Lever Time - Premium

00:02:09:10 - 00:02:36:00
David Sirota
Hey there and welcome to this week's special bonus episode for the Leavers Paying subscribers. Today we're going to be sharing our interview with Abraham Josephine Riesman, the author of the new biography Ringmaster Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America. For anyone interested in pro wrestling's influence on American politics, including Vince McMahon's surprising connection to political figures like Rick Santorum, Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump.

00:02:36:09 - 00:02:57:12
David Sirota
This is the interview for you. Even if you don't like pro wrestling, you're going to want to listen to this because it's about that industry's influence and impact on American politics. Just a heads up. The interview was between Abraham and the Leavers. Jordan, you'll thanks again for being a supporting subscriber and funding the work we do here at the Lever.

00:02:57:17 - 00:02:59:11
David Sirota
Now here's that bonus interview.

00:03:01:04 - 00:03:14:22
Jordan Uhl
Hi, this is Jordan. You're with lever time, and I am joined by Abraham Josephine Riesman, author of the new book Ringmaster Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America. Josie, thank you so much for joining me.

00:03:15:05 - 00:03:18:04
Abraham Josephine Riesman
It's a total pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.

00:03:18:16 - 00:03:41:12
Jordan Uhl
Now, I finished this book recently. I absolutely loved it. But I'm not a wrestling fan. I have never been a wrestling fan. I kind of observe from afar. And I'm curious from your perspective as the author of this book, who wanted to tell this story of someone who was so influential in our pop culture and also our politics?

00:03:42:02 - 00:03:46:20
Jordan Uhl
What you want people who aren't wrestling fans to understand about why they should pick this book up?

00:03:47:16 - 00:04:21:15
Abraham Josephine Riesman
Well, if you like me, are concerned about the rise of a uniquely American brand of fascism in this great nation of ours, then I would hope you pick up my book. Not so much because you just want to learn about pro wrestling. Although pro wrestling, I contend, is a fascinating subject on its own. But I would hope you'd grab the book because it will tell you a lot about how we got where we are and will tell you a lot, not necessarily about how to fix the problems we're facing.

00:04:21:16 - 00:04:46:07
Abraham Josephine Riesman
If I knew those solutions, then I'd be running for office right now. But at least it talks about the things that don't work and the things that seem like strategies to combat fascism, but in fact only reinforce it. You know, there's this term that wrestlers use that I think is a useful lens for looking at the rise of American fascism.

00:04:46:07 - 00:05:27:05
Abraham Josephine Riesman
And that term is kayfabe. K y. F a b. E kayfabe. Kayfabe was a carny term. It emerged from the carnivals and it may be corrupted pig Latin. Nobody really knows what the linguistic origin is, but it used to mean the fiction that everything you saw in a pro wrestling ring was real. Now, of course, this was a fiction because the matches in pro wrestling after it sort of branched off from more traditional Olympic style wrestling in the late 19th century, have always been predetermined.

00:05:27:20 - 00:05:53:16
Abraham Josephine Riesman
Once pro wrestling became its own little entity in America, it really entrenched itself in fakeness. The match, the ends of the matches are predetermined, the characters are characters, so on and so forth. But for about a century from the late 19th century until 1989, there was this industry omerta, and that was the code of kayfabe. You didn't, as they say, break kayfabe.

00:05:54:14 - 00:06:17:05
Abraham Josephine Riesman
You wanted the audience to believe that everything they saw in the ring was real. So that meant if you played a Swedish guy in the ring, but you were actually some, you know, random white guy from New Jersey, if an outsider from wrestling saw you, you had to adapt your Swedish accent. You had to commit to it. That was kayfabe.

00:06:17:06 - 00:06:38:22
Abraham Josephine Riesman
You had to commit to kayfabe and not break kayfabe. So people would be able to go to the wrestling shows and think, Oh, well, this is all real. And if somebody was a good guy in the ring, then they couldn't be caught doing immoral things and vice versa. So on and so forth. So kayfabe was kind of a big flat foundational, easy lie, which is everything here is real.

00:06:39:05 - 00:07:02:19
Abraham Josephine Riesman
And in America, we used to have a kind of kayfabe, which was, Hey, this is a representative democracy. The will of the people is enacted through government. And of course, this wasn't true. And much like kayfabe, it's always a mix of truth and fiction. You know, kayfabe was often about exaggeration and so on and so forth. And sometimes you'd have a lie.

00:07:02:20 - 00:07:26:14
Abraham Josephine Riesman
You'd commit to so much that it would become the truth. And with American democracy, it was much that way where we lived in an apartheid country, where for long stretches of time, whole swaths of the population couldn't even vote, much less have political power and protection. But that useful fiction kept people coming back. And sometimes you would commit to that kayfabe so hard that actual progress would happen.

00:07:26:15 - 00:07:59:14
Abraham Josephine Riesman
So that was the old system. Now, in wrestling you have something called neo kayfabe, and it's called that because I invented that term. So maybe it won't catch on. But that's what I refer to it as. Neo kayfabe is what emerges after Vince McMahon, the subject of my book, Ringmaster Kills Kayfabe in the eighties, when he took over his father's pro wrestling company in the mid 1980s, he saw it as advantageous to him to deregulate professional wrestling to get rid of taxes and health and safety regulations on wrestling.

00:08:00:04 - 00:08:31:10
Abraham Josephine Riesman
And this was his entry into Republican politics, by the way. But by doing this effort, he found himself in situations where it was advantageous to him to admit the wrestling was fake to lawyers and lawsuits to legislators in legislative pushes. So gradually, people started to get a bit of a sense that wrestling might be fake. And then in 1989, The New York Times runs a front page story based on one of the WWF that was the name of Vince's company, one of the WWF efforts in New Jersey.

00:08:31:10 - 00:08:53:00
Abraham Josephine Riesman
And the friendly the front page story had the headline. Now it can be told these wrestlers are just having fun. And this article completely missed the point, which was that wrestling had just obliterated health and safety standards for its very abused and nonunionized workers. It was just like, Hey, now we can say it. Wrestling is fake, everybody. Ha ha.

00:08:53:14 - 00:09:20:18
Abraham Josephine Riesman
And what replaced that was this this system that I call neo kayfabe, where you're not saying to the audience, Hey, everything you see tonight is real. In fact, you're operating with the assumption and the message to the audience that it's all fake. You say, Don't worry. What you see tonight is fake. It's all fake. But there's this one element of it that's totally real, or there's going to be an element that's totally real.

00:09:20:18 - 00:09:45:17
Abraham Josephine Riesman
And we won't tell you what it is or, yeah, it's all fake. But wait. Oh, my God, this thing just happened. And those two guys you read on that blog that they actually hate each other. So maybe one of them really meant to hurt the other. So on and so forth. You have this mix of truth, fiction and everything in between, and you're in a constant state of confusion about whether someone is telling an outrageous truth or an outrageous lie, or something That's a hybrid.

00:09:46:00 - 00:10:04:22
Abraham Josephine Riesman
And that's what we have in American politics right now. We have a neo kayfabe chaos system, and Trump is a big factor in that. And Trump is a big wrestling fan, which we can get to. So anyway, that's my very long preamble for people who may have wanted to tune out this podcast just because they heard the word wrestling.

00:10:05:16 - 00:10:28:04
Jordan Uhl
Yeah, we'll get to Trump in a second because going into this book, that was the one political name I was expecting to see that's generally known that him and Vince McMahon are associates. The name I was not expecting to see was Rick Santorum. Could you talk about Rick Santorum's role in this deregulation push?

00:10:29:16 - 00:10:55:07
Abraham Josephine Riesman
Sure. So Rick Santorum, when he was a young man, when he was a 20 something, he was a junior lawyer at Kirkpatrick and Lockhart, a Pennsylvania based law firm. And the McMahons had come to Kirkpatrick and Lockhart in kind of a panic because one of their wrestlers had been accused of assaulting an airline attendant and the plane had landed in Pennsylvania.

00:10:55:07 - 00:11:21:10
Abraham Josephine Riesman
So that was where the jurisdiction was. So Kirkpatrick and Lockwood had worked out well for them in that case. And then after that, they decided to help them rather contract Kirkpatrick and Lockhart for help in deregulating wrestling in Pennsylvania. And who was the young conservative, the former president of his chapter of college Republicans, who was assigned to this effort?

00:11:21:10 - 00:11:46:15
Abraham Josephine Riesman
Well, it was young Rick Santorum, and Rick Santorum was not a major personality yet. This is mostly just coincidence. But the McMahons, their first political donations to a campaign were to Santorum's congressional campaign in 1992. It was a real relationship, and Santorum, on top of that, had grown up watching Vince McMahon's father's wrestling shows. He wrote about it in his memoir.

00:11:48:06 - 00:11:57:04
Jordan Uhl
That is why it's so interesting to see how some of these people pop up throughout different aspects of our pop culture history. I was just shocked to.

00:11:57:06 - 00:12:22:09
Abraham Josephine Riesman
I mean, the first page the first page of the book is Ron DeSantis. And I wrote that that that opening. Not everybody knows this. The first passage of the book, from the introduction, from the overture, that is almost verbatim what I wrote in the book Proposal as the opening of the book proposal in April of 2020. So when I wrote it, Ron DeSantis was not.

00:12:22:15 - 00:12:33:07
Abraham Josephine Riesman
He was a rising figure, but I could not have predicted that the book would be coming out in the first page is Ron DeSantis, who is now, you know, our own private Hitler.

00:12:34:15 - 00:12:46:14
Jordan Uhl
And you're referring to Ron DeSantis basically carving out an exception to allow WWE to host events in Florida at the height of COVID 19.

00:12:46:14 - 00:13:21:02
Abraham Josephine Riesman
Yeah, Vince McMahon's company, World Wrestling Entertainment, or WWE, once known as the World Wrestling Federation or WWF, was granted the specialty exemption that like pharmacies, hospitals and grocery stores were getting because they have a so-called performance center in Orlando. They have a facility WWE does in Orlando, and when COVID lockdowns were happening, all of a sudden no sports, no new TV shows, no new TV content.

00:13:21:20 - 00:14:06:19
Abraham Josephine Riesman
And Vince McMahon is nothing if not someone to leap into a gap in the marketplace and much as he was the first live athletic events, he is was the first live ethnic led event after 911. You know, he had an episode of Smackdown the Thursday after the Tuesday of 911. He got himself back on TV really quick and is a fascinating little story where it just so happens that former WWE CEO Linda McMahon, who is also Vince McMahon's wife and also was a member of Trump's Cabinet as the director of Small Business Administration and was the head as of 2020 of the largest pro-Trump super PAC, happens to have announced that her pro-Trump super PAC

00:14:06:19 - 00:14:27:15
Abraham Josephine Riesman
would be donating some 18 odd million dollars to Republican ads in Florida. And this same week, Ron DeSantis, his office, quietly signed legislation that says you can you can't do anything. You have to be locked down, except if you are such and such kind of a business. And guess what? That one kind of business turned out to be.

00:14:27:15 - 00:14:54:14
Abraham Josephine Riesman
It was Dodo. So WWE kept going in the heat of the pandemic months and months before there was a vaccine, before we knew anything about what was going on. It was just like we had Vince McMahon putting on these like silent wrestling shows. There was no audience. It was amazing. There was no audience. It was just the wrestlers and their grunting and the cameramen and the referee.

00:14:54:20 - 00:15:14:23
Abraham Josephine Riesman
And that was it. It was very surreal. But the point is, nothing stops the content train when you are Vince McMahon. This is a guy who kept the show going when one of his wrestlers fell to his death in 1999 during a live pay per view event. Owen Hart He kept the show going. Vince McMahon stops at nothing.

00:15:16:05 - 00:15:35:07
Jordan Uhl
That's a perfect segue way to where I wanted to take this conversation next, because you point out this is an industry, despite really taking a physical toll in these performances, they aren't afforded the same benefits as most other professional athletes because they're treated as contractors.

00:15:35:08 - 00:15:43:07
Abraham Josephine Riesman
They're essentially or professional act or professional actors for that matter, given that they're performers doing art on television. Sorry, just to interject.

00:15:43:07 - 00:16:19:13
Jordan Uhl
No, you're absolutely right to say that It is very analogous to both industries. They're kind of a hybrid. They they take a beating and they're you know, there have been documentaries and specials and books written about life after wrestling for a lot of these performers. And it's really tragic, just tragic story after tragic story. But for someone who was a performer and in a in a wrestler who died in the ring, this is Owen Hart you're talking about, he he tragically died, but people didn't quite know when they were in the arena that he actually died and they didn't know if it was real.

00:16:19:23 - 00:16:24:23
Jordan Uhl
Could you talk about that incident and how this reflects this reflects the impact of the kayfabe?

00:16:26:06 - 00:16:58:00
Abraham Josephine Riesman
Sure. Yeah. So the ultimate example of what a neo kayfabe environment does to the human psyche for me is the death of Owen Hart in 1999. In May of 1989, there was this live pay per view event called Over the Edge, an unfortunate name. And there was this wrestler Owen Hart, who was much beloved, good guy, as regarded by the locker room, and he was being forced to do this gimmick that he really didn't like where he was pretending to be a superhero.

00:16:58:12 - 00:17:24:10
Abraham Josephine Riesman
It was it's complicated, but the point was, it was something that he was already being forced by Vince McMahon to do mostly against his will. But because there is no union, there are no labor protections and everybody's an independent contractor, you can't really talk back to Vince McMahon, especially if you're not really high on the totem pole. So Owen Hart's going along with this, and there's this stunt that he's supposed to do in which he is going to zip down on something called a defender.

00:17:24:10 - 00:17:52:08
Abraham Josephine Riesman
It's kind of like a zip line going downwards from the rafters of the Kemper Arena in Saint Louis, Missouri, down to the the canvas of the mat. And Vince got a new person to do the technician work who wasn't familiar with technician, did a sloppy job. The equipment failed and he fell more than 70 feet and he hit the ropes, bounced into the ring, and within minutes he was dead.

00:17:52:19 - 00:18:18:08
Abraham Josephine Riesman
He was probably not dead in the arena, but he died minutes later after they took him out. But the point is, Vince, in a very short period of time, over the course of a few minutes, made a very pointed decision, which was No. One in the arena. The crowd was not to be told that anything was particularly life threatening.

00:18:18:09 - 00:18:48:16
Abraham Josephine Riesman
They were not to be told that he was dead even after a few. Like an hour later, they found out that Owen was dead. Not even an hour. The crowd was not told to show, kept going. And the thing is, because of neo kayfabe, there had been so many. I'm not going to get into all the examples, but there have been so many things that have been shown on television by Vince McMahon that seemed so improbably violent that they couldn't be faked and then turned out to be faked, that people thought this was just another example of that.

00:18:49:07 - 00:19:15:00
Abraham Josephine Riesman
They were like, okay, well, he's probably fine. Maybe something went slightly wrong with their carting him off and it's all entertainment. It's all fake, right? That's the danger of neo kayfabe. You make everyone into a cynic who can see death right in front of them and go, It's probably made up. And that's what I see happen with like COVID denial and climate denial and gun death denial.

00:19:15:00 - 00:19:32:08
Abraham Josephine Riesman
There's just literal deaths are happening right in front of us. The bodies pile up in the arena and people just shrug it off and either say fake news or it's exaggerated or it's part of the show. And that's bad. That's a really bad way to run a society.

00:19:33:05 - 00:20:04:06
Jordan Uhl
You know, there have been a lot of analogies and comparisons to our modern politics between wrestling or from wrestling to our politics. And people pointed to the way Trump campaigned specifically as one of those those moments are really shift in our politics really shifted collectively. And as you point out in your book, Vince McMahon and Trump, they might actually be friends and Vince might be one of the few friends, real friends that Trump has.

00:20:04:06 - 00:20:09:08
Jordan Uhl
Could you talk about what you learned in your reporting for this about that association?

00:20:10:16 - 00:20:51:19
Abraham Josephine Riesman
Yeah. So in 1981, according to Linda McMahon, at least in 1981, the McMahons happened to be at the same rolling Stones concert in New Jersey that Donald Trump was a very boomer story and they met and struck up a friendship. That friendship was flat. They flowered into a business relationship at the end of the eighties, when Donald Trump acted as the quote unquote host of two wrestlemanias And WrestleMania is the annual big event that WWF slash later WWE throws every year in the spring.

00:20:51:19 - 00:21:15:12
Abraham Josephine Riesman
And it's sort of the centerpiece of the whole shebang for the year. So two of those Wrestlemanias four and five held in 88 and 89 respectively, were hosted by Trump at the Trump Hotel and Casino. Now this was all, of course, kayfabe because the Trump Hotel and Casino could not accommodate WrestleMania. So they had it at a different venue that was across the street.

00:21:15:12 - 00:21:38:20
Abraham Josephine Riesman
But be that as it may, that was the beginning of the business relationship and it was very promising for the very beginning. You watch old clips of Trump talking about this this, this hosting gig, and he sounds so bowled over. He's like, we are honored, we're honored to be hosts. And it's it's not even obsequious. It seems like he's really humbled.

00:21:39:02 - 00:22:01:07
Abraham Josephine Riesman
And that's not surprising because to jump back in time, Trump has been watching McMahon family wrestling since he was a child in the 1950s. We have people on record talking about watching wrestling in Queens with little Donny Trump. Trump has been a wrestling fan for a very long time, and the opportunity to host those wrestlemanias was huge for him.

00:22:01:21 - 00:22:35:05
Abraham Josephine Riesman
And then he would appear at other wrestling shows for advance, just like at ringside, and sort of bring some glitz and glamor to the thing. And then in 2007, he was a part of the action and I won't get all the details, but there was this thing called the battle of the Billionaires, where Trump was a long running for a few months, character building up, playing himself, but, you know, a version of himself leading up to a confrontation at WrestleMania 27 where Vince and Trump had proxy wrestlers fight against each other.

00:22:35:11 - 00:22:58:01
Abraham Josephine Riesman
And whoever is wrestler one would get to shave the other guy's head. And Vince is always much more willing to make himself the butt of the joke. So he had Trump's wrestler win, and then Trump got to shave Vince McMahon's head on live television. And what's interesting about that whole stretch is not just, oh, isn't it goofy that this guy who became president was in a wrestling show?

00:22:58:01 - 00:23:26:16
Abraham Josephine Riesman
It's prior to that, Trump had spoken to crowds. Certainly. Certainly he had given speeches and such. He'd never worked a wrestling crowd and working a wrestling crowd in character. And to advance a storyline is a very specific and unique experience. And you talk to any wrestler, they will tell you. Once you have felt the magic of working a wrestling crowd, you become addicted to it and it becomes something that you can't put away.

00:23:27:04 - 00:23:49:20
Abraham Josephine Riesman
And I think that the Trump rather learned a lot about how to work a rally crowd from working at WWE. CROWD Because the WWE crowd is interactive. They're vicious, they love red meat. You know, it's like he learned how to get people booing and cheering. And I think there was a huge influence on it. And they are they are friends.

00:23:49:20 - 00:24:13:23
Abraham Josephine Riesman
You know, I talked to Sam Nunberg, the campaign adviser for the 2016 Trump campaign, and he told me on the record during that campaign, there were two human beings on the planet that Trump would take phone calls from only in private, as opposed to what Trump usually did, which was just put anybody, be they a friend or a family member or a world leader on speakerphone and make the whole entourage listen to him showboat.

00:24:14:10 - 00:24:33:06
Abraham Josephine Riesman
You know, there are only two people that he would take calls from in private in confidence. And those two people were Mark BURNETT, the producer of The Apprentice, unsurprising. And Vince McMahon. That's friendship for Trump. That's about as close as it gets to friendship. You keep going because, of course, then Linda was in Trump's cabinet and so on and so forth.

00:24:33:06 - 00:24:35:13
Abraham Josephine Riesman
But that's I think that's the basics of it.

00:24:37:02 - 00:25:11:21
Jordan Uhl
So we've talked a lot about the effects and the impacts of Vince McMahon's business, WWE and his relationship with some now prominent Republican politicians. But who is Vince McMahon and this guy, this figure, this larger than life personality in WWE, but also in real life has a a lot of baggage that comes with him. Could you talk about who he is and some of the, you know, major black spots on his reputation?

00:25:13:10 - 00:25:48:13
Abraham Josephine Riesman
Vince McMahon has one of the most interesting Republican backstories that you can possibly imagine because he lived not one, but both of the Republican archetypal back stories. There is the I was born into a great dynasty and there's the I came from nothing. Vince had both. It's very weird because Vince was born to a poor North Carolina woman and a rich child of a wrestling and boxing promoter who then went on to become a rich wrestling promoter himself.

00:25:48:13 - 00:26:33:18
Abraham Josephine Riesman
Vince Senior and Vince Senior abandoned the North Carolina woman, Victoria and his two sons by her, Rod and Vince. Before Vince could have any memory of Vince Senior Vince, he was gone. He was not a presence in Vince like they called him Vinny back then in Vinny's life for the first 12 years of his life. Instead, Vinnie was Vinnie Lupton because he was raised by his stepfather, Leo Lupton, who by multiple accounts was a physically abusive father, stepfather, I should say, and eventually, at 12, he meets his real biological father, Vince Senior, basically because Vince seniors second wife, bullied him into meeting his biological children.

00:26:35:11 - 00:26:57:07
Abraham Josephine Riesman
So Vince meets his father, Vinny meets his father and finds out that his father is rich. It's like the story of the peasant girl who finds out that she's actually the the princess of a long the far off kingdom, you know, And she gets and he gets a glimpse of that kingdom. He starts to get to see what his father's life is like and what his father's business is.

00:26:57:07 - 00:27:30:10
Abraham Josephine Riesman
He hadn't had any wrestling interest prior to knowing his father. And that's sort of the origin of it, is he has this hardscrabble abuse, surviving childhood, and then he also has the world kind of handed to him abruptly. Not entirely, though, because his father was his biological father was never very never very nice to him. And that's really the original sin that I think that makes Vince a difficult person in some ways is his father, his biological father didn't think much of it and was very cold to him.

00:27:30:23 - 00:27:45:21
Abraham Josephine Riesman
And Vince thinks the world of his father, to this day, he will say, My father, I loved my father. I fell in love with my father. I was attracted to my father. These are all things he says. But at the same time, all the stories he tells about his father are Here's the time. My father was mad at me.

00:27:45:22 - 00:28:07:10
Abraham Josephine Riesman
Here's when he was disappointed with me. Here's when we had a fight. And I think that complicated relationship with his dad really fuels a lot of the more abusive tendencies that he has, because a lot a lot of these wrestlers will tell you they develop father son relationships with Vince. You know, it's very psychosexual.

00:28:07:16 - 00:28:17:11
Jordan Uhl
This book was one of my favorite books I've read in the past couple of years. I absolutely loved it. And so that it's a New York Times bestseller. So thank you so much for joining us.

00:28:17:19 - 00:28:18:19
Abraham Josephine Riesman
Thank you for having me.

00:28:20:11 - 00:28:41:03
David Sirota
That's it for today's show. Thanks again for being a paid subscriber to the lever. As I always say, we could not do this work without you. If you particularly like this episode, please pitch in to our tip jar. The tip jar link is in this episode's description. Or at lever news.com slash tip jar. Every little bit helps us do this kind of journalism.

00:28:41:06 - 00:29:02:11
David Sirota
Oh, one more thing. Be sure to, like, subscribe and write a review for every time on your favorite podcast app. Until next time. I'm David Sirota. Rock the Boat, The Lever Time podcast is the production of the Lever and the Lever Podcast Network. It's hosted by me, David Sirota. Our producer is Frank Cappello with help from the Levers lead producer Jared Zhiqiang Jackhammer.