Wrestling icon Mick Foley has spilled on why Donald Trump’s response to the killings of director Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele, led him to distance himself from WWE due to its relationship with the president.
“Belittling the man who just died, somehow tying it into Reiner’s dislike of Donald Trump — for me, that was the ball-peen hammer tap that broke the windshield,” said Foley on Tuesday’s episode of “The Ariel Helwani Show.”
Foley — a Trump critic known for personas like Cactus Jack, Mankind and Dude Love during his WWE Hall of Fame career — declared that he wouldn’t be making appearances for the company so long as Trump was in office, calling the president’s reaction to the Reiners’ killings as the “final straw” for him in a statement to social media last year.
“Just heartless, unbelievably cruel comments coming from the most powerful man in the world finding joy in how somebody died,” said Foley of Trump in his interview with Helwani.
Foley pointed to WWE’s “very cozy” relationship with Trump, who was also inducted into its Hall of Fame, and noted that several people associated with the company surrounded the president in the Oval Office last year.
Foley went on to note that, though he wasn’t “technically employed” by WWE, his name had been associated with the company for three decades, and he had a “legends deal” (a contract for retired talent).
“I felt like… I was complicit in my silence. So I did speak up,” said Foley, who has decided not to renew the deal that expires at the end of June.
Foley said that he’s given up “two really easy, very high-paying jobs” during the week of WrestleMania, the company’s premier event, to instead work 24 hours on his own to make what he could’ve made in six hours.
He stressed that he’s OK with his decision.
“Everyone, I think, has to make a decision that’s right for them and, in my case, I just didn’t want to be in the position where my grandchildren are asking what their grandfather was doing when things were really tough,” he continued.
“I made the move that I felt was right for me and I love that company. I’m not going to disparage them. But it didn’t seem like a good fit. It didn’t seem like a fit that would allow me to look at myself in the mirror before I went to bed.”
