WWE has gone through some major changes over the last few years as the company was sold and Vince McMahon is no longer part of WWE. In the transition Triple H took over WWE creative, but Vince McMahon was still involved for some time.
During an appearance on What Do You Wanna Talk About? with Cody Rhodes, Triple H was asked if he considered WrestleMania 40 to be his first full WrestleMania as the Chief Content Officer, and he opened up about Vince McMahon directing traffic from the side.
“I think so. Though you know there was, and again terrible with times, but it’s not like one day, here it’s yours, and everything else went away, right? There was so many aspects to that of, you know, ‘Hey Vince is stepping away, you’re going to take this spot, but he’s chiming in.’ And where he’s still meeting with me all the time and he’s still, you know, directing traffic from the side and there, there’s no real… It’s a weird, no real clear moment for me, but I would consider it that, yes.”
“The only thing that is difficult in that transition, you’re trying to, at the end of the day when people are like, ‘But it’s your decision, right?’ Yeah, sorta. You know what I mean? Like you’re, you’re ‘Yes.’ And you have to defend your position and you have to be able to sell that to people and explain it to people. It’s a little, but not your position, or a little bit well, ‘Why did this happen?’ And you don’t wanna say, ‘Well because you know, it wasn’t totally my decision.’ Or, and not because you don’t want to seem like you don’t have that power, but like you’re, you have to position it that way.”
“There’s so many aspects to what we do, where you know, you’re putting something out there and in some manner, you’re like in an ideal world, I would do this. We don’t live in an ideal world. We live in a realistic world where I can’t do that because of this, and I can’t do that because of this, and I can’t move this here. It can be something as simple as these two people don’t get along, or I know this person has an injury, that I can’t put all that there. Whatever the moment, the sequence, the scenario is, there’s so many factors to all of it. I wish it was as simple as what people think when they just go, ‘Why don’t they just do this?’ I wish it was that simple. I really do.”