Dave Davies

He also finds that her experience with professional wrestling and her volatile husband was good preparation for her turn to MAGA politics.

Zach Helfand became a staff writer at The New Yorker in 2025.

Previously, he was an editor of the magazine's Talk of the Town feature, a member of its fact-checking department, and a reporter for the Los Angeles Times.

His new story is The Executor, How Professional Wrestling Prepared Linda McMahon for Trump's Cabinet.

Zach Helfand, welcome to Fresh Air.

Thanks for having me.

Professional wrestling is more than just battles in the ring with pile driving and swinging chairs.

And this is something that you describe well.

I mean it's also stories, right, with characters and a plot with dialogue in the ring and videos that are shown on the big screens in the arenas of live or recorded confrontations involving the characters.

And you write that Vince McMahon, Linda's husband, played a character in these conflicts that were played out in these arenas.

You want to describe his character?

Oh, boy.

That's getting a crowd into it, I'm sure.

I have a little clip of one of these performances, not the one you described, but it gives us a little bit of a sense.

This is – I think it's the year 2000.

And Linda is – she's not in a coma there.

She's standing up.

She's in the ring with three big wrestlers.

One of them is The Rock, I believe.

And her husband Vince is a few feet away with the two adult children, Stephanie and Shane.