Jim Cornette, your favorite wrestling podcaster, based on the weekly ratings, and mine, based on how many minutes I tune in each week, let his blind spot on AEW get to him again, this time over Mick Foley, WWE and Donald Trump.
Cornette, on a pod this week, questioned how Foley reconciles quitting WWE over its association with Donald Trump with Shad Khan, the father of AEW founder, owner and booker Tony Khan, being a “quiet Trumper.”
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What seems to have happened here is, Corny saw a post from wrestling YouTuber Alfred Konuwa, provocatively titled “Mick Foley’s AEW Deal Proves He’s Full of Shit,” and just ran with it.
From that post:
After a public protest against WWE due to their ties to Donald Trump, Mick Foley ran to Atlanta to sign with Turner Broadcasting and AEW despite the fact that the Khan family donated $1 million to Trump in 2017. This is a teachable moment of what happens when somebody establishes a belief system with a strong public stance, only to play backpedal gang and contradict that same set of beliefs that nobody even asked about to begin with. Mick Foley is not an advocate. He’s not an ally. He’s a glorified stuntman. Ric Flair’s words, AND mine.
When you look at Konuwa’s other posts on the wrestling business, it’s clear that he’s a fan of the WWE brand of ‘rasslin, which, fine, to borrow from a favorite Cornette line, for the kind of people who like that kind of thing, that’s the kind of thing those people will like.
Fact-check: Shad Khan did contribute $1 million to the Trump campaign in 2016. And then, very publicly broke with him, first over Trump’s attacks on the NFL – Khan owns the Jacksonville Jaguars – then in 2020 over social-justice issues in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd.
Among Shad Khan’s political statements and actions since the 2016 campaign:
- He said Trump’s attacks on the NFL are “about money, or messing with, trying to soil a league or a brand that he’s jealous of,” speculating, like a lot of us do, that Trump continually whines about the NFL because the league’s owners denied his bid to buy the Buffalo Bills in 2014.
- Khan said “what [Trump] has done is shown leadership as the great divider, not uniter. We are used to being warm and fuzzy and cuddled. Well, it’s a different time.”
- When Trump blasted NFL players who knelt during the national anthem before games to bring attention to racial injustice, Khan “met with our team captains prior to the game to express my support for them, all NFL players and the league following the divisive and contentious remarks made by President Trump, and was honored to be arm in arm with them, their teammates and our coaches during our anthem.”
- In an essay written at the height of the Black Lives Matter protest movement, Khan wrote that “being a Muslim-American made me a frequent target of prejudice, discrimination and hatred. I won’t claim to know what it means to be a young African American today, but I can speak honestly and painfully to my own experiences as a person of color for the past 53 years in this country. Even recently, I have had people spew racist language in my presence when talking about other people of color — apparently ignorant of my ethnicity. Change for all people of color in the United States is long overdue, and it must happen now.”
- More recently, Khan signaled his support for the 2027 re-election effort of Jacksonville Mayor Donna Deegan, a Democrat.
Shad Khan, Tony Khan, Genghis Khan, Shaka Khan – nobody named Khan or anything else needs me to defend them.
One issue here is, just taking somebody on the interwebs’ word on something, without considering their motivations.
Another: Corny wears his political heart on his sleeve, and he’s about as anti-Trump as you’re going to see from somebody who makes a living in and around the wrestling business.
I’m with him on the anti-Trump thing, but where I break away is, I don’t want to brand people who were Trump supporters and have since come to see the light with a Scarlet Letter, basically, those folks are forever irredeemable.
I don’t think that’s what Cornette is doing here, it’s definitely not what Alfred Konuwa is doing here – Konuwa doesn’t like the AEW brand of wrestling, and feels it’s his job as an influencer to run interference for his favored brand, WWE, which, again, fine, it’s a free country.
Corny’s issue is more deep-seated – Tony Khan met with Cornette before launching AEW in 2019, and Cornette is frustrated that TK doesn’t run his company the way he would, if he were the son of a billionaire.
Any and every opportunity to make TK and his AEW brand look bad, Cornette takes.
I called it his blind spot in the lede to this column for a reason.
I need to be careful myself trying to paint the Khans as being social-justice warriors, but for billionaires interested in providing an alternative in the wrestling business to WWE, they’re probably about as good as we’re going to get.
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Chris Graham
