Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jesse Ventura, and Our Present Apocalypse

On the last day of the Trump administration, a look at how we got here through the lens of two celebrity officeholders who preceded him.

Welcome to Sports Stories, a newsletter that explores sports and history at the intersection of everything. If you’re not already a subscriber, you can sign up here. 

This issue of Sports Stories is being sent out on Tuesday, January 19th, 2020, the last full day of Donald Trump’s presidency. This is obviously a historically significant moment -- and it’s been hard for me to think about anything else. But at the same time, it’s impossible to write about these past four years (or four weeks) with the kind of zoomed out perspective that the subjects of this newsletter usually allow for. 

One thing I’ve been thinking about lately is just how stupid the past four years have been. Whatever line that might have once existed between our dumbest collective distractions and our most high minded societal values has obviously been totally obliterated. Or, more accurately, the lie that such a line ever existed in the first place has been obliterated. 

A lot of writers like to dismiss Trump as the “reality TV” president. But I don’t really see him that way. To me, Donald Trump is more of a Sports Entertainment President. In addition to the racism and the corruption and the incompetence, the essence of the whole Trump deal has been the soap opera: machismo and palace intrigue and the vanquishing of enemies. It’s been a WWE presidency for reasons that go well beyond Linda McMahon’s presence in the cabinet. 

Maybe once upon a time we could fool ourselves into believing that we could confine our basest instincts to entertainment. After all, everyone’s gotta blow off steam. There was a place for dumb fun stuff and a place for serious business. But the West Wing was just a TV show, and Donald Trump really has been president for the past four years. It’s not a surprise to me that one of the most insightful comments about the Trump years came before he was actually elected from Darren Rovell, a reporter who is the human embodiment of the sport/business/entertainment singularity:

Darren Rovell @darrenrovell

i feel bad for our country. But this is tremendous content.

This week we’re going to tell the story of two Trump critics with especially loud voices: a pair of guys who in the past week have compared the Capitol riots to Kristallnacht and Trump himself to Charles Manson -- but whose own unlikely political careers should have clued us in on what was to come. 

Once upon a time, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jesse “the Body” Ventura were dear friends. They were both self-made men who rose from obscurity to become beloved American originals competing in relatively obscure sports. They got famous, fought killer aliens, and won governorships. Now they apparently no longer speak to one another. But let’s look at how we got here: the giant muscles, the pop culture superstardom, the shocking political ascents, and in particular the three movies that they appeared in together. 

Predator, 1987

One thing that’s wild about Arnold and Jesse is that by the time they first met on the set of Predator in 1986, they were both already well beyond the first acts of their careers. They were both closing in on 40 years old. Arnold won his first Mr. Olympia title way back in 1970. He had been featured in the documentary Pumping Iron in 1977. Ventura had been a Navy frogman, an early member of the Mongols motorcycle club, a bodyguard for the Rolling Stones, and of course, a charismatic professional wrestler.

While filming Predator in Mexico, the two became fast friends. Ventura wrote later on that Arnold was the most focused person he had ever met. Arnold taught Jesse how to negotiate in Hollywood and pulled off an outrageously quaint prank that ended with him humiliating Jesse about the size of their biceps. In return, Jesse teased Arnold over his coming marriage to Maria Shriver. 

From the footage of them on set with Carl Weathers and company, you don’t get the sense that either man is on his way to a career in politics (though this was the tail end of the Reagan era, so perhaps we should have seen it coming). Running for office wasn’t something they talked about amongst themselves either in between shooting giant guns at the robot alien and delivering impeccable action movie lines. But Arnold and Ventura shared a deep mutual respect: an insatiable curiosity and ambition, and a capacity to think bigger than one might expect of a bodybuilder and pro wrestler. 

By the time they were shooting Predator, Arnold had also already committed to star in his next movie: a post-apocalyptic thriller about America in the distant future. He told his new buddy Ventura that there was a part in it that would be perfect for him.

The Running Man, 1987

So The Running Man is set in the year 2017. It’s about a broken America that has devolved into a police state where everybody seems to have fallen under the spell of a charismatic and evil game show host. There’s fake news, there’s state-sponsored violence, there’s savagely and cleverly manipulated video. 

This stuff is pretty universal for sci-fi (it’s based on a pseudonymous Stephen King novel). But still, it hits closer to home than one might expect -- especially the game show aspect. In retrospect, maybe the whole newsletter this week should have been about The Running Man. After all, it’s also a sports movie. (The sport is running away from killer action dudes in a closed course on abandoned LA streets and then dispatching them in increasingly creative ways.)

The details of the movie don’t matter that much. Arnold delivers some tremendous lines as a runner. Ventura plays Captain Freedom, the show’s star stalker who nobly wants to kill runners with his bare hands and refuses to resort to using gimmicky weapons like razor-sharp hockey sticks, flamethrowers, and chainsaws.

The thing about The Running Man is that it’s dated and corny and sexist and the plot doesn’t really work. But it’s also a movie about a society where it’s hard to tell the truth from fiction because reality is always being manipulated by someone with an agenda and the world is constantly bombarded with bullshit. The revolution isn’t just televised, it happens on the set of a reality TV show. Ironically, this is the kind of stuff that Ventura and (and to a lesser extent Arnold) would talk about when they ran for office. Ventura still talks about it.

Batman and Robin, 1997

A decade after The Running Man, Arnold and Jesse reunited for a single scene in this glorious, terrible movie. An incredible thing to think about: by the time he played a prison guard who got charmed and killed by Uma Thurman as Poison Ivy, Ventura had already served a term as mayor of his Minneapolis suburb, Brooklyn Park, Minnesota. The year after Batman & Robin was released, Ventura was elected governor of Minnesota. Arnold flew in for the inauguration in sub-zero temperatures*. Then just after Ventura left office in 2003, Arnold was elected himself in California. 

*Sadly I found no evidence that Arnold made any Mr. Freeze jokes at the Ventura inauguration.

The Aftermath

The two men had different politics. Ventura was a Reform party member who pretty much ignored every single political norm. Arnold was a moderate Republican who embraced those norms in a way that was so sincere it was almost hilarious (the Terminator in a navy blue blazer just never looked right). But they shared a few things too: a taste for bad jokes, social positions that were more liberal than their parties, and a deep understanding that the whole thing is really just theater. But to their credit -- and unlike Trump -- they both seem to have made a legit effort at their jobs. They proved that you can be an amateur and a celebrity and if you care about other human beings even a tiny bit, also escape elected office with no less scorn and no less damage inflicted than the average politician.

It’s also clear that the elections of Ventura and Arnold had an impact on Trump. When he was considering a third party run in 2000, Trump actually flew out to Minnesota and met with Ventura to learn from him. They were friends, or something approaching friends. During the 2016 Republican primary, Ventura’s old campaign manager said he thought Trump and Ventura were “exactly the same.”

Here’s a video of Jesse Ventura interviewing Donald Trump at Wrestlemania in 2004. There’s some president talk in there too:

Trump also hung out with Arnold. Arnold went on The Apprentice in 2007, and Trump called him a “great friend.” He also gave $10,000 to Arnold’s reelection campaign. Not that this kind of accounting really matters. These were rich and famous guys who ran in rich and famous circles. Plus, it all went to shit anyway.

Ventura stopped speaking to Arnold after the revelations about his adultery. Ventura and his wife had become friends with Maria Shriver as well and took her side in the divorce. Arnold, meanwhile, endorsed John Kasich and then refused to vote for Trump in 2016. Ventura, on the other hand, offered to be Trump’s running mate. (To give you a sense of Ventura’s vibes, he also tried to endorse Bernie Sanders that year but was politely rejected; now Ventura seems to reside firmly in the Bernie camp.)

Anyway, Trump won in 2016. As far as I know, Arnold and Ventura still don’t talk. And considering how specifically their own political careers pointed us toward and presaged these four awful years, there’s some faded out irony in the fact that now, hating Donald Trump is perhaps the one thing that Arnold and Ventura can share. 

At the end of The Running Man, Arnold’s character Ben Richards finds himself alone on the set of the titular game show with its host, the evil Damon Killian, played against type by beloved Family Feud host Richard Dawson. (The movie really is kind of good.) At this point, we’re just waiting for Arnold to strike the final blow, and deliver the last corny line. But before he can, Dawson’s Killian character gets one final monologue, one last change to beg for forgiveness. 

This is television, that’s all it is. It has nothing to do with people, it has to do with the ratings. For 50 years, we’ve told ‘em what to eat, what to drink, what to wear. For Chrissake Ben, don’t you understand? Americans love television. They wean their kids on it. They love game shows, they love wrestling, they love sports and violence. So what do we do? We give ‘em what they want. 

Related Reading

I almost feel guilty sending you down the rabbit holes this story demanded. Here’s a piece from Politico on the feud between Arnold and Trump. Here’s an interview between Ventura and Graham Bensinger where they touch on his relationship with Arnold. And here’s a video of Arnold and Jesse and the infamous bicep size prank on set of Predator:

Also, The Running Man is streaming on Amazon.

Another interesting thing I learned in the course of doing this story was that Arnold and Ventura were not the only elected officials to appear in Batman and Robin. They were joined by Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy. Leahy, who may be running Trump’s impeachment trial soon, apparently is a huge Batman fan, and has made cameos in five different Batman movies, plus wrote the forward to a Batman themed book.

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Eric & Adam