This week, after Donald Trump appeared on wrestling legend The Undertaker's podcast and Trump transition team co-chair Linda McMahon was sued for allowing sexual abuse to happen during her tenure as CEO of WWE, I thought back to a project I undertook but never finished four years ago: American Heel, a podcast about Donald Trump's history with professional wrestling and how Trump's presidency made everything professional wrestling.

The cover art for American Heel, which I commissioned from the incredible Aesthetic Apparatus.

I started reporting out the podcast in the summer of 2020. Stuck inside, a pandemic raging and a presidential election approaching, I wanted to focus on something that felt relevant and tangible and would take my mind off of the daily Covid body count.

As the shape of the podcast began to come together—eight episodes that would chronicle everything from Trump's long history with professional wrestling to the intertwined finances of the McMahon family and the Trump Foundation to the way that wrestling concepts like the promo and kayfabe have infiltrated politics and journalism—it was clear to me that it was an undertaking that was going to need a budget and a few more skilled hands to pull off.

So I started shopping it around, holding zoom meetings with a bunch of podcast networks. To help the conversations along, and to acknowledge that the turnaround was going to be tight, I cut together a rough cut of the first episode (and started on a cut of the second episode, which in the process thought might actually become the first). Everyone turned it down, largely because they were accustomed to year-long production windows and also because, to a person, nobody thought there would be any interest in Donald Trump once the 2020 election was over.

Well here we are four years later, we're a week away from the third election where he's the Republican candidate, and everything feels eerily similar to back when I was getting American Heel turned down. If anything, what once felt like subtext has become text: Donald Trump's walk-on music has become the Undertaker's dark theme, Rest in Peace.

And so I actually listened back to those two rough cuts I put together, and there's a lot of really interesting stuff there. Sure some things feel dated (lots of covid references) and other elements beg for an update (Vince McMahon, the head of the WWE for decades was forced out amid growing sexual abuse scandals of his own), but the fundamental concept still feels solid. Listening back, it felt like a missed opportunity to have these tracks just sitting on my backup drive.

So guess what? This blog is called "Unfinished Business," which is sort of an arbitrary title, but of the many things that I've started and not finished, American Heel is probably the one I regret the most. So I'm going to release the two rough cuts I put together back in 2020, now, here on this blog.

A few caveats: These are rough cuts, please understand that. The mix is choppy, my narration read is temp (and I reread lines a few times), there is no music, and there are a lot more audio cues that would have been dropped into a final, polished edit.

OK, that out of the way, here we go.

Episode One: No Chance in Hell. How the “Battle of the Billionaires” storyline from Wrestlemanie 23 became the defining GIF of Trump’s early presidency.

• I wanted to make the first episode a bottle episode that would sort of encapsulate the whole thesis of the show in a single episode, as well as enmesh the listener in the world of pro-wrestling. This episode featured interviews with Open Mike Eagle, Wrestling Observer Newsletter head Dave Meltzer, CNN's Brian Stelter, and meme expert Kenyatta Cheese. Keep in mind, all of these were completed four years ago.

Episode Two: Know Your Role. A deep dive into Trump’s campaign rallies and how they borrow from the art of the promo, the interview a wrestler gives to fire up the crowd.

• If there's a thesis statement to all this, it's this episode. And, I think if there's a thesis episode to the entire political landscape the US is in, it's in the quote from writer Dave Schilling that closes the episode. This episode features interviews with the aforementioned Dave Schilling, wrestler RJ City (who has since gone on to be an on-air interviewer for AEW), and political journalist Olivia Nuzzi (who has very recently become embroiled in controversy of her own. Note that this episode is topped by some audio from me, it's directed to a handful of folks that I sent the episode to for early notes.

I guess since I'm just laying this all out, here were the other episodes in the lineup:

• Episode Three: You’re Fired. How Trump’s relationship with the WWE began with hosting two Wrestlemanias at the Trump Plaza in Atlantic City, and what happened to Atlantic City afterwards.

• Episode Four: The Family Business. On this episode we flip the script and investigate the McMahon family, the owners of the WWE and, surprisingly, the largest donors to the Trump Foundation.

• Episode Five: Monday Night Wars. The story of how wrestling once dominated cable TV ratings and how it was knocked from its throne by Fox News.

• Episode Six: Kayfabe. A look at how the White House — and the journalists who cover it — have adopted the wrestling art of kayfabe, the fiction that sells the story.

• Episode Seven: Rock Bottom. A journey into the darker corners of the internet, where four years of Trump inflaming emotion through wrestling tropes, has become deadly real.

• Episode Eight: The Brawl for All. With the presidential electon imminent, a look at how wrestling’s greatest hits have influenced the campaigns and how even if Trump is voted out, wrestling isn’t leaving our politics

Not everything gets released, I get it. But it's nice to finally have some of this out here, even in rough form. Thanks to everyone that did interviews way back when, including the 4-5 interviews I did for other episodes that never got cut together. And thanks to all of you for listening to these roughs.