Sad but true, Donald Trump really managed to fight his way into the White House | David Moon

Do you remember World Wrestling Entertainment? For many people, the show, in which muscular wrestlers in tight tights compete in staged fights, is a nostalgic throwback to the early 2000s, when it was briefly broadcast on Channel 4. Today , its mix of soap opera, theater and sports spectacle still attracts millions of viewers every week. For some, it's a guilty pleasure; for others, timeless entertainment. However, few would associate him with the serious world of politics.

But for Donald Trump, professional wrestling is a lifelong passion. His announcement in November that former WWE CEO Linda McMahon would take on the role of education secretary in his cabinet of curiosities was met with shock and disbelief. It is impossible to fully understand American politics today without understanding the importance of professional wrestling.

Long before McMahon's nomination, Trump was the first occupant of the Oval Office to be inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame, an honor that marked his decades-long business relationship with the company. Trump hosted two WrestleManias, WWE's annual flagship event, appeared more than a dozen times on WWE programs, played a leading role in two storylines, and got physical (albeit at a very limited and annoying degree) around the ring itself. It is now widely recognized that professional wrestling is the key to Trump as a political phenomenon. Yet his influence is greater than that of Trump. The struggle has become a key element in understanding the reshaping of American politics itself, particularly of the Republican right.

Just look at the 2024 presidential campaign. Jesse the Body Ventura has been nominated by Robert F Kennedy Jr's campaign as a potential vice presidential candidate. Hulk Hogan ripped off his shirt at the Republican National Convention, rallied Trumpaholics at Madison Square Garden and hinted at a possible role in a future Trump administration on Fox News. For his part, Donald Trump participated in a Fox News segment with former WWE Superstar Tyrus, who called him the People's Champion and gave him a replica title belt. He has joined the podcasts of professional wrestling icon Mark the Undertaker Calloway and current WWE Superstar Logan Paul, and has also received endorsements from Calloway and Glenn Jacobs, better known as Kane of the WWE, the Undertakers storyline brother in a TikTok video.

One explanation for such behavior is simply that it is strategic. A former boxing promoter, Trump has become a reference in combat sports in general, notably in the Ultimate Fighting Championship (which merged with WWE to form the media conglomerate TKO in 2023), whose CEO, Dana White, was one of the first people to take the stage. during his victory speech. By focusing on forms of entertainment largely rejected in polite society, Trump reinforces his anti-establishment stance while appealing to a younger, often politically apathetic, male electorate that populates these fandoms. However, it is professional wrestling that is his natural home. The idea that Trump's professional wrestling experience is used strategically also ties into his infamous campaign rallies. From fireworks and punchy entrance music to carefully choreographed onstage conflicts and spectacles, the atmosphere of these gatherings has often been compared to professional wrestling shows.

Hulk Hogan rips his shirt while speaking at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, July 18, 2024. Photograph: Andrew Kelly/Reuters

Trump frequently resorts to call-and-response chants and indulges in insulting remarks against losers and haters by giving them demeaning nicknames such as Liar Ted, Crooked Hillary and Sleepy Joe. Being part of a professional wrestling audience, much like attending a Trump rally, allows spectators to experience emotions usually forbidden. They can shout, scream and demonstrate their rage in a rare public context where this is socially permitted. Trump rallies are safe spaces where it is acceptable to express emotions: shouting and cheering for your country and its candidate, while expressing hatred toward your political opponents. In 2016, you might think these similarities were a coincidence. Today, the influence of professional wrestling is unavoidable. Watch the post-election footage of Donald Trump emerging to Kid Rocks American Badass the Undertakers' earlier entrance music through the roaring crowd of a recent UFC event and it's impossible not to make the connection .

As the American political sphere transforms into a gigantic arena of professional wrestling, traditional theories and frameworks are inadequate to make sense of events. So we have to look to professional wrestling for answers, particularly the industry-specific concept of kayfabe. Initially a label for the illusion that predetermined performances in professional wrestling were real, today Kayfabe describes the particular way in which fans engage in professional wrestling as a recognized form of performance. In her own insightful writings on professional wrestling and politics, writer and author Abraham Josephine Riesman offers neokayfabe as a label for Trump-inspired Republican strategies that deliberately blur truth and fiction so that producers and consumers lose the ability to distinguish between what is real and what is real. isn't it.

The idea of ​​politics as kayfabe can be taken further. In my view, the relationship between professional wrestling fans and performances is analogous to the way voters engage with contemporary politics more generally. Trump and his supporters constitute an extreme case of a larger phenomenon. Enjoying professional wrestling involves a deliberate suspension of disbelief, whereby fans recognize the theatrical nature of the performance while also investing emotionally in it. Spectators collaborate with the performers by playing the role of believing fans, clapping and booing as convention dictates, embracing the spectacle while recognizing its pretense. In professional wrestling terms, this is called keeping Kayfabe.

This reflects people's engagement with the artifice surrounding contemporary, professionalized politics. We all know, for example, that politicians' speeches are written by speechwriters, based on the findings of focus groups, targeted to specific voter demographics, identified by pollsters and strategists. Yet their supporters suspend their disbelief, applaud conference speeches, and invest emotionally in the sentiments they express, all the while knowing, accepting, and even discussing in detail the calculations underlying their construction. In other words, they keep Kayfabe. Politics increasingly comes down to this: voters playing their role as believing partisans while maintaining a conscious cynicism about the whole spectacle.

So what makes Trump special is not that he personifies pro-wrestling politics, but that his supporters are willing to suspend their disbelief and support his campaign when his falsification is so blatant. If the best our political systems offer their naturally jaded electorates is the ability to suspend their disbelief and maintain kayfabe with a political campaign they view as essentially sham, we shouldn't be shocked that many choose one with an anti – establishment and chaotic performance style (each products of a professional wrestling pedigree). It may be a performance, sure, but at least it's entertaining.

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