When Rusev first arrived on the WWE main roster it didn’t take long for him to become a force to be reckoned with. The Bulgarian Brute got some major heat by praising Vladimir Putin and declaring himself the Hero of the Russian Federation.
After singing Putin’s praises for quite some time, the character was randomly dropped and Rusev told Video DIRBG that the 2016 election played a part in WWE’s decision to nix the character.
“It’s true, we keep up and Vince [McMahon] keeps up with what’s going on globally,” Rusev said. “He noticed that tension between Russia and America at the time and that’s when it was decided that I’ll go represent Russia and Putin and whatnot. But things changed, [Donald] Trump was elected as US President and he is a WWE Hall Of Famer etc.”
He also went on to say that people got to see another side of him which led to the creation of Rusev Day.
“‘Also people saw more [of me] from Total Divas and we started trying different stuff and we struck gold with ‘Rusev Day’ two years ago. It started kind of as a joke. After Randy Orton beat me in 10 seconds and I beat him back the following week it was decided that we’ll throw a celebration and we got the Mayor of Plovdiv to give the key me to the city. Aiden English who is a great singer and actor learned the Bulgarian anthem in a day and sung it and we just started adding ‘Rusev Day’ to everything. That’s when things took off, the [Rusev Day] shirt was the top seller.”
H/T Wrestling Inc.
