“I consider this to be my greatest honour of all,” Donald Trump said in April 2013, as he was inducted into the World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) Hall of Fame at Madison Square Garden. The President-elect would presumably now rank twice being voted into the Oval Office as a greater honour than entering wrestling’s celebrated pantheon, yet the remark demonstrated the critical importance of combat sports in his life and work.

The love Trump has for the sport has certainly been reciprocated by devotees of wrestling and bodybuilding who passionately supported his landslide victory over Kamala Harris last week. Those who have studied the links between Trump and professional wrestling testify to the role the sport played in getting him back into the White House. “Everybody likes to attribute The Apprentice for his media exposure but Donald Trump learnt a lot how to interact with the public and how to do so much stuff from wrestling,” says Dr Shannon Bow O’Brien, a presidency scholar at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of Donald Trump and the Kayfabe Presidency: Professional Wrestling Rhetoric in the White House [Kayfabe is the wrestling convention of presenting scripted and staged performances as real]. “Wrestling helped him inform how he sees the world,” she says. “He uses wrestlers’ tactics, their tropes and their skills – he never apologises, always forcefully doubles down and he’s never wrong.”

It’s not difficult to see why Trump was drawn to professional wrestling, which is akin to an overblown reality TV musical in a sports stadium setting and where bombastic pronouncements and grand titles are highly valued. In 1988 and 1989, Trump hosted WrestleMania, wrestling’s annual equivalent of the SuperBowl, at the hotel he then owned in Atlantic City. He continued to attend WWE events and feature as part of their narratives, culminating in a bizarre 2007 appearance at what was dubbed Battle of the Billionaires where Trump faced off with WWE CEO and chairman Vince McMahon at WrestleMania 23. The pair battled via proxy fighters with the winner getting to shave the loser’s head. Trump’s wrestler won the bout and McMahon lost his hair. The event became the highest grossing pay-per-view event in wrestling history.