04.27.26
A 'real American'
The aborted attempt on Trump’s life at the Washington Correspondents Association Dinner Saturday night brought to mind another correspondents’ dinner, in 2011, when Trump endured a much gentler, but perhaps far more consequential, attack.
That night, April 30, President Obama soundly and wittily rebuffed Trump’s claims that he should have been disqualified from the presidency because he was not born in the U.S. by making plain the puny qualifications of “the Donald” to do, well, anything serious at all.
“All kidding aside, obviously, we all know about your credentials and breadth of experience,” said the president, warming up. “For example . . . just recently in an episode of ‘Celebrity Apprentice’ . . .”
The comedian Seth Meyers also laid it on: “Donald Trump has been saying that he will run for president as a Republican – which is surprising, since I just assumed that he was running as a joke.” During both these roasts, Trump stared forward, faintly scowling.
Later, the press would circulate the narrative that this was the moment Trump’s presidential musings turned to concrete ambitions — suggesting that Obama may have been unwittingly responsible for what would turn out to be no joke.
The part of Obama’s appearance that is less well known, however, is its introduction. Before the president took the podium, a video montage of patriotic cliches — Uncle Sam, cowboys in the sunset — flashed on the screen, interspersed with the pulsing image of Obama’s birth certificate. The soundtrack was the 1985 rock anthem “Real American,” by Rick Derringer, which was Hulk Hogan’s entrance theme at World Wrestling Entertainment matches.
The refrain: “I am a real American / Fight for the rights of every man / I am a real American / Fight for what’s right / Fight for your life.”
The use of the song was a sly reference to another aspect of Trump’s ridiculousness. A frequent WWE guest and spectator, he bought its flagship franchise, “Monday Night RAW,” in June 2009. At first there was much positive hype. But within a week, the owner had accused Trump of trying to bankrupt the company by going commercial free and refunding tickets and bought RAW back at twice the price.
Hulk Hogan became a MAGA hero, and in 2024, he was a marquee performer at Trump’s closing campaign rally, at Madison Square Garden, two weekends before the election. The event, which the New York Times called “a carnival of grievance, racism and misogyny,” was shocking for its unconstrained bigotry, even in the context of the candidate’s crude racism, ableism, and misogyny.
As the wrestler climbed onto the stage, dressed in a red sleeveless T-shirt and a flame-colored boa and waving an American flag, his theme song blasted over the loudspeakers: “I am a Real American.”
In 2011, an elegant, worldly, witty Black man with a dazzling smile personified what America was and could be. In 2024, the festival of hatred at the Garden presaged both the rhetoric and the policies of Trump II. On display in the middle of the most cosmopolitan city in the U.S. was the current president’s cartoonishly masculine, sadistic, and bigoted idea of what it is to be a real American.