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The Definitive History Of That Time Donald Trump Took A Stone Cold Stunner

The Definitive History Of That Time Donald Trump Took A Stone Cold Stunner
Photo illustration: Damon Dahlen/HuffPost; Photos: Getty/Reuters
Photo illustration: Damon Dahlen/HuffPost; Photos: Getty/Reuters

Stone Cold Steve Austin was waiting calmly in the bowels of Detroit’s Ford Field when a frantic Vince McMahon turned the corner.

WrestleMania 23’s signature event was just minutes away. Austin and McMahon would soon bound into the stadium, where they’d be greeted by fireworks, their respective theme songs and 80,000 people pumped for “The Battle of the Billionaires,” a match between two wrestlers fighting on behalf of McMahon and real estate mogul Donald Trump.

McMahon, the founder and most prominent face of World Wrestling Entertainment, had spent months before the April 1, 2007, event putting the storyline in place. Trump, then known primarily as the bombastic host of “The Apprentice,” had appeared on a handful of WWE broadcasts to sell the idea that his two-decade friendship with McMahon had collapsed into a bitter “feud.” They had spent hours rehearsing a match with many moving parts: two professional wrestlers in the ring, two camera-thirsty characters outside it, and in the middle, former champ Stone Cold serving as the referee.

The selling point of The Battle of the Billionaires was the wager that Trump and McMahon had placed on its outcome a month earlier during “Monday Night Raw,” WWE’s signature prime time show. Both Trump and McMahon took great pride in their precious coifs, and so the winner of the match, they decided, would shave the loser’s head bald right there in the middle of the ring.

But now, at the last possible moment, McMahon wanted to add another wrinkle.

“Hey, Steve,” McMahon said, just out of Trump’s earshot. “I’m gonna see if I can get Donald to take the Stone Cold stunner.”

Austin’s signature move, a headlock takedown fueled by Stone Cold’s habit of chugging cheap American beer in the ring, was already part of the plan for the match. But Trump wasn’t the intended target.

Austin and McMahon approached Trump and pitched the idea.

“I briefly explained how the stunner works,” Austin said. “I’m gonna kick him in the stomach ― not very hard ― then I’m gonna put his head on my shoulder, and we’re gonna drop down. That’s the move. No rehearsal, [decided] right in the dressing room, 15 minutes before we’re gonna go out in front of 80,000 people.”

Trump’s handler was appalled, Austin said. Trump wasn’t a performer or even a natural athlete. Now, the baddest dude in wrestling, a former Division I college football defensive end with tree trunks for biceps, wanted to drop him with his signature move? With no time to even rehearse it? That seemed … dangerous.

“He tried to talk Donald out of it a million ways,” Austin said.

But Trump, without hesitation, agreed to do it.

The man who became the 45th president of the United States in January has a history with Vince McMahon and WWE that dates back more than two decades, to when his Trump Plaza hotel in Atlantic City hosted WrestleManias IV and V in 1988 and 1989. The relationship has continued into Trump’s presidency. On Tuesday, the Senate confirmed the nomination of Linda McMahon ― Vince’s wife, who helped co-found WWE and served as its president and chief executive for 12 years ― to head the Small Business Administration.

After Trump launched his presidential campaign with an escalator entrance straight out of the wrestling playbook, journalists began pointing to his two-decade WWE career to help explain his political appeal. WWE, in one telling, was where Trump first discovered populism. According to another theory, wrestling was where he learned to be a heel ― a villainous performer loved by just enough people to rise to the top, despite antics that make many people hate him.

To those who were present, though, The Battle of the Billionaires is more an outrageous moment in wrestling history than an explanation of anything that happened next. No one in the ring that night thought Trump would one day be president. But now that he is, they look back and laugh about the time the future commander-in-chief ended up on the wrong side of a Stone Cold stunner.

Donald Trump, Stone Cold Steve Austin and Vince McMahon spent months promoting The Battle of the Billionaires.
Jamie McCarthy/WireImage via Getty Images
Donald Trump, Stone Cold Steve Austin and Vince McMahon spent months promoting The Battle of the Billionaires.

‘To Get To The Crescendo, You’ve Got To Go On A Journey’

Professional wrestling is, at its core, a soap opera and a reality TV spectacle, and its best storylines follow the contours of both: A hero squares off with a heel as the masses hang on their fates.

The Battle of the Billionaires was the same tale, played out on wrestling’s biggest stage. WrestleMania is WWE’s annual mega-event. It commands the company’s largest pay-per-view audiences and biggest crowds. At WrestleMania, WWE’s stars compete in high-stakes matches ― including the WWE Championship ― and wrap up loose ends on stories developed during weekly broadcasts of “Monday Night Raw” and special events over the previous year. Even before Trump, WrestleMania had played host to a number of celebrity interlopers, including boxer Mike Tyson and NFL linebacker Lawrence Taylor.

Building a story ― and, for Trump, a character ― fit for that stage required months of work that started with Trump’s initial appearance on “Monday Night Raw” in January 2007. He would show up on “Raw” at least two more times over the next two months, with each appearance raising the stakes of his feud with McMahon and setting up their battle at WrestleMania on April 1.

“The Battle of the Billionaires, and all the hyperbole, was the crescendo,” said Jim Ross, the longtime voice of WWE television commentary. “But to get to the crescendo, you’ve got to go on a journey and tell an episodic story. That’s what we did with Donald.”

Creating a feud between Trump and McMahon, and getting wrestling fans to take Trump’s side, wasn’t actually a huge challenge. McMahon “was the big-shot boss lording over everybody,” said Jerry “The King” Lawler, a former wrestler and Ross’ sidekick in commentary. It was a role McMahon had long embraced: He was the dictator wrestling fans loved to hate.

Bobby Lashley, Trump's wrestler in the match, was a rising star who'd go on to challenge for the WWE championship after The Battle of the Billionaires.
Leon Halip/WireImage via Getty Images
Bobby Lashley, Trump's wrestler in the match, was a rising star who'd go on to challenge for the WWE championship after The Battle of the Billionaires.

Trump was never going to pull off the sort of character that McMahon’s most popular foes had developed. He wasn’t Austin’s beer-chugging, south Texas everyman. And vain and cocky as he might be, he never possessed the sexy swagger that made Shawn Michaels one of the greatest in-ring performers in pro wrestling history.

But rain money on people’s heads, and they’ll probably love you no matter who you are. So that’s what Trump did.

Trump’s first appearance on “Monday Night Raw” came during an episode that centered on McMahon, who was throwing himself the sort of self-celebratory event that even The Donald might find overly brash. As McMahon showered the crowd with insults and they serenaded him with boos, Trump’s face appeared on the jumbotron and money began to fall from the sky.

“Look up at the ceiling, Vince,” Trump said as fans grasped at the falling cash. “Now that’s the way you show appreciation. Learn from it.”

In true Trump fashion, the money wasn’t actually his. It was McMahon’s. But the fans didn’t know that.

The folks with slightly fatter wallets than they’d had moments before loved the contrast between the two rich guys. One was the pompous tyrant. The other might have been even wealthier and just as prone to outlandish behavior, but Trump was positioned as the magnanimous billionaire, the one who understood what they wanted.

“That went over pretty well, as you can imagine, dropping money from the sky,” said Scott Beekman, a wrestling historian and author. “Trump was the good guy, and he got over because of how hated McMahon was. Vince McMahon played a fantastic evil boss and was absolutely hated by everyone. So anyone who stood up to McMahon at that point was going to get over well.”

The wrestlers that each billionaire chose to fight for them also bolstered the narrative. Umaga, McMahon’s representative, was an emerging heel who had gone undefeated for most of 2006. “A 400-pound carnivore,” as Ross described him on TV, he was a mountainous Samoan whose face bore war paint and who barely spoke except to scream at the crowd.

Trump’s guy, on the other hand, was Bobby Lashley, a former Army sergeant who might have been cut straight from a granite slab. Lashley was the good-looking, classically trained college wrestler, the reigning champion of ECW (a lower-level WWE property). Even his cue-ball head seemed to have muscles.

Another selling point for the match: the wrestler who won would likely emerge as a top contender to challenge for the WWE title.

Then McMahon added another twist ― as if the match needed it. He enlisted Austin, a multi-time champion who had retired in 2003, as a guest referee.

“It sounded like an easy gig, sounded like a fun gig,” Austin said. “It didn’t take a whole lot of convincing. The scope of Donald Trump … would bring a lot of eyeballs. A chance to do business with a high-profile guy like that sounded like a real fun deal.”

The minute Austin signed up, Trump should have known that despite his “good guy” posture, he, too, was in trouble. When Stone Cold entered the ring at “Raw” to promote the match, he introduced himself to The Donald with a stern warning.

“You piss me off,” Austin said, “I’ll open up an $8 billion can of whoop ass and serve it to ya, and that’s all I got to say about that.”

‘We Thought We Were Shittin’ The Bed’

The opening lines of the O’Jays’ 1973 hit “For the Love of Money” ― also the theme song for Trump’s “Celebrity Apprentice” ― rang out of Ford Field’s loudspeakers a few minutes after Trump and Austin’s impromptu meeting backstage. It was time for Trump to make his way to the ring.

“Money, money, money, money, money,” the speakers blared. Trump emerged. The crowd erupted, and cash, even more than had fallen during his previous appearances, cascaded from the ceiling like victory confetti.

“There was a ton of money that had been dropped during Donald Trump’s entrance,” said Haz Ali, who, under the name Armando Estrada, served as Umaga’s handler. “There was about $20, $25,000 that they’d dropped. … Every denomination ― 1s, 5s, 10s, 20s.”

Lashley appeared next, bounding into the ring without the help of the stairs the others had needed.

For months, McMahon and Trump had sold the story of this match. Now, as Umaga and Lashley stood face to face in the ring, it was time to deliver.

The match started fairly routinely, perhaps even a bit slowly.

“I’m seeing it the same as anyone else who’s watching it,” said Ross, the commentator, who regularly skipped rehearsals to ensure matches would surprise him. “The entire arena was emotionally invested in the storyline. Once they got hooked in it months earlier, now they want the payout.”

On the TV broadcast, it’s obvious that the crowd was hanging on every twist, eager to see which of the two billionaires would lose his hair and how Austin ― famous for intervening in matches and now at the dead center of this one ― might shape it.

But Ford Field, an NFL stadium, is massive compared to the arenas that had hosted previous WrestleManias. Even with 80,000 people packed in, it was difficult to read the crowd from inside the ring.

Me and Vince keep looking back and forth at each other like, ‘Man, this match is not successful because the crowd is not reacting,’” Austin recalled. “We thought we were shittin’ the bed.”

Trump, for all his usual braggadocio, wasn’t helping.

From outside the ring, McMahon ― a professional performer if there ever was one ― was selling even the most minor details of the match. He was haranguing Austin, instructing Umaga and engaging the crowd all at once. Trump was stiff. His repeated cries of “Kick his ass, Bobby!” and “Come on, Bobby!” came across as stale and unconvincing.

“It’s very robotic, it’s very forced, and there’s no genuine emotion behind it,” said Ali, who had been power-slammed by Lashley early in the match and was watching from the dressing room. “He was just doing it to do it. Hearing him say, ‘Come on, Bobby!’ over and over again ― it didn’t seem like he cared whether Bobby won or lost. That’s the perspective of a former wrestler and entertainer.”