Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, who, in his wrestling-heel voice, referred to fans in Salt Lake City “inbred” and called fans in Glendale, Ariz., “cactus-loving crackheads,” won’t be endorsing Joe Biden in the 2024 presidential race, because his 2020 endorsement caused “division.”
This kind of political fiction, indeed, is stranger than wrestling kayfabe.
“The takeaway after that, after months and months and months, I started to realize, like, ‘Oh, man, that caused an incredible amount of division in our country,'” Johnson told Fox News chucklebum Will Cain in an interview last week.
“My goal is to bring our country together. I believe in that, in my DNA. So, in the spirit of that, there’s going to be no endorsement,” Johnson said.
This is reminiscent of Michael Jordan’s infamous “Republicans buy sneakers, too” line, when MJ was asked in 1990 about the race between Harvey Gantt, the Black Charlotte mayor, and Republican Sen. Jesse Helms, a segregationist, and why he wasn’t getting involved on Gantt’s behalf.
Johnson’s update, in essence, is, The MAGA crowd watches my bad superhero movies and buys overpriced tickets to watch me talk rather than wrestle, too.
The key way you can tell it’s more than even that: he talked to Cain, from Donald Trump’s favorite morning TV show, “Fox & Friends,” about how “cancel culture, woke culture, this culture, that culture division, et cetera, that really bugs me.”
The pro-wrestling crowd, in particular, skews conservative, or rather, MAGA, whatever MAGA is on the ideological scale, so this is almost certainly Johnson not wanting to get the couple of million people a week who watch “Raw” and “Smackdown” to change the channel when he’s cutting promos.
It ain’t about him not wanting to cause “division.”
As he delivered his signature “finally, The Rock has come back to …” promos in Utah and Arizona, he riffed in Salt Lake City about how the men in the crowd and their “50 wives will have a story to tell … your 600 inbred grandchildren one day, and that is what it’s like to look at greatness in the flesh,” and then to the crowd in Glendale, a suburb of Phoenix, which he called “the #1 city in America for cocaine and meth use,” he said, “finally you cactus-loving crackheads finally have something worth shooting in your veins as you sit and you look at greatness.”
Even among wrestling observers who knew what Johnson was doing, this was pushing the limits, given Johnson’s status as a top Hollywood draw.
But now Johnson wants us to believe that it somehow hurt his soul to have gotten a few people torqued at him for endorsing the pro-democracy guy over the wannabe-dictator guy in 2020, so he’s sitting this one out.
It’s really about him wanting to make a few more bucks, but anyway, duly noted.
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Chris Graham
