuance,

it has to be involved in order for it to be sustainable. I mean, it's pretty high. It's pretty high to have. It would be really hard to pull off just someone with a blanket defense. of the Dodgers with the blanket defense of the Seahawks because, I mean, people do get tired of it after a while. Yeah. Though there is a long tradition of the Homer, right, and you like for the Homer to eat it when his team loses or her team.

And you love the Homer to celebrate when they win, right? So it's sort of a little bit like Jeffrey. I mean, part of the Jeffrey Lord thing on CNN, right, even for people who say, this guy is terrible, is when something bad happens to Trump, people tune in because they want to see Jeffrey Lord disappointed. Right. Right. Yeah, and that becomes part of the narratives. Oh, yeah, I really want to see Jeffrey Lord. Or even the other way, it was, you know, after the election, there are people who wanted to see, you know, the sad liberals on TV, you know, all disappointed and bummed out.

So, yeah, I think that they become an extension of the politicians themselves. So I do think maybe there'd be some Chadenfreude. If you really hated the Cowboys, you know, you'd love to see after a Giants win, you know, the Cowboys' Home are really upset. But I do, I think the lines start blurring at some point. Yeah, and I think the ex-players actually play that role sometimes, right? They do kind of answer for their old teams. Yes. And everybody gets made fun of.

You know, if it's Jimmy Johnson, it's sort of like he wants the shot in front is when Jerry Jones loses. But otherwise, right, you sort of root for your old team. Yeah. And look, there's enough, we'll use the Cowboys as an example. There's enough, you know, Tony Romo is going to be a surrogate for the Cowboys. We know that to be true. We know it's going to come from Jerry.

We know some of the stuff will come from Garrett, you know, if that relationship is still okay. So you will get the company line from that. I mean, I think the Cowboys, I saw a stat, you know, Romo is probably going to call two Cowboys games this year from CBS. Aikman's probably going to call another 10 or

12. I mean, how many games are we going to have that the Cowboys play where there's not an ex-Calboy's quarterback in the booth? Basically, like two or three. We're going to get a lot of company line from those guys. Yeah, absolutely. It's really funny because also I think both people in cable news and in sports, they just have crazy charges of bias thrown against them on Twitter at all times.

Right. For no reason, because that's just what people on Twitter like to do. Well, now in politics, there really is evidence that there is bias. I mean, these guys are really brought on to say, to defend one candidate. So for the first time in history, the your bias thing actually holds a little bit of weight. Yeah. I think I spent some very short amount of my career as a political reporter and with some giant air quotes there. But what's funny to me about it is like, not all, but lots of political reporters,

looked at the sports world as something that was, let us say, a lesser pursuit than politics. So I think part of this is that people think, well, if something bad is happening on my television, it must have come from sports, right? If two people are yelling at each other, politics couldn't have come up with that. Sports television must have come up with that. And politics has been sadly influenced. Like, sports television becomes the alt-what, the alt-right to the CNN's Republican Party, something like that, right? It's like it's a regrettable influence. But, you know, Now we're down the rabbit hall. Yeah, politics was very, was such a sacred ground before the debate,

before the best damn sports show period launched. Yeah. And it's also funny because I think CNN is something that was so boring a few years ago. Oh, yeah. If you'd said CNN has become like ESPN, I think people at CNN would have been doing an end zone dance, right? They would have been so excited. Oh, my gosh.

This is like what we're watchable, right? We're like one of the most popular networks on cable. Wait, wait, we're like, ESPN now? People have loyalty to this brand. That's incredible. I mean, Zucker's done a great job. I mean, it's newly a lot of it. So have a certain messed up way, yeah.

Yeah, no, I mean, it's everyone's talking about CNN that did not have, I mean, people were talking about the death of CNN just a couple of years ago. Yeah. But I think, I think it's both, I think honestly, the biggest thing they have in common is the existential crisis. Like, why do people need us? Why do people want to watch? Not the web arm, right? But why do

people need to watch this television station? CNN has a bigger problem than ESPN. that regard. You really think so? Well, ESPN at least has the live events. At least people are going to tune in to see Bengals Steelers Monday night, whereas CNN does not have, with the exception of election results, which by the way you can get anywhere, there is nothing where people have to tune into CNN. I mean, there's no required viewing. I mean, the reason Fox Sports One went out and tried to spend so much money to get the live events is because that's the only time you know people are going to tune in. Even if it's just Big East basketball that they have, people are still going

tune into that. And so ESPN at least has the live rights to NBA playoff games, Monday night football, a little bit of baseball. So, I mean, I don't, I think that I understand ESPN has built itself up so much as far as carriage fees. And obviously, there's, there's some pending problems there. But as far as, you know, people needing a network, I would say ESPN's in a much better position than CNN. If there's like a big speech, do you watch a postgame show on cable news? Yeah, no, I mean, that's it. But you also. Do you want to know, you, Kevin Clark, do you want to know what people think? I mean, I...

How did Van Jones think he did tonight? Is that an interesting question for you? I actually tend to, just as a consumer, and I'm a different consumer because I'm a journalist, but I tend to look at Twitter on that a little bit more. And I would say the same thing is true of sports as well. I mean, I don't necessarily watch the post-game shows for these things unless it's something I have to cover. After I watch a baseball game, I'm not going to...

Yeah, let's see. Unless it's A-Rod. Love A-Rod. Yeah, it has to be a lot of it. to be the destination analyst, right? Yeah. Yeah. Pete Rose and Arod.

But that's, I think, and I think that's part of the thing, too, is that, like, cable news realized that they could do pre-end post-game for people who aren't expert consumers, let's say, of these things, right? Like, nobody you know who's a huge football fan is really watching that much pre-game show. But CNN's probably the same thing, right? If you read, you know, Ezra Klein and Jonathan Chait and all these people, and these people are just, like, pop up your Twitter for you're not like, well, I've got to watch this for an hour before the speech starts, right?

Yeah. I mean, it's a very... And so expectations are being set tonight. You know, I need to know the latest about this Trump speech that was written two days ago, right? Like, you're not going to worry about that. But there's a certain crowd that is like, oh, great. Ooh, more politics. I'm in.

Right. Right. But, you know, it's odd that CNN's ratings have gone up. They've made a lot of money, obviously, in the election cycle. But it's also interesting me because the group of people you describe the people who want to watch an hour of CNN, they're also the people who are hyper-engaged on Twitter. They're also the people who are just reading every single. piece of punditry known to man online. And so it's interesting to me that they're watching both

television and being engaged online because in a lot of cases, especially in sports, it's an either or proposition. Yeah. Do you think sports and politics are that different as beats? I've never covered politics, but... Putting aside the importance to the nation, sports is much more important. I still think there's a lot. I mean, I do think, you know... Let's put it this way. Simmons comes to you and says, Kevin, you're our new. You're the ringer's congressional correspondent. Oh, gosh. Do you have to relearn 100 things, or do you basically go about your job in the same way?

Could you figure out a way to do it in more or less the same way you do it now? It would take about a week to figure it out. I have to memorize some names. Yeah, I have to memorize some names, some procedural stuff. But, I mean, it's all the same. I kind of think so, right, at the end of the day? I mean, it's all just sourcing and talking to people and figuring out what a story is. And there's certain people that answer the phone all the time, right?

I was almost shed a tear. There's always five people who will just call you back, no matter of what. When Jason Chaffett's the Congressman from Utah retired, I almost shed a tear because, I mean, he was fantastic. He was fantastic to me, and I don't write about politics. I called him a couple years ago, I called the office and I say, I'm writing about this conservative case for football that is forming in the media,

a defense of football against all those liberals who would threaten our national institution. And they said, well, what about Tuesday? That was literally the response that he would be glad to make such a case. And we sat in there next to his old BYU helmet. He was a kicker at BYU and talked about his winning kick in the holiday bowl. And then he proceeded to make a fabulous and interesting case. And it was a fabulous article. That's what they say about Trump, too.

Is that, you know, Dean Bicay, after the election, went on some of the shows and said, you know, A, Trump has been very rough on us. But B, you know, there's never been a presidential candidate in history who's been easier to get on the phone. And so, yeah, I mean, it's really interesting. political, you know, people know how to work the phones in politics, that's for sure. Same in sports. All right. Well, we look forward to your 30-year run that you're beginning today. Congratulations to Kevin Clark, the ringer's new congressional the course of out. Now, thank you for joining us, Kevin.

Thank you for having me. So now we're joined by David Shoemaker, Ringer Art Director, wrestling columnist, host of the Masked Man Show. David, thanks for coming the 15 feet here to the podcast studio. It is my pleasure, Brian. Thank you so much for. having me on. Here's what I want to talk to you about. If any metaphor has been beaten into the ground in this last year and a half, it's that Donald Trump owes something to professional wrestling or his campaign is the quote-unquote

WrestleMania of politics. I actually had a Trump advisor tell me that in the last week, so they're still claiming former Trump advisor. Here's what I'm going to ask you, the wrestling expert. How is Trump like wrestling? Well, that's a good way to ask the question. I think that asking whether or not he's influenced by wrestling is a sort of hopeless chicken and the egg diversion.

Yeah. He's like wrestling, I think, in a lot of very obvious ways. I mean, just look at his speaking style. It's the, you know, focus on catchphrases and call and response. And, I mean, from a very, like, base functional level, just going and putting on the same show every night as you travel around the circuit, right? You're not trying to improvise or you're not, I mean, you do improvise.

You're not trying to, you know, get into any, like, high-level discussions here, right? Yeah, like every appearance in the Rust Belt is like a house show. Exactly. Basically. Yeah, and people watching it. I mean, you know, cable news has spent most of the campaign wondering why he kept hitting the same beats over and over again. But the people who were in the crowd only got to see him that one time. It's the people who are sitting behind the desk that expect something greater.

it's just, you know, they're totally missing the point, I feel like. That's really interesting. So it's the ability to go out and repeat the show. Give everybody in the house their money's worth, their money's worth and it's free in this. You can relate it to wrestling or you can relate it to a million other things. I mean, it's like going to see, you know, the Eagles play. You want to hear and play Hotel California. You know, you don't want to hear a 45-minute guitar solo because you haven't, I mean,

if you were following them every day, you would want to see something different every show. If you get to see them once every 10 years, you want to hear the hits. Yeah, absolutely. The other thing I was thinking about is it just in the administration's denial of things that are facts. There's a little bit of the Bobby Heenan as wrestling color man thing, you know, right? Where the evil manager goes up and he hits the wrestler with a chair and Bobby Heaney goes, oh my God, his knee just gave out. Exactly. Right. Yeah, no, I mean, I think that there's the heel commentary is a great point of reference for, you know, a lot of the things we see in our culture. but that's exactly what they're doing. I mean, you, you, if you want to, if you want to label them a heel, if you want to label, you know, if you want to label any, this politician or that one or representative of a villain, it's almost, it's, again, too easy.

It's too simple, you know. I mean, Bobby Heenan was one of the most effective personalities in professional wrestling history. And, you know, denial of reality is kind of neither here and or there. That was part of the schick. Right, right. And the people at home, and I think there's probably some Trump supporting people that like this, no, it's not real. No, the denial is not real, right? But you savor just the audacity of it, right?

There's something about it. Oh, yeah, yeah, this is funny, right? This is, it's funny to poke them in the eye and say, oh, I didn't see anything, right? I didn't see any of that. Yeah, and I think that there's probably some of that, I mean, probably some of the underdog mentality that a lot of wrestling fans can sympathize with, too. You know, I mean, if you feel like it's part of this sort of archer or even, you know, the stage combat, then anything goes. As long as like, as long as politics seems like, yeah, seems like has this sort of pro wrestling

vibe of a battle that is just purely for show, then, you know, truth or right versus wrong. I mean, that stuff's all kind of falls by the wayside. Wrestling's never shied away from booking whatever is happening in the world, Cold War, first Iraq invasion, knockoffs of the nation of Islam. In this case, would the WWE book a fully Trumpian, Trump sympathetic villain? I mean, it's a really difficult hypothetical because we know Vince McMahon and Donald Trump are friends. And Linda McMahon is now working in the Trump administration. So, I mean, I think they're very, like, they're functional reasons why it probably would never happen.

Also, you know, for the most part, the rap on Vince is that he's about 10 years behind the curve on anything pop culture related. Just getting around to George W. Bush. The nation of domination that you were talking about was, you know, in the 90s. So, you know, it's a little bit of a time of a lapse there. I don't think, you know, presidential politics is a little bit of a, you know, might be a little bit too far for WWE just as far as trying to keep all of the masses happy. Now, if you saw Donald Trump, you know, in the last days of his term with a 2% approval rate,

I think that, you know, that's totally fair game. Yeah, I mean, everyone who's listening to this knows that Donald Trump has actually appeared on WWE television two different times, or multiple times, if you count those early WrestleMania's. He had a fake Donald Trump. He had a Donald impersonator, wrestle a Rosio Donald impersonator in the ring on Monday Night Raw. I mean, this is a thing that actually happened. After some of the most vile comments of Donald Trump's career, right? Exactly. Yeah. And it's worth pointing out referencing back to what you said before that his last appearance in 2009, he bought Monday Night Raw in storyline terms from Vince McMahon. USA Network and WWP put out a press release announcing this storyline and it caused the WWE stock to plummet because people actually believed it was true.

No one brought this up in the campaign that like Donald Trump, you know, attaching Donald Trump's name to anything makes the stock market, you know, take notice. But yeah, I mean, it's, you know, fake is always. always been part of the fabric of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of W. Trump's presentation. Well, it's funny to me, too, because when you talk about Linda, you know, we say, okay, Vince would be sensitive. But this is assuming that Donald Trump wouldn't be flattered by a villain who supports Donald Trump.

That's totally true. I mean, Donald Trump might, Donald Trump would probably watch it. If we were, everything we've read this last week and a half about his TV viewing habits, it's not nuts that he's not sitting at the, sitting in the White House in, like, in the, in the treaty room or wherever watching Raw. Donald Trump might be willing to play the character himself for all, you know, I mean, we're not going far enough, right? No, no, it's totally true.

I mean, you know, Donald Trump might, I think, you know, without reading too much into the man's psyche, it wouldn't surprise me if he appreciated a WWE on-screen representation of himself more than Saturday Night Live or something. One of my favorite things is I read some of the Trump books over the last couple of weeks. Yeah. Let us scan to some of the Trump books. There were like these passages in the book where he would be talking about this battle of the billionaires he had at WrestleMania, which you were talking about a second ago. And he would just, he was totally in on the K-Faebae,

I mean, he was not, he was, he was acting like it was real in the passage of the book. Yeah. Like he was in on the show. Again, at the risk of over psychoanalyzing, there's two, well, there's two parts of this. No risk here, Dan. One is the allegiance to his friend Vince and to what he did there. I think that, you know, there's an extent, there are some people who would go be in a pro wrestling match and would be very loud about how they knew it was fake and it was just a good time. And there are some people who might be embarrassed by being too involved in something fake, so you put it over as real.

You know, in pro wrestling, in modern pro wrestling, one of the really interesting sort of organizing principles is the extent to which the wrestlers will go to. They know that the audience knows it's fake, but they make it about real things. Hulk Hogan saying, you know, if Andre hadn't let him slam him in the ring, then he wouldn't have been able to. You know, all these guys saying, well, this is fake, but like look at him, jump off the top of the steel cage, that's real. you know, you find real things. But you're right. Trump totally bought into the kind of unreality of the whole thing. And I'm not exactly sure what that says about him other than, well, let's hope that he was in on it.

You know, let's hope that he doesn't actually believe it was true. We saw this dynamic with Bill O'Reilly getting fired, which is that I think there's a rough parallel to wrestling here, maybe. Rupert Murdoch, shameless tabloid proprietor. Oh, right. Always happy to touch the third rails of race or gender, whatever, gets ratings, right? But we know that the Murdoch children who are now taking over parts of News Corp aren't so comfortable with that because they mix in polite New York society. They're of a different generation, right? They're, they just don't want to go there.

Right. Is there anything like that in wrestling with Vince, who we know is the ultimate carnival barker and then his kids and Hunter, the quote unquote Hunter, being sort of less willing to do that because they're just in a different. different society and a different generation? I definitely think they're more sensitive to it. And those sorts of, I mean, the power dynamic that goes on there is the most impossible thing to suss out. I mean, there's no wrestling reporters have very, very seldomly have aligned into those conversations.

But yeah, I mean, Shane McMahon just came back to the company after working for many years in international business. Stephanie is, Stephanie and Triple H are both certainly. more attuned to what's going on in the real world. Now, they're all still, to some extent, sort of cordoned off in Stanford, Connecticut. So it's not like they're necessarily going to New York cocktail parties every night. To the museum benefit. Yeah.

But there's certainly what, I mean, I think, you know, if you want to draw a parallel between Vince McMahon and, you know, the caricature of Donald Trump or any other number of very successful people of a certain age, you know, you have a couple of big hits. And, you know, you keep kind of replaying them for a long time. And I think that, and I think that, you know, once you reach that level of success and once you get to a point where your interaction with humanity is like your secretary and the five people you have meetings with every day, then there's not always a lot of room for evolution of thought or a sense of humor or of just, you know, opinion. Or propriety, right? Exactly. Because I think, you know, it sounds like a great idea and you're rich and powerful.

They say, okay, but then you have somebody who's like, has like friends. and they go, hey, what your dad did was really gross. How can you be aligned with that? And so then you go and kind of clean it up subtly. Maybe that's firing Bill O'Reilly. Maybe that's saying, okay, we're going to be, wrestling is not going to be the Charlie Rose show, but it's going to be, we're going to clean it up a little bit, that kind of stuff.

Yeah, I think that's totally feasible. I mean, you know, normally I would say just having someone in charge who reads Twitter, you know, and sees the reaction would make a difference. But, you know, this whole conversation is about somebody who regularly reads Twitter. and, you know, according to, again, according to these news stories we've read recently, just relishes in reading and watching people who have dissenting opinions just so we can complain about it. One more thing I wanted to run by you. Hulk Hogan, correct, has been in exile since his racist remarks from WW.

They're easing him back into the kind of reality of wrestling, but yes. Would it not be the ultimate watch, hate watch, whatever you want to call it, Hulk Hogan comes back wearing a Make America Great Again hat. And he endorsed Trump, I'm pretty sure, last year, I think in some random interview, and comes back in, brother, we're going to make wrestling great again as kind of a Trump sympathetic elder statesman who, as we've seen, is not bound by PC or anything else. I've spent a lot of time wondering what the return of Hogan to the ring would, what would be the right way to read to endear him to the fans? Now, obviously, there's a lot of fans who don't care and are going to be happy to see him. come back, but I could never quite settle on a way to sort of get my contingent of fans.

You know, there's no appropriate, there's no appropriate level of apology that could happen in a ring that would really feel okay. But I think you might have hit on it is bringing him back in a sort of self-aware, self-conscious form where he's, where he's playing out the villainy of the character that he sort of turned out to be in real life, just sort of like wash away his own sins. That might actually do it. Yeah, it's a perfectly wrestling thing. right, because you build up the fake villainy, or in this case, fake slash real villainy. Right. And then you have the fake apology seems all the much more sincere because it's totally contained within this fake world.

Yes. Something like that. That's exactly right. It's funny how we just, you know, as wrestling fans, we are accustomed to these sort of travails being played out in the wrestling ring. But, you know, there's some truth that, you know, working out that way in real life, too. We'll watch, David. Together we'll watch. If Hulk Hogan comes back that way, I will, I hope I'm sitting right next to you when it happens.

Thanks for coming on. Thanks so much, man. It was some fun. Thanks to Joel, Kevin, and David for coming on today and joining our little political roundtable here at the ringer. Listen to everything else on Channel 33 and all the great Ringer channels. We'll see you soon.