When Hulk Hogan showed up on the Netflix debut of Raw, the most I thought of it was “haha, look at what these dumb motherfuckers thought they could get away with.” It was January 6th, the election results had been certified, and Donald Trump, the WWE Hall of Famer the McMahon family has spent much of their combined lives tailing like a piece of toilet paper stuck to the bottom of his shoe, is days away from being sworn in as president, with long-time colluder Linda McMahon, one of his chief fundraisers, parlaying the Trump victory into her second cabinet post. Why not turn Raw into a victory party?
The degree to which the McMahon family is currently winning their many wars is tough to fully comprehend. Given a personal hall pass by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis WWE (and AEW) operated through the lockdown portion of the COVID pandemic as an “essential service,” posting a record profit due to increased television rights fees, which did not stop them from firing a staggering number of wrestlers to cut costs. Their competition, AEW, started out hot but has seen its audience decline in a way that’s worrying if you care about things like ticket counts and television ratings more than wrestling, and, arguably worse, has seen some of the biggest motivators for their initial success leave and become focal points of a “new era” of WWE.
You’d think the saga surrounding Vince McMahon would dampen things a bit, but his initial 2022 “retirement” from WWE after the Wall Street Journal reported that WWE’s board was investigating McMahon for a secret $3 million payment to a former employee, especially as the company lionized him in public just while the Journal discovered additional payments to other ex-employees totaling $12 million, but that merely ushered in said new era, which has enjoyed a praise for Paul Levesque’s approach to booking as well as some long-overdue tweaks to WWE’s presentation, setting new attendance and gate records seemingly every month. Vince McMahon staged a comeback a year later that resulted in WWE’s merger with Endeavor’s UFC, forming TKO Group, who presumably would have kept Vince as Executive Chairman for as long as he wished to remain, except that the January 2024 sex trafficking lawsuit filed by Janel Grant compelled him to resign.
Over the course of all of this, perhaps to assure the WWE Universe that the McMahon family’s contributions to the field of sports entertainment would not be swept under the rug, various McMahons not named Vince — Stephanie (who was interim CEO and chairwoman after her father’s first departure from WWE), Linda (whose rumored separation from Vince, first reported in 2022 by the Wrestling Observer Newsletter, was recently confirmed by the mainstream press after she was tapped to lead Donald Trump’s Department of Education), and Shane — appeared at WWE events in some form or fashion, in crowd shots for a nice pop, in behind the scenes backstage photos, or in Shane’s case as a flop surprise competitor at WrestleMania 39. Levesque became something of the WWE’s Steve Jobs, issuing rallying-cry speeches about This Business and holding court after important shows in press conferences that were at times so chummy you’d never know anything horrible had been alleged about the former owner of the company, let alone what those allegations insinuated about WWE. It was, in fact, considered by some to be in poor taste to bring it up at all. The impact Vince McMahon’s ouster has had on WWE’s bottom line is baffling — it is as lurid and horrifying as the ring boy scandal, has seen him come under federal investigation, and brought new details about old horrors to light, all of which would have imperiled the company in the past, but the money continues to roll in. Beyond posing for photos with Rudy Giuliani’s failson at the Mar-A-Lago New Year’s party, what do you do to celebrate your win?
Buy into Hulk Hogan’s grifter vanity beer, plaster its logo on your ring mat, and invite him onto the first episode of your $5 billion venture with Netflix to repeat his RNC gimmick of ripping off his Hulk Hogan shirt to reveal the shirt of the hand that feeds him. The boos were delicious, but not unexpected: Hogan and his exploits belong to two of the most-covered eras of professional wrestling, during which he was either the most popular wrestler in the world or the second most popular wrestler in the world. He comes across well in exactly zero stories (especially his own), is visibly disinterested in his routine every time he performs it, and, oh yeah, was very publicly fired from WWE and removed from its Hall of Fame in 2015 when The National Enquierer leaked a transcript of a video of Hogan and Heather Clem, whose sex tape spurred the Hogan v. Gawker lawsuit, in which, among other things, Hogan said of his daughter Brooke, “I’d rather if she was going to fuck some n*****, I’d rather have her marry an 8-foot-tall n***** worth a hundred million dollars, like a basketball player.” Here I’ll cede the floor to Open Mike Eagle’s unpacking of the leak, its outcome, and Hogan himself:
It’s impossible to fully account for how pathetic Hogan’s groveling was — there was a Good Morning America appearance where he claimed that the n-word was just something he and the other kids in Florida called each other back when he was growing up, an additional lawsuit against Gawker alleging that they had leaked the transcript to further damage him in an act of revenge, was publicly very sad about being wiped from WWE’s website, and apparently volunteered with children. All of this led to his being reinstated into WWE’s Hall of Fame on July 15, 2018, which, despite the Hall of Fame’s status as a page on an ad-choked website, was apparently important enough to have him come to Pittsburgh for Extreme Rules the same evening, where the WWE locker room was assembled so that he could apologize. Oh, and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia probably asked really nicely if he’d be the host of Crown Jewel later that the year, and you can’t say no to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
In the years since, Hogan’s mostly been called upon to do the same promo about being happy to be wherever WWE is that night, mentioning Randy Savage and Andre the Giant and other things that happened 40 years ago. Every single time this has happened, even when he was paying tribute to Gene Okerlund, the leaked tape comes up, but the soft rehabilitation of Hogan’s image clearly mattered to Vince McMahon — Hogan was on Raw celebrating 30 years of the show just days before McMahon resigned from TKO in 2023 — and the new regime didn’t exactly drop the project, celebrating 40 years of Hulkamania last year.
What’s notable about his being booed on Monday, then? Mostly the hubris of the whole thing — WWE could have looked to AEW’s partnership with Ric Flair’s Woo Energy Drink for an inkling of what fan response to this new venture would be, or maybe come to the realization that giving Hulk Hogan four minutes to speak about a beer you can’t buy in the state of California was an odd use of their time in Inglewood, or, hell, got a real beer company to pay to put its logo on the ring mat, altogether avoiding buying into a new Hulk Hogan business that I’m sure everybody believes will be his first wildly successful one outside of wrestling.
Even if you knew nothing about Real American Beer — brewed by the beer equivalent of a ghost kitchen and brought to market by a disgraced celebrity who said as recently as 2022 that he abstains from alcohol nearly one full year after Bud Light’s courting of trans content creator Dylan Mulvaney caused conservatives to lose their minds in ways great and small, one of which was consumer boycotts and the birth of “woke alternative” grifter consumables like Conservative Dad’s Ultra Right Beer — that kind of shill would be hard to endure coming from a universally beloved wrestler, and Hogan is neither universally beloved nor capable of a soft touch. The man has spent 40 years talking about himself and America but both of those concepts are fraudulent, the divide Hogan seeks to heal in these United States with a supposedly crushable light beer vague and nebulous but shouted at a volume that suggests that Hogan’s next WrestleMania opponent is a 19-year-old liberal arts major who stated their pronouns at the Hulkster’s Thanksgiving dinner table.
I also think that part of the reaction to his appearance is that by buying into Real American Beer, WWE is explicitly choosing a side in the culture war. It’s always been on this side of the fence, but if you’re just trying to escape the state of the world with your good friends Cody Rhodes and CM Punk for a few hours on Monday, you can chalk up a lot of things about WWE that should make its audience feel a little bad about watching it to the previous regime. Partnering with Real American Beer unsettles that notion, its scion appearing at the RNC and Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally and on conservative news networks around his busy schedule of barnstorming bars and grocery stores to build the brand. At one event, he was filmed repeating Trump’s insinuation that Kamala Harris, his opponent in the 2024 presidential election, was lying about being Indian, adding a condescending “How” as his punchline because, as it turns out, people who do racist things aren’t always smart enough to work what the racist dogwhistles they’re parroting actually mean. Who could resist the opportunity to align themselves with a months-old beer brand whose only nationally-available products include the recently dropped “America’s Back” hat?
We won’t know whether or not Hulk Hogan has a racist bone in his body until all that remains of him is his skeleton and the bandana they bury him in, but no amount of pithy “bringing America together” copy is going to wash away his affiliation with Donald Trump, and unless you’re in an arena and social media sphere that’s just Donald Trump fans, every time Hulk Hogan appears on Raw to promote a beer that, again, most of WWE’s audience can’t buy, someone is going to remember something that he did or the weird pang of shame they felt for a week after the RNC and pop off about it.
Ultimately, I think that’s a good thing. It’s been too easy for too long to act as if this “era” of WWE meant that the company had undergone a radical change, that things were “better” there, culture wise, despite their sister company’s events taking on the air of a Trump rally after the election. Maybe things have changed, but at heart the WWE is still the WWE, they’ll find a way to kick themselves in the nuts even in the middle of a party they’re throwing to celebrate the billions of dollars they just made. They’ll even take some of that money and invest it in a guy whose previous food and beverage endeavors include Pastamania, Hogan’s Beach, Hogan Energy, the Hulkster Cheeseburger and Chicken Sandwich, blenders, and Foreman Grill knock offs, some of which managed to remain on the market for more than a year. I hope Jimmy Hart had a great time in catering.