Hulk Hogan, Trump idol and enemy of the free press, dead at 71

NOTE: This is a guest post by journalist and author Josephine Riesman whose books include the New York Times bestseller RINGMASTER: VINCE MCMAHON AND THE UNMAKING OF AMERICA and the Hugo finalist TRUE BELIEVER: THE RISE AND FALL OF STAN LEE. Her third book, THE LAST TEMPTATION OF BECK, will be published by Simon & Schuster next year.

Friends, Americans, countrypeople, lend me your ears; I come to boo Hulk Hogan, not to cheer him. “The evil that men do lives after them / The good is oft interred with their bones”—so let it be with the Hulkster.

While I was writing my biography of pro-wrestling tycoon Vince McMahon, my spouse often asked me why Vince’s biggest superstar was so popular. How could this pot-bellied non-athlete with a handlebar mustache, who spouted nonsensical sentences as though his coke dealer’s life depended on it, gain the adoration of the world? I don’t quite know how to account for it. Regardless, Hogan—real name Terry Bollea—has died at the age of 71.

Perhaps Hogan appealed to America because so many people could smell the white supremacism wafting off of him. Or perhaps they could tell that he wanted to return to childhood just as much as they did. Or maybe they just really admired his ability to rip open a t-shirt. Indeed, that was the first thing I ever noticed about him. 

I was six years old, flipping channels on the TV alone, as we Millennial children were wont to do in 1991. I had never seen professional wrestling before and had no idea what I’d landed on. All I knew was that this very large man was mugging before a massive crowd and rending his “HULKAMANIA”-branded shirt in two like a textile Laffy Taffy.

I wanted to obtain this power. I assumed it lay in the shirt.

That very night, when my mother came home I asked her to please, please buy me a rippable shirt like the one Hulk Hogan had on TV. I described what I’d seen, at length. God bless her, Mom took one of my little t-shirts and cut a slit down its front, popped holes on each side, then strung shoelaces through them so I could “rip open” the shirt, then tighten it up again for reuse. Major kudos to my mom for thinking of a more sustainable way to Commit to the Bit than Hogan ever did.

Now that I think about it, it was less of a t-shirt by that point than a tiny bodice. Fitting, given that I grew up to be a trans woman. You know, the kind of woman that Hulk Hogan’s beloved Republican Party would prefer to see jailed or murdered for her very existence. But to use the parlance of Gawker—the news outlet Hogan helped destroy with the assistance of a neofascist billionaire—And now he’s dead.

The Hulkster’s transgressions were as operatic as they were pathetic. He became a household name in the mid-1980s for strongman antics in the ring, earning a legion of devoted child fans who obeyed Hogan’s “Three Demandments” for clean living: Train, say your prayers, and eat your vitamins! Those youths underwent a harsh coming-of-age when Hogan’s massive steroid use was revealed in the early 1990s and became the locus of a federal drug case against then World Wrestling Federation owner Vince McMahon. But such a violation of youthful trust seems quaint compared to the other stuff.

There was his lawsuit against Gawker, ostensibly filed because he was mad that they had posted video clips of him cheating on his wife. Ultimately, the suit was only successful because billionaire Peter Thiel—who had also suffered embarrassment from Gawker’s keyboards—decided he could use it as a cudgel. 

The rich man, who continues to full-throatedly denounce the concept of democracy, had decided to take down Gawker before Hogan’s dispute with the site even began, and he was happy to invest a reported $10 million in lawsuits against Gawker, including Hogan’s. The two of them won a March 2016 decision that killed the site for good. Hundreds of jobs were lost and a precedent had been set: billionaires and celebrities were capable of annihilating media outlets by weaponizing the legal system. 

I had been a working journalist for over a decade when the Bollea v. Gawker decision came down, and I’ll never forget the terror I felt upon learning of it. It meant that I, and whoever was publishing me, were no match against surging American fascism. I was not alone in my fear. Gawker’s demise was a grim portent of Donald Trump’s war on, and capture of, the free press.

(Indeed, Trump just succeeded in using a lawsuit against CBS to force the entirety of its parent corporation, Paramount, into a submissive position. Erstwhile Trump skeptics—and longtime billionaires—Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong have reorganized The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times, respectively, into rabidly pro-Trump mouthpieces. And The New York Times, for all its protestations of journalistic independence, is now regularly cited by the Trump administration in the latter’s legal battles against transgender existence—the paper tends to agree with him on the issue.)

There was also the time Hulk Hogan scuttled the only credible attempt WWF wrestlers ever made at unionization by ratting them out to McMahon. How many wrestlers died from negligence and desperation because Hogan prevented collective bargaining in pro wrestling? Jesse “The Body” Ventura still hasn’t forgiven him for that one, nor should you.

And there was his vehement anti-Black racism. "You know that God gave you this vibe and this, this, energy that you and I are going to live forever, bro," Hogan once told his son, Nick, during a taped prison conversation (Nick was serving time for a drunk-driving crash that left a passenger permanently disabled). "I just hope we don't come back as a couple — I don't want to say it — blizz-ack gizz-uys, you know what I'm saying?" In the same conversation, Hogan spoke of his fear that Nick might be transferred to a different facility:  "Your mom went there and said it was mainly blizz, you know what I'm sizz-aying? … Some of the ladies there that, you know, run the school are nice blizz lizz-adies, you know?"

And in his now-infamous sex tape, he was caught making racist statements about his daughter’s choice of suitors: “If she was going to fuck some n****r, I’d rather have her marry an eight-foot-tall n****r worth a hundred million dollars! Like a basketball player! … Fucking n****r.”

“I guess we’re all a little racist,” Hogan once mused. 

I don’t know about “all” of “us,” but a sufficient number of Americans—real Americans, living Americans, Americans you know and perhaps once trusted—were sufficiently racist to make the Hulkster’s biggest fan President of the United States. Twice.

Donald Trump has been a Hulkamaniac since the Eighties, when he and all of his fellow WWF viewers were first exposed to “Hulkamania” on television and at live shows. Trump had been an avid watcher of McMahon-family wrestling shows since he was a child in the Fifties. By the time Hogan “won” the WWF championship in 1983, Trump was already friends with Vince McMahon and his wife Linda—who is now serving as Trump’s Secretary of Education.

Trump hosted two WrestleManias that Hogan headlined back in his initial run of fame and attended many more shows in which Hogan wrestled. You can see him on the old tapes: the future POTUS leaping to his feet to give Hogan standing ovations and beaming at him like a kid who just saw Superman.

That same eerily-awed smile crossed Trump’s weathered face at the Republican National Convention last year when Hogan gave one of the final speeches before Trump’s own. The candidate had spent most of the convention sitting bored in his chair, occasionally falling asleep, or perking up just to leer at his own daughter. But when Hogan cut a promo (to use the jargon of the pseudo-sport that made him famous) in Trump’s honor that night urging America to “Let Trumpamania rule again,” Trump was absolutely riveted. Maybe, if it’s even possible, happy. 

The feeling of respect was mutual. In a sign of profound deference that seemed to really, actually mean something to Trump, Hogan did what he did best: Ripped open his branded Hulk Hogan t-shirt. This one bore the words “REAL AMERICAN,” and he tore it to shreds so he could reveal another one with “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN” printed on a painfully red background. 

He gave a similar speech a few months later as part of Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden, an arena Hogan had headlined so many times before. "I don't see no stinkin' Nazis in here!” Hogan declared. “I don't see no stinkin' domestic terrorists in here! The only thing I see here are a bunch of hard-working men and women that are real Americans, brother!"

Thirty-nine years earlier, at that same location, Hogan had executed what I consider to be his greatest shirt-rip ever. It came while Hogan was Hulking up to start his big match against “Rowdy” Roddy Piper (who played the kind of racist that Hogan really was) at The War to Settle the Score, a joint broadcast with the nascent MTV. It was a free broadcast to sell tickets for the next month’s live, closed-circuit debut of WrestleMania, at which actor Mr. T would tag-team with Hogan against the evil duo of Piper and Paul Orndorff. You can’t see the MTV show legally anywhere anymore.

But watch this gray-market YouTube clip of Hulk Hogan walking to the arena while his then-theme music, Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger” (also a Trump favorite), pumps to the rafters. If you’re a wrestling fan, I dare you to get through it without feeling goosebumps rise on your arm when his shirt comes off.

Yet before he achieved global fame, Hogan was just a poor kid from Port Tampa, Florida. In his 2009 autobiography My Life Outside the Ring, he recounts the story of being driven to his very first professional wrestling match. He recalled sitting in the back of a car, far from home, completely terrified that the men in the front were going to rape him.

“We’ve got about a hundred and fifty miles to go, and before you get to the arena, you have to give one of us a blow job,” the driver—a famous wrestler named Pat Patterson—told him. When the terrified, 23-year-old Hogan protested that he wasn’t gay and wanted no part of that, Patterson replied, “We’re gonna have to tell all the other guys that you failed your initiation. So after your match, in the shower in the locker room, everybody’s gonna grab you and fuck you in the ass.”

Hogan arrived at the arena and wrestled B. Brian Blair that night, then walked a grim path to the locker room, dreading the sexual violation that might await him there. It turned out to be a prank—a rib, as wrestlers call them—but the experience shook him forever.

“I didn’t understand why they would do something like that,” Hogan wrote. “It’s still so weird to think about. Even now, it still upsets me.”

Perhaps we should shed a tear for a young, frightened Terry Bollea. But by the time Hogan died, he’d devoted himself to the very kind of man that Terry had feared on that fateful car ride. And the very kind of masculinity celebrated by the Trump administration.

Now, an adjudicated rapist and 2013 inductee into the World Wrestling Entertainment Hall of Fame is the President of the United States, and Hulk Hogan is very much deceased. No amount of cheering will cause his desiccated, drug-addled corpse to “Hulk up,” turn back time, and re-insert you into childhood. But the return to childhood is what the impulse to fascism is always about. That’s why Hogan was such a dangerously effective weapon for the Republican Party that he so dearly loved: countless millions of voters living today can tell you their own childhood memory of seeing Hulk Hogan rip off his shirt for the first time. 

Tonight, there is a very old child behind the Resolute Desk of the Oval Office, and he is very sad that his hero is dead. Perhaps that is cause for celebration.