Trump's long links to wrestling's carnival of buffoonery

Hours after the coronavirus death toll reached and then quickly passed 52,000, president Donald Trump tweeted his 78 million followers his latest thoughts about professional wrestling.

When any other incumbent of the White House might have felt it timely to dispatch a national message of condolence, empathy or some sort of consolatory acknowledgement of the humanitarian disaster in our midst, Trump decided it was more important to declare "Triple H is a total winner!"

A pre-pubescent fan boy of a leader praising a steroid-fuelled pantomime artist celebrating 25 years of accomplished fakery. The acrid flavour of the times.

On April 1st, Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida, went on television and belatedly issued an executive stay-at-home order shutting down all but essential businesses across the state.

Just over a week later, with no fanfare or public announcement, the stringent rules were quietly tampered with so World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) could be reclassified as an "essential" industry.

This freed the company to continue to record live promotions in order to fulfil the exact terms of their broadcast commitments to NBC and Fox. Failing to do so would have meant forfeiting a chunk of $400 million from their annual contracts. The only thing it was essential to is their shareholders' bottom line and the only explanation for it is WWE's weirdly symbiotic relationship with Trump.

DeSantis owed his election in 2018 in large part to Trump's influence and has been in his debt ever since. The same day the governor mysteriously re-evaluated wrestling's place in the commercial universe and somehow reckoned it as necessary for society's survival as a grocery store, Linda McMahon announced that America First, the committee she heads up on behalf of the president's re-election campaign, would be spending $18.5 million in advertising across Florida.

Formerly CEO of the WWE, a position currently held by her husband Vince, McMahon also served in Trump's cabinet from 2017 to 2019. Not even one degree of separation here.

When Trump first jump-started his run for office in 2015, pundits considered the grotesque tone of his outré candidacy and christened it the first WWE presidential campaign. In his bizarro world, no finer compliment.

His links to wrestling's corrupt carnival of buffoonery (the list of performers who end up prematurely dead or addicted to drugs is long and growing) stretch right back to 1988 when he persuaded the McMahons to bring Wrestlemania IV to the Trump Plaza in Atlantic City.

Over the ensuing decade, he featured so often in cameo roles across their various rancid pageants that he was eventually inducted into the company's Hall of Fame, the kind of ersatz accolade that only appeals to the truly narcissistic or imbecilic.