191. WRESTLING WITH DONALD TRUMP - Why We Ignore The Wrestling Connection at Our Peril
To understand Donald Trump, I have always said, you have to understand professional wrestling. Trump, after all, has been a long-term fan of, and participant in, professional wrestling. Inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2013, Trump was part of the main event of Wrestlemania 23 and hosted Wrestlemanias IV and V at what was named ‘Trump Plaza’ after his Atlantic City hotel. Arguably, Trump took his iconic ‘you’re fired’ catchphrase from WWE’s own toxic billionaire, Vince McMahon, and McMahon’s wife, Linda, was an actual member of the Trump administration during Trump’s time in office.
Remember, when Trump took the stage at the Republican National Conference this summer, it was after being introduced by Hulk Hogan. In 2016, his much lauded conference entrance borrowed heavily from WWE legend The Undertaker. Trump is an unabashed wrestling mark, whose ‘Make America Great Again’ slogan and merchandise is something right out of a wrestling gimmick. In 2016, when he led chants of ‘lock her up’, or used one of his many demeaning nicknames for his opponents, this was something anyone familiar with a wrestling promo had seen a million times before. Even Trump’s xenophobic, jingoistic anti-immigrant rhetoric is right out of the WWE’s playbook. Over the years any ‘foreign’ wrestler was painted as the bad guy, or ‘heel’. German, Japanese, Russian, Iranian, Iraqi… A flag waving American ‘babyface’ would always ultimately put the cartoonish ‘other’ in their place with a 1 - 2- 3 after several months of build-up which depicted the non-American character as a despicable monster.
One could even say Trump’s return in 2024 is another classic move from professional wrestling. In the old territory system, when wrestlers grew stale, they would leave one territory and wrestle in another so that, in their absence, their old fans would miss them and grow eager for their return. In the modern era, the absence usually takes just missing a few weeks or months of TV. But any wrestler knows that when your gimmick gets old and the fans turn away (or you lose an election) taking some time away from the cameras is always a good move if you want to plan an epic return and restore the shine that had waned on your tired old bag of tricks. After being gone for a few months, the same fans who had once grown bored of your predictable matches now cheer with nostalgic enjoyment as you dust off the same old catchphrases and manoeuvres they hadn’t realised they missed. With a few of these well-timed absences from TV and dramatic returns you can squeeze out several more years of appeal even long after your sell-by date has been passed.
Even no-selling the 2020 election loss is a wrestling thing to do. Heels never admit defeat. It was always a crooked referee or unfair advantage that the babyface had on them which caused them to lose the big match. Bobby Heenan was a master of doing this on commentary for his stable of clients. An apologist for every big loss with an ‘alternative truth’ to sell to the audience. The January 6th insurrection might be seen as a case of what happens if the fans actually believe the lies of the heels. Or it might be seen as another classic wrestling response. A big publicity stunt to promote an agenda. After all, when WWE were losing their ratings war with WCW in the 1990s they drove a tank full of wrestlers dressed in military garb to the doors of the arena WCW was performing in. Assuming they would not be able to get through security, the wrestlers involved (one of whom now sits at the top of the WWE corporate structure) have since admitted they had no real plan of what to do if they got through. It was just a visual, headline-grabbing, way of showing their opposition to their competitors. (WWE also once ran a pay-per-view called Insurrection, coincidently).
As a wrestling fan of over thirty years, I suspected Trump would win in 2016 because I knew professional wrestling. I knew what got ‘over’ with crowds and what didn’t. I knew an exciting promo when I heard one, and I knew what catchphrases were connecting with an audience. Even though, personally, I was with Hilary (as a dual UK/US citizen, I vote in US elections too and have never voted for Trump, and never will), I knew that the mood music suggested a shocking upset for the Republican. Like the NWO or Stone Cold Steve Austin in their prime, Trump was treading a familiar path as the ‘cool heel’. A character who did deplorable things which, instead of turning the crowd off them, somehow made them appeal only more. An ‘anti-hero’ who ‘told it like it was’ and appeared to ‘speak truth to power’. An outsider. Anti-establishment. A disrupter. When Trump broke all the rules of political convention and human decency in a campaign that seemed to reel from one ‘he’ll never be elected now’ to another ‘surely this is the end’ moment, I was reminded of the edgy, distasteful, and absolutely beloved ‘attitude’ era of WWE. The world was telling us what we were watching was obscene - sexist, homophobic, racist, blasphemous - and we just told them to ‘suck it’ and carried on watching. Trump was courting the same demographic of disaffected 18-35 year old men. With his performer’s instinct of self-promotion and publicity stunts, informed by decades of watching his favourite wrestlers emotionally manipulate their audiences to sell a particular fantasy agenda, Trump got himself over with a tried and tested formula…and the media, the commentators, the politicians who didn’t watch wrestling didn’t see it coming. Like an RKO outta nowhere.
They didn’t see it coming because they didn’t watch wrestling. And why didn’t they watch wrestling? Because wrestling is considered to be lowbrow. Wrestling isn’t seen as being smart or clever. Wrestlers are a bunch of muscled idiots pretending to hit each other while even stupider people cheer them on and don’t even realise the whole thing isn’t real. At least that is the attitude of the many people who don’t actually watch professional wrestling. The idea it isn’t serious, or worthy of concern. That somehow it is the lowest of the low when it comes to forms of entertainment.
I was thinking about this whilst teaching my students about John Stuart Mill’s idea of higher and lower pleasures the other day. Mill makes the case that his fellow utilitarian, Jeremy Bentham, failed to distinguish between higher, intellectual, pleasures and base, lower, pleasures when suggesting that moral goodness comes from maximising pleasure for the most amount of people. Mill asserts that anyone who has experienced both - a competent judge - would always pick the higher pleasures over the lower ones, and so we ought to maximise the higher pleasures of the mind rather than those base, physical ones. ‘Better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied’ says Mill as a response to the utilitarian critics who suggested that the idea of maximising happiness by quantity alone might lead to us simply living the hedonistic life of swine. And the traditional critique of Mill is that his notion is elitist. Mill has picked as his so-called ‘higher’ pleasures the very sort of things people like Mill like. ‘Lower’ pleasures are those things popular only with the lower classes, unlike Mill. Food, drink, sex. Mill’s elitism puts some pleasures in a more privileged category than others, dismissing their appeal as some sort of malignant temptation away from what one truly ought to want. Even a ‘competent judge’ is only truly considered competent by Mill if they opt for one of Mill’s preferred pleasures. The outliers who experience both and still opt for the ‘lower’ pleasure are, he says, to be ignored in favour of the majority elite opinion.
While there is still a strong case to be made that not all pleasures are equal (can we really say the sadistic killer’s joy at torturing their victim ought to be considered equally to the happiness gained from a charitable act of kindness), to create a hierarchy out of competing forms of different entertainment or art can have damaging unforeseen consequences. We have seen this historically, for example, in the myopic canons of literature and philosophy, where non-traditional voices have been excluded because they do not fit some pre-determined image of what ‘higher’ art is ‘supposed’ to look like. Or in the way the poetry of hip hop might be dismissed because it is not found printed on paper in a limited edition journal. My own love of punk has often been sneered at by those who think the only real music is music played by orchestras. But profound emotional responses to punk, hip hop, and intellectual revelation from excluded writers and thinkers occur nevertheless. A life of the mind just as rich as those things stimulated by conventional philosophy, poetry, or music. But ones simply missed by the myopic gatekeepers of high culture.
By being unable to tap into the worldview and taste of the significant number of Americans who enjoy watching professional wrestling, a similar blindspot was created in the mainstream narrative around Trump which completely missed crucial signs that his running in 2016 was a serious threat to the Democratic campaign. But the problem goes deeper than that. Wrestling, of course, is an epistemological minefield. A place where there is a shared agreement to suspend disbelief and accept as true whatever fictions the on-screen characters present. An arena of non-truth presenting itself as truth and shifting what is real and what is not to suit that particular week’s storyline. Whether it is faking large audience numbers to hype up an event, exaggerated heights and weights of a grapplers to signify what a threat they might be to their opponents, or simply the idea that there is a legitimate grudge between two individuals who, backstage, are really close friends - wrestling is a world where the actual truth has no business being there. Fiction and reality blur lines to serve some promotional purpose and build up hype. But a wrestling fan never expects what they heard on a wrestling show to stand up to serious scrutiny. They know there is no baseline reality to hold onto and learn to just go with the flow.
“These two individuals have never locked up before” a wrestling commentator might say in order to excite the audience about an upcoming match up and a simple Google search will show that the two have fought many times before in different companies and at non-televised live events. The truth doesn’t matter in wrestling. Trump took that sensibility to politics - why should truth matter anymore in this other venue of mass entertainment? Politics as news programming - as television - has never been about the nuts and bolts of running a society. It has always been about wooing public opinion or setting an agenda. Just as wrestling uses its weekly television shows to sell the public a future pay-per-view or premium live event, politicians use the weekly news shows to put across their policy goals and garner public support. By being a fan of WWE (who claim to run ‘the longest running weekly episodic television show in television history’), Trump knows how to use those weekly broadcasts to keep a storyline on the agenda and get an audience wanting more, week after week. And so, when Donald Trump makes his wild claims, exaggerates his ratings or the number of people attending his rallies, outright lies about political facts to build a storyline that served his own political goals, this is, again, just matter of course for your average wrestling fan. They know Trump isn’t trying to tell the truth. He is trying to tell them a story. One which connects with them emotionally and gets them to buy a ticket.
The mainstream blindspot to the norms and lore of professional wrestling explains how the media could have been caught so off guard by Trump in 2016. But as the 2024 election looms and Trump is at it again - still making a mockery of truth, still trying to play a larger than life character so outrageous his fans keep on tuning in each week - I can’t help but wonder why no-one seems to have taken seriously, still, those missed lessons of the past. Why the connection to the workings and dynamics of professional wrestling have not been made more central to the analysis of Trump’s enduring, and seemingly bewildering, success despite his run of criminal convictions and continuing scandal? (Yes - when Trump released merchandise with pictures of his mugshot on it, he was also continuing a tradition stolen from wrestling storylines. Somewhere in my closet I still have an old Mr. McMahon t-shirt bearing his storyline mugshot.) And I keep coming back to the idea of higher and lower pleasures as the only explanation. Cultural snobbery. Elite gatekeepers thinking they understand the world while they ignore some the most crucial elements which make up the cultural reality of so many of their fellow citizens. The ease of dismissing that which you have always dismissed, and committing continual epistemological self-harm which leaves you without the cultural tools to truly know what exactly you are witnessing.
Some epistemic injustice comes from being dismissed as a knower. Others come from not having the hermeneutical tools to interpret what is happening to you. The Trump phenomena shows a third kind: a hermeneutical injustice that exists not because the terms of knowledge haven’t been invented yet, but one which is self-inflicted because you never bothered to seek them out.
Trump is undoubtedly a monster. Trump is a massive threat to the kind of democracy that all Americans should hold dear. But he is using the playbook of professional wrestling to win the White House once again and is therefore a monster we are responsible for keeping alive so long as we continue to not take the influence of professional wrestling on politics seriously.
Author: DaN McKee (he/him)
My book, ANARCHIST ATHEIST PUNK ROCK TEACHER, is out everywhere now on paperback and eBook. You can order it direct from the publisher or from places like Amazon.
My academic paper - ‘An error of punishment defences in the context of schooling’ is out in the Journal of Philosophy of Education here.
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I also have a chapter in THIS BOOK on punk and anarchism.
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