Vince McMahon, the 76 year old WWE CEO and husband to former Trump Administration Small Business Secretary Linda McMahon, announced on Friday his retirement from the staged fighting soap opera promotion he helmed since the 1970s amid multiple allegations of hush money payments to sexual harassment victims or affair partners or both, the Wall Street Journal reports.
McMahon spent decades as both the real life CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment (formerly the World Wrestling Federation until the World Wildlife Fund stole the “WWF” belt circa 2002) and a fictionalized version of himself in the ring. Kind of like his friend Donald Trump, except McMahon’s TV persona of a shrewd and successful executive was kind of accurate, whereas Trump’s was not. Also unlike Trump, McMahon evidently has at least some measure of capacity for shame and is walking away after his horrible private behavior toward women became public.
We keep coming back to this, but this full circle of the WWE and Trumpism is too fascinating not to note here: Around 2000 or so, a right wing Christian activist L Brent Bozell III, whose “Parents’ Television Council” or “PTC” ran an obnoxious moralizing campaign against the WWF’s multiple hours a week of staged violence and borderline pornographic indecency. To mock him, McMahon took one of his midcard punkish wrestlers Stevie Richards and retooled him as “Steven Richards” the head of an obnoxious moralizing wrestler faction called “Right To Censor,” or “RTC.” Richards would disrupt matches between female wrestlers, brainwashed a pimp character wrestler called “The Godfather” and his “hoes” into joining RTC, and other wacky stunts to solidify his heel status.
Two decades later Bozell’s son, L Brent Bozell IV, pleaded not guilty to multiple federal felonies he was indicted on for entering the Capitol and the Senate chamber on January 6th, 2021, trying to overturn the election loss of the president on whose cabinet sat the wife of the man who for at least a dozen hours of nationally televised wrestling had openly mocked his father as being a right wing Christian pussy imposing his dated morality on a generation that didn’t want it. This fucking Bozo is going to prison because he thought the only way to save Christian America from degeneracy was to keep Trump – a man who in more ways than one was linked to the degeneracy of the WWF/WWE that his father used to crusade against – in office.