Donald Trump: The Kayfabe President?
A heads-up - this probably won’t be a fun one.
On Saturday 13th July 2024, former and likely future President Donald Trump was the target of an assassination attempt, leaving him bloodied as - reports vary - a bullet either skimmed his ear, or hit one of his teleprompters, causing a shard of glass to hit Trump in the face/ear. A bystander was killed, and two more left seriously injured. The shooter was also killed.
Almost instantly, the conspiracy machine went into overdrive. The shooting was staged. A false flag. A Democrat-ordered attack. Twitter accounts and TikTokers spoke with unearned confidence and non-existent expertise about how the Secret Service didn’t act the way they were “supposed to”, how the behaviour of other rally attendees wasn’t in line with how you’d expect people to behave after a shooting - that is to say, they didn’t start instantly screaming and running around with arms flailing overhead like extras in a Godzilla movie. This is the stuff conspiracy is made of - when reality stubbornly fails to live up to our expectations.
The logic of conspiracy theory is so embedded into this story and everything around it that this piece started out as part of my Bunkum & Bullshit series, where I take a rare break from writing about professional wrestling to write about conspiracy theories, showmen, con artists, liars, and pseudoscience, before I decided to pivot to looking at this from another angle.
The calling cards of conspiracy theories are everywhere. For my part, my eye was drawn to a figure behind Trump, taking almost centre stage among the amassed supporters - Vincent Fusca. Recognisable with shaggy hair, ever-present fedora and glasses, Pittsburgh Republican also-ran Fusca was, arbitrarily and inexplicably, deemed by the lunatics of QAnon to secretly be the long-dead John F. Kennedy Jr., waiting for the opportune moment to remove his disguise, reveal his death in a 1999 plane crash to have been a hoax, and announce his intentions to be Trump’s running buddy and eventual Vice President.
Why the Kennedys, the shining stars of the post-War Democrat Party, would be the centre of far-right Republican conspiracies on the side of Trump is a mystery that’s never really been explained - though the real-life conspiratorial and anti-science beliefs of RFK Jr. might raise an eyebrow or two - nor is there a satisfactory explanation for why a political movement that styles itself as opposed to political elites would find imaginary allies in the epitome of a political dynasty.
It’s not just JFK Jr.; conspiracy theories tend to balloon to include a cast of thousands, and QAnon is no exception, with some adherents even believing that JFK Sr. was preparing to emerge from the shadows in 2020 to endorse a Trump/JFK Jr. ticket - even without the immense handicap of having been assassinated almost sixty years earlier, John F. Kennedy in 2020 would have been 103 years old, which would frankly be pushing it even by the current gerontocratic standards of the US presidential race. Some of the wackier QAnon beliefs go so far as to suggest that Trump is himself a secret Kennedy, in a byzantine family tree that also ties in Benito Mussolini, George Patton, and Princess Diana, tying up half of 20th century history into a conspiracy theory Wold Newton Family.
Of course, assassinations and assassination attempts have a long history in American politics, and leave deep, intransigent footprints in the annals of conspiracy theory. Countless conspiracy theories grew up around the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, just as the death of JFK birthed a cottage industry, becoming the Ur-conspiracy for a generation - from the benign “list of coincidences between Lincoln and Kennedy” that was chain letter/email fodder for years, to the bleaker and darker allegations that have been done to death.
(the “Lincoln was shot at Ford’s Theater, Kennedy was shot in a Ford Lincoln” list of coincidences was brilliantly satirised by the late, great Sean Lock; “Reagan was shot in Washington, and Washington was shot with a ray gun”)
When I started writing Bunkum & Bullshit, I referred to my earlier efforts to start a podcast about conspiracy theories and fringe beliefs, which was abandoned when the changing nature of conspiracies spreading online became too depressing - watching in real time, tragic events with body counts and very real human tolls were picked apart, painted as staged “false flag operations”, and innocent people were accused of horrendous crimes based on the flimsiest of evidence. This just wasn’t fun any more.
In the case of the attempted assassination of Trump, it has been no different. High profile right-wing figures pointed fingers at completely innocent YouTubers, while footage of other innocent people was repackaged as apparently depicting the shooter. Others bypassed the shooter entirely, and went straight to placing the blame on Joe Biden, the Obamas, George Soros, the Deep State, and every other political bogeyman of the 21st century. Perpetual boil on the arse of the body politic Alex Jones finally found a shooting he actually believes happened, but blamed the CIA, the FBI, MKUltra (an illegal CIA human experimentation program that ended some forty years before the shooter, Thomas Crooks, was born), and Joe Biden, while insisting despite all available evidence that the “mainstream media” were denying an assassination attempt. It was all so miserably predictable.
And lest I be accused of bias, accusations of fakery came from left-wing and liberal voices too - there were suggestions that the attempt was staged, in order to garner sympathy, or to rebuild Trump’s reputation and recast him as a strong man. How those currently in hospital, or the family of the other victim of the shooting, or indeed the family of the shooter, would feel about that suggestion I don’t think we need to speculate about - these things don’t stop being conspiracy theories just because we decide we’d prefer to believe this one, and if you find yourself in a position of arguing away the death of innocents, it’s always time to reassess your position. Aside from anything else, if the purpose were to stage an assassination attempt in order to paint Trump as the stronger candidate, the timing seems ill-judged - when the entire news cycle has been focused on Joe Biden being unfit for office, that work is already being done for you. And if the goal was to paint Trump as under attack from an establishment that fears him and what he represents, there’s a very recent court case that he and his supporters have already been painting in that light - you don’t need to kill anyone or wound a presidential candidate to get to that conclusion.
There was one strange element to all of this that was absent from any previous conspiracy, and remains uniquely Trumpian. It relates to a trope that intermittently rears its head - the suggestion that Donald Trump either owes some of his success to, or can be explained through, his connections to WWE.
When I began writing my book, Kayfabe: A Mostly True History of Professional Wrestling, it was originally intended to include one additional chapter - this was cut due to a combination of length (the book having already long since surpassed its planned word count), and pacing; the final chapter in the finished version now sees the narrative come somewhat full circle, returning to some of the themes of chapter one. This excised final chapter was to look at the rise of reality TV and social media, two cultural behemoths that on one hand have trampled all over conventional ideas of kayfabe, while on the other, have rebuilt kayfabe in their own image, and led to everybody who engages with them to construct a kayfabe of their own; every time we decide what to write in an “About Me” section, every time we choose what and when to Tweet, we’re presenting a stage-managed version of ourselves, all indulging in a sort of personal kayfabe, while “reality TV” purports to show us unfiltered truth, but instead just adds additional layers of ambiguity into how we navigate the world, just as wrestling walks its own tightrope across the hinterland between “real” and “fake”.
This chapter would have looked at the way social media changed the way audiences consume wrestling, at how both pro-wrestling and reality TV benefited from the opportune timing of writers’ strikes, at the analogues between reality TV, professional wrestling, and found footage horror and, inevitably, at the rise of Donald Trump. The Twitter President. And, to many, the Kayfabe President.
Think-pieces trying to “explain” Donald Trump via his connections to WWE popped up almost immediately after his election in 2016, everywhere from Politico and The Atlantic to Rolling Stone and Salon - the latter referring to Donald Trump as an “avid fan and student of pro wrestling”; a description that doesn’t hold up when you consider that, following a phony limousine explosion on an episode of Monday Night RAW, Trump infamously phoned WWE’s headquarters to check that Vince McMahon was okay. Donald Trump may be the only person to have performed at Wrestlemania, while still thinking that it’s all real.
In the context of the assassination attempt, observers pointed to Trump’s triumphant raised fist to camera as evidence of a performer’s instinct that could only have been honed in WWE - choosing to overlook that he has a media career that includes almost 200 episodes of The Apprentice and cameos in many TV shows and movies; why assume that only pro-wrestling could have taught him the knack for working a camera? More absurdly, what I assume began as a joke but I saw proffered as a genuine explanation in multiple Twitter replies, was the suggestion that the blood on Trump’s face wasn’t the result of a gunshot but that he had bladed, you know, the way wrestlers do.
If you’ve made it this far without knowing this much, a quick explainer - when wrestlers feel like an ample helping of the old Kensington Gore is what’s needed to add some extra drama, gravitas or perceived danger to a match, the tried and tested method of getting the claret flowing is to make a small incision on their hairline using a razorblade, usually hidden in their boots or wrist-tape. This is what some otherwise sane people are suggesting the former President of the United States was reduced to doing on-stage to convince the world he had been shot at. There are wrestlers who bladed elsewhere on their bodies - Dusty Rhodes wasn’t averse to cutting his arms when the story called for it, Killer Kowalski actually did blade his ear during a match with Bruno Sammartino, and Pirata Morgan takes home the prize for the most brutal, inventive, and downright disgusting display for blading his empty eye socket - but there’s a variety of reasons why the hairline is the accepted spot from which to draw blood, and it’s not just for the Grand Guignol visual of the proverbial “crimson mask”. Yes, it generates a lot of blood, but it’s also a reasonably large space to work with, and one where the resulting scar should be relatively easy to hide in day-to-day life (though veteran wrestlers can often be identified by the criss-cross patchwork of scar tissue covering their foreheads). It’s the easiest place from which to get the desired effect, but for a first-timer, it’s daunting - too shallow a nick doesn’t get the job done, but many a wrestler has a horror story of cutting themselves again and again in a mad flurry when the blood doesn’t gush out instantly, only for their next breath, their next heartbeat, to leave them resembling an unfortunate extra in a gory slasher movie. What we’re asked to believe is that one of the most famous and powerful men in the world was asked to run the blade in a manner that most people who do so for a living wouldn’t be trusted to pull off. That, presidential candidate or not, the notoriously vain Donald Trump would have risked disfiguring himself in the name of a staged stunt? That a renowned germaphobe would willingly take a razorblade to his own skin? It’s absurd, and born solely of this misguided idea that Donald Trump somehow is professional wrestling.
Core to the “Trump as professional wrestling” metaphor are the ideas that he is playing a character, an exaggerated persona - again, something that is far from unique to professional wrestling - and the lazy trope of explaining Donald Trump as a “heel”, a wrestling villain. Like Muhammad Ali, or so the theory goes, he saw professional wrestling’s great bad guys and realised that you can make just as many people pay to see you get beaten as you could make pay to see you win, that bad guys have more fun, and that playing the antagonist gets you more column inches than glad-handing and kissing babies. On the surface, it almost makes sense - sure, Trump is a cartoon villain, he says outrageous and offensive things, and he insults his opponents and detractors like a playground bully. But Donald Trump doesn’t paint himself as the villain or court ridicule, and while his most childish supporters define their personalities purely out of what they imagine would antagonise a stereotypical “liberal”, to the true fanatics Trump is a saviour figure, rescuing the United States from whatever villains they imagine have it under threat - Muslims, immigrants, the Deep State, Joe Biden and the Democrats, or a cabal of baby-harvesting demonic paedophiles. Trump rankles and recoils at criticism, he tries to ingratiate himself, he cannot stand to be ridiculed, he has the narcissist’s desperate, pathetic need to be loved. He is not a heel, he doesn’t revel in hatred, he rejects it in the most authoritarian ways. And the explanation that he learned how to be the bad guy from his time in wrestling doesn’t ring true either - if nothing else, in WWE he was always hopelessly miscast as a babyface, and a man of the people.
That’s not to say that there are no connections between WWE and Donald Trump - there are plenty, but none as superficial as the suggestion that Trump’s stage persona can be explained through lazy comparison to wrestling baddies. Andy Kaufman would be turning in his body double’s grave.
One of the fallacies of talking about Donald Trump is treating him as an aberration or a novelty, and not part of the continuum of American politics that inexorably brought us to the inevitability of a Trump presidency. Nothing about him is new.
Even the connection between pro-wrestling and politics goes back a long way - Jesse Ventura appeared as a special guest referee on a WWF pay-per-view while Governor of Minnesota, multiple other wrestlers have crossed from the ring to the political sphere, Watergate conspirator G. Gordon Liddy made an unlikely Wrestlemania appearance as guest judge for a boxing match between Roddy Piper and Mr. T, and Theodore Roosevelt once quipped that if he weren’t President, he would like to be George Hackenschmidt. As countless wrestling histories love to remind us, Abraham Lincoln was a wrestler.
WWE even arguably owes its existence to a proto-Trump; it was the eccentric right-wing fitness guru, wrestling promoter, publishing magnate and presidential candidate Bernarr MacFadden who bankrolled the first New York wrestling event promoted by the partnership of Toots Mondt and Jess McMahon, which would eventually lead to the creation of WWE, and the McMahon family’s stranglehold on the wrestling business in North America.
Toots Mondt was, in his way, one of history’s winners. I explore in my book how a fair-to-middling wrestler became power-broker to a subsequent generation, and how a 1930s wrestling exposé coined the name “the Gold Dust Trio” and credited Mondt and his allies with inventing modern wrestling as we know it. That book was Fall Guys: The Barnum of Bounce, by a jobbing sportswriter named Marcus Griffin, who just so happened to be on the Toots Mondt payroll at the time of publication. Marcus Griffin went on to write for his brother William Griffin, protégé of the infamous and all-powerful William Randolph Hearst, in a little newspaper named The New York Evening Enquirer.
William Griffin died in the late ‘40s, with the circulation figures of his newspaper still in the toilet. He didn’t live to see it become a household name. It was the new owner, Gene Pope Jr., a mobbed up son of an Italian kingmaker and media baron who bought the struggling publication, with a little help from Mafia money and from the man that Tony Kushner’s Angels In America dubbed the “polestar of human evil”, Roy Cohn.
Long story short - through a combination of sensationalist tabloid headlines, celebrity gossip, absurd tall tales, and fascist apologia, the newly rechristened National Enquirer went from a little-read local rag to one of the most infamous “newspapers” in the western world. In 1989, following the death of Gene Pope Jr., the Enquirer was sold to - who else? - the MacFadden Communications Group, the company born out of the fitness, gossip and true crime magazines published by our old friend, the fascist, anti-vaccination, former pro-wrestler and failed presidential candidate Bernarr MacFadden, whose financial support laid the foundations for what became WWE.
In the years to come, the National Enquirer was to become a powerful ally for Donald Trump in all his political ambitions, while its backer Roy Cohn defended Trump in court against allegations of racism for advertising different rental terms and conditions to black potential tenants than he would to white people. When Roy Cohn died from complications related to AIDS in 1986, it was after two years of public denial, insisting that he was in fact suffering from liver cancer. Owing millions in taxes, one of his only possessions not reclaimed by the IRS was a pair of diamond cufflinks given to him by Donald Trump. His panel on the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt reads “Bully. Coward. Victim”.
The diamond cufflinks turned out to be fakes.
In March 1985, the Writers Guild of America voted for a two week strike over disagreements around royalty payments from home video sales and rentals. The timing of the strike meant it may have gone unnoticed by most television viewers - most of the major networks had enough episodes of their hit shows in the can and were able to ride out the two weeks without having to produce new content - but anyone tuning in to NBC hoping to catch new episodes of Saturday Night Live would have been sorely disappointed.
The March 16th episode was pushed back to March 30th, and the change in date, and a family illness, meant that planned host Steve Landesberg was no longer available. A last minute decision saw hosting duties handed over to Hulk Hogan and Mr. T, ably supported by Roddy Piper and “Cowboy” Bob Orton. With the first ever Wrestlemania airing the following night, NBC had effectively handed the WWF a shop window in which they could advertise to an audience of 23 million, which may well have been enough to transform Wrestlemania from a modest success into an epochal, industry-changing event. The butterfly effect of a two-week strike changed the wrestling business forever, but that butterfly wasn’t done flapping its wings yet.
Three years later, another writers’ strike loomed, this time over royalty fees from re-runs - as cable TV and twenty-four hour schedules became the norm, networks were recycling old content more than ever to fill gaps in the schedule, and the WGA fought for greater residual fees from these repeat showings. While the 1985 strike was short-lived and little-remembered, 1988’s strike dragged on for five long months, with no new scripts produced for the major TV and film studios for the entire period.
The networks could only rely on re-runs, and unscripted news and sports, for so long. Professional wrestling was perfectly positioned to benefit, but they weren’t the only ones; what networks needed was must-see weekly TV without writers. The only problem was, no such thing existed.
Worst hit of all was the fledgling Fox Broadcasting Company, already struggling to carve out its share of the TV pie, failing to attract major advertisers, and lingering in a distant fourth place behind the “Big Three” of NBC, ABC and CBS. The last thing they needed was a writers’ strike preventing them from producing any new content just eighteen months after they launched. Enter FOX executive Stephen Chao. Chao had an idea he called “Electronic Lynching”; a wild west approach to true crime and news reportage that he first fleshed out in America’s Most Wanted, and he found a kindred spirit in director John Langley.
Two years earlier, Langley had masterminded a Geraldo Rivera TV special named American Vice: The Doping Of A Nation that promised to show real-life drug busts and arrests on live TV. It was critically derided, and, worse still, resulted in a legal quagmire when two of the people who were filmed being arrested, and lambasted live on air by Rivera, turned out to be innocent, and one sued the network for $30 million, quite reasonably citing libel, defamation, invasion of privacy, and emotional distress. But Stephen Chao didn’t care about all that, he was interested in a property that John Langley had been trying to shop around multiple networks for most of the decade - nobody was interested, none saw the appeal in this strange show with no host, no stars, no set, no fancy camerawork and production, and no voiceover. But crucially, it was also a show without writers, and that’s exactly what Stephen Chao and FOX needed.
The show was COPS, and its impact on American culture cannot be overstated. Over a run of more than thirty years, multiple studies have shown that regular viewers of the show were far more likely to overestimate, by wide margins, the amount of violent and serious crime in America. No episode of COPS is uneventful, none show routine police business, the act of policing is edited down to the most dramatic of drug busts, high speed chases, violent clashes and heated altercations, while the higher proportion of black and other minority suspects shown on-screen than white, and the opposite for the racial make-up of the heroic police officers, means that the same studies show a deleterious effect on viewers’ perceptions of the racial make-up of criminal statistics. COPS and America’s Most Wanted, Stephen Chao’s vision of “Electronic Lynching”, are the bedrock that FOX was built on.
In trying to circumvent the impact of a writers’ strike, FOX had effectively invented a brand new genre - Reality TV. While shows like Granada Television’s Seven Up! had shown real people on television before, the format was always documentary, with the filmmaker an acknowledged participant in the proceedings. COPS was different, and the first wave of Reality TV it opened the floodgates for made a virtue of their relative amateurism - the use of cheap camcorders, shaky and off-centre footage, and little evidence of directorial input, meant that the show looked real in a way that television ordinarily didn’t. The shows that followed made much use of this almost cinéma vérité voyeuristic approach.
COPS and FOX were well practiced at planting seeds of hatred and division in the living rooms of the television-viewing American public by the time the next great innovation in reality TV came along, this time courtesy of MTV. Looking to expand beyond music programming, but lacking the budget to pay the actors, writers and extensive crew that would be required for the kind of young adult drama - the likes of Melrose Place and Beverly Hills 90210 - that was siphoning away viewers in their target demographic, they landed on a solution; no actors, no writers, minimal crew. Thanks to huge leaps forward in the fields of digital editing, the once extremely difficult and laborious process of video editing had been made much easier, allowing editors to work through hours and hours of footage, chopping and changing shots as they saw fit; the cameras could be rolling for twenty-four hours, and the editors could selectively edit footage down into a dramatically paced, glossily produced product with no script. All they needed was a cast - a group of seven strangers placed in a house together, while cameras filmed everything they did. The Real World was born.
Reality TV was off to the races by the time Dutch producer John de Mol got a hold of the Real World concept in 1999, taking the basic premises of filming strangers in a house for twenty-four hours, and adding extra elements of gamification with competitive challenges, evictions, phone-ins and audience interactions, to create Big Brother. The show was hugely successful, franchised across more than sixty countries, birthing celebrity spin-offs and tie-in media. While initially promoted as sociological experiment in how the contestants would behave in relative isolation from the outside world, in subsequent series any scientific pretense was very quickly shelved in favour of manufactured conflict, outlandish personalities, and lowest common denominator entertainment. Clever editing, as it had for The Real World, was used to exagerrate stories and personalities, to create heroes and villains of the cast.
The runaway success of Big Brother made rival networks scramble for a competitor, and CBS looked to the Swedish game show series Expedition Robinson, adapting into Survivor, in which two tribes of contestants were placed in a remote location and pitted against each other in a series of physical tasks, fighting to avoid getting voted off at the end of the week. The original concept had been shopped around since 1992, and had aired in Sweden since 1997, but in Expedition Robinson the focal point was on competitive game show elements, whereas producer Mark Burnett recognised that the true appeal to American audiences would be the fly-on-the-wall reality TV approach. Burnett was right, and it was a smash hit.
Fast-forward to 2004, and NBC had grown tired of struggling to compete with Survivor, even with their flagship show, Friends, running in the same time slot, and poached Mark Burnett from CBS, looking to produce a Survivor-beating reality hit of their own. Mark Burnett’s pitch was simple - take the personality plays and competitive drama of Survivor and move it from a desert island into the boardrooms of big business. He called it The Apprentice, and all he needed was a host.
That host was Donald Trump. In 2004, Trump wasn’t on the political scene, nor was he the byword for crass Reaganite wealth that he had been throughout the 1980s. A run of corporate bankruptices - most recently of his Atlantic City hotels and casinos - had forced Trump to shift the core of his business away from the family trade of real trade investments, and towards licensing and branding; effectively, selling the Trump brand to anyone who was prepared to pay for it, and plastering it on everything from magazines to perfume, from coffee to phony universities. For Donald Trump, The Apprentice provided the perfect opportunity to strengthen his brand - already increasingly removed from the actual physical capital of real estate, a television role that painted him as a wealthy, successful and respectful businessman, in a prime time slot on a major network every single week, was like Manna from heaven. For the Trump brand, Donald Trump didn’t need to be a successful business, he just needed to play one on TV. The Donald Trump persona was born on The Apprentice, not in the wrestling ring.
In 2007, the WGA went on strike again, the issue of residual payments reignited thanks to the popularisation of DVD, and the advent of streaming and on-demand media. This time, Reality TV wasn’t the easy out for the networks that it had been in the past - as the genre had evolved to become more heavily edited and constructed, the WGA argued that Reality TV editors, directors, and euphemistically named “story producers”, who were responsible for taking footage and crafting it into coherent storylines, were scriptwriters in all but name, and as such should be eligible for union membership.
The 2007 strike didn’t hit networks as hard as 1988 had - most already had extensive backlogs of reality and unscripted content to pull from for their coming season; FOX had American Idol, CBS had Survivor, and ABC had Dancing With The Stars. NBC, though, had made a catastrophic error, and had cancelled their ace in the hole. With The Apprentice and fellow reality show Fear Factor - helmed by future cultural poison Joe Rogan - both cancelled, and unable to bring their summer hit America’s Got Talent forward for a November start date, they were in trouble - they had already fallen from atop the pedestal as the top dog of network television to fourth place in the coveted 18-49 demographic, and now they had nothing to fill the gaps in their schedule.
The answer, inspired by a British Comic Relief version of the same show, was Celebrity Apprentice. With a cast including UFC Heavyweight Champion Tito Ortiz, KISS frontman Gene Simmons, and disgraced British tabloid editor Piers Morgan, the concept was simple - repeat the format that had already worked, but with the added frisson of some recognisable names. The WGA strike of 2007 was largely a failure, and The Celebrity Apprentice was a smash hit, running for years, and giving Donald Trump a platform where he was uncritically portrayed as a genius of the business world, a man whose authority could extend even over the great and the good of Hollywood, even as he was in the midst of even more closures, bankruptcies and class action suits, not to mention the litany of allegations and sex scandals from this period that would emerge during his presidential campaign and presidency. None of that mattered, as the mediated real of “reality” television was selling Donald Trump to the world as a bold, strong, successful and competent business titan. The character of Donald Trump was more successful than ever.
It was The Celebrity Apprentice, and the reality TV catchphrase “You’re Fired”, that brought Donald Trump back into the orbit of WWE, and of his long-time friend Vince McMahon, with whom he shared that TV catchphrase. The two had worked together before - both Wrestlemania IV and V were both heavily promoted as being held at Trump Plaza, despite the fact that they actually took place at the nearby Atlantic City Convention Center; Trump’s ability to stretch the truth when his own brand was the beneficiary has never been in doubt. The truth is that Trump had put up the booking fee for the Convention Center, just as Bernarr MacFadden had provided the financial backing for Vince McMahon’s grandfather to run Madison Square Garden decades earlier, in return for copious plugs for his hotel and casino, and front row seats in full view of the camera. Donald Trump was a recurring celebrity guest in pride of place on the front row when major WWF events came through New York City, but it was The Celebrity Apprentice that inspired the awkward move from spectator to participant in 2007.
WWE had first booked an intentionally bad, poor taste comedy wrestling match between two wrestlers portraying Donald Trump and Rosie O’Donnell in an utter failure of an attempt to trade on the notoriety of the celebrity feud playing out on reality TV, and that served as a precursor for Trump himself appearing on WWE programming. With Vince McMahon portraying the tyrannical billionaire owner of WWE, and reveling in the same “You’re Fired!” catchphrase that Donald Trump had popularised on The Apprentice, Trump was brought in to portray yet another version of himself - a rival billionaire to McMahon, this one the benevolent, fan-friendly babyface man of the people, in one of the most wildly inappropriate pieces of casting in entertainment history. Whether on The Apprentice or on the campaign trail, Trump’s appeal had long come from his selfishness and wanton cruelty towards anyone he deemed either an enemy or otherwise beneath him, whether a celebrity guest star in a mock-boardroom on reality TV, or a journalist who dared to question him during his presidency. To say it was a departure from type to see Donald Trump sold as caring more about audience satisfication than his usual pet obsessions with personal wealth or TV ratings is an understatement, though the farcical attempts to present Trump as some kind of street-tough, virile alpha male in WWE were admittedly a precursor to some of the more delusional depictions of President Trump by some of his supporters. Donald Trump, the tough guy issuing threats to WWE wrestlers while flanked by beautiful women, felt like a brief terrifying glimpse inside his own head.
Thankfully any suggestions of Donald Trump himself actually wrestling were quickly abandoned, which tends to be glossed over by the thinkpieces who seem to think Trump spent any meaningful time in an actual wrestling ring. Instead, the heavily promoted Battle Of The Billionaires was to take place at Wrestlemania, with Donald Trump represented by the strongly pushed new star Bobby Lahsley, and Vince McMahon by the throwback problematic Samoan savage gimmick Umaga, with both men placing their hair on the line. WWE invested hours of TV time, and a mass media celebrity-endorsed marketing blitz, into promoting this match far more heavily than anything else on the card, but the bell-to-bell match itself was something of a non-event, and that began with the seemingly arbitrary choices of competitors. Neither Lashley nor Umaga feel in any way like an extension of the men they’re ostensibly representing, and while the success of Vince McMahon as an in-ring performer was famously predicated on the psychology underpinning his feud with “Stone Cold” Steve Austin - the blue collar wish fulfillment, the oft-stated dream of the working class man having the rare opportunity to beat up their own boss - where was that hypothetical working class viewer going to place their sympathy in a match that, no matter how much WWE attempted to present Donald Trump as one of their own, amounted to little more than a billion dollar dick measuring contest?
Bobby Lashley ultimately won the match, despite Donald Trump’s abject uselessness in every effort to get physically involved - though him throwing one of history’s worst clotheslines didn’t prevent Trump from, during his presidency, retweeting GIFs of the match with the CNN logo imposed over Vince McMahon’s face. Despite McMahon’s pantomime facial expressions doing their best to sell the outcome of having his head shaved bald, the end result was always going to be underwhelming, when Vince McMahon’s hair holds no special significance when compared to the famously bizarre mane of Donald Trump.
Trump returned to WWE in 2009 for a brief and nonsensical angle, where it was announced that he had somehow purchased Monday Night RAW from Vince McMahon, and would allow part of the show to air commercial-free. Such are the muddy waters of playing out kayfabe business deals while you’re the head of a very real publicly traded company, that the news of Donald Trump getting involved caused WWE stock to drop by 7%.
Similarly, it was in June 2007, only a matter of months after Donald Trump had been a performer on WWE television, that the company ran an elaborate angle in which Vince McMahon was presumed dead after a limo explosion. CNBC ran a po-faced article debating whether it was irresponsible to WWE’s shareholders to portray the CEO of the company as having died in an accident, prompting WWE to issue a statement distinguishing between the real Vince McMahon and the character of “Mr. McMahon”, asserting that any WWE fan and shareholder would be more than smart enough to understand the distinction, and to be able to tell fact from fiction. Not so Donald Trump, the man that many a journalist and commentator would have us believe learned the finer points of crowd work, performance and characterisation from his time in wrestling, as the future President was, as I mentioned earlier, quick to phone WWE’s head office in Stamford, Conneticut, eager to know if his friend Vince was okay following his “accident”.
The tasteless angle was planned to play out to ultimately reveal that Vince McMahon, in hiding and allowing his hair to grow out a la Howard Hughes, had faked his death, kicking off a McMahon family drama to culminate at the following year’s Wrestlemania. Instead it was cut short, with Vince McMahon having to return to TV and publicly reveal that the whole thing had just been a TV storyline, when just two weeks after the “explosion” a planned Mr. McMahon Memorial episode of Monday Night RAW was abandoned as news broke of the very real double murder-suicide at the hands of Chris Benoit, a wrestler on WWE’s books.
Donald Trump’s connections to WWE run far deeper than just a few on-screen appearances, a Hall of Fame induction, and an underwhelming Wrestlemania main event, though.
In March 2017, during Trump’s presidency, CNN ran an article detailing the number of accounts that Trump followed on Twitter, the social media platform he was almost synonymous with due to his seemingly never-ending slew of ill thought out and often inappropriate Tweets. At the time of the article, despite Tweeting multiple times a day, Trump had only ever liked four Tweets, and followed just forty-six accounts. Once you remove Trump’s own family, White House and campaign staff, Trump’s own businesses, and FOX News personalities, Trump followed just six accounts, one of whom was Vince McMahon. Multiple accounts from Trump’s inner circle claimed that Vince McMahon was one of the few people from whom Trump would always take a private phone call.
The connections between Donald Trump and the McMahon family run deep. Vince McMahon’s wife Linda was a member of Trump’s cabinet as administrator of the Small Business Administration, and a chair of the pro-Trump right-wing fundraising organisation America First Policies, which has consistently been one of Trump’s biggest sources of funding, and in 2021 was found to have funded multiple transports to Washington D.C. ahead of the January 6th attack on the United States Capitol Building by angry Trump supporters refusing to recognise the legitimacy of their hero’s electoral defeat. In April 2020, Trump named Vince McMahon as a member of an advisory group on sporting events during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Now for a minor conspiracy of my own. In 2018, Vince McMahon announced his plans to bring back the much-maligned XFL, the alternative American football league that had cost him millions of dollars and been the subject of ridicule back in 2001. While the original XFL attempted to inject WWE-style characters, promos, and crass “Attitude Era” comedy into the sport, the second coming was built on promises of regulating off-pitch behaviour; political gestures were banned, with particular focus on players taking a knee or otherwise protesting during the national anthem, and players with criminal records would be ineligible to take part. It was in September 2017 that Donald Trump took aim at Colin Kaepernick, insisting that the NFL should fire players who protested during the national anthem, and by December 2017, reports were starting to trickle out that Vince McMahon had his eyes set on the XFL relaunch. Did one of those private phone calls between Trump and McMahon lead to the suggestion that one of Trump’s old friends should put the frighteners on the NFL by launching a rival organisation, looking to capitalise on the right-wing anger at the NFL and players like Kaepernick, or to create a football league for embittered Trump supporters? Or, and here’s where the real conspiracy comes in, what if we’ve got cause-and-effect all mixed up? Maybe Vince McMahon was eyeing up the XFL revival all along, and called in a favour with his good friend in the Oval Office to start whipping up right-wing resentment against the competition?
Today, with Vince McMahon in exile from WWE and embroiled in legal battles stemming from allegations of sexual assault, human trafficking, and decades of abusive behaviour - all of which Donald Trump would know nothing about, I’m sure - stories circulated that the two had been in contact regularly, though a representative of McMahon has claimed that they only spoke once, for less than a minute. Whatever the truth is, it’s easy to see analogues between the two, and, should Vince McMahon face legal repercussions for his actions, a presidential pardon should Trump return to the White Office feels like a safe bet.
This is all to say, as far as the countless articles that attempted to make sense of a President who seemingly followed none of the unwritten rules of politics, who was happy to lie and contradict himself without a moment’s thought, and seemed to occupy a mental world of his own making, are concerned, the routine explanation that Trump could be understood through the lens of professional wrestling simply doesn’t cut it. It often relies on the misguided and mean-spirited assumption that wrestling audiences are marks and suckers, conned by liars and fraudsters, into believing something that isn’t true, or on the argument that Trump’s performative aggression was born in the world of Kayfabe. It’s a connection that doesn’t deserve any credence - American politics has a long history of skirting on the fringes of fascism, of opening the door to extremist and unpleasant characters, and of racist and nativist sentiment being all it takes for the media to dress up a millionaire celebrity as really having the interests of the working man at heart. Donald Trump was Donald Trump long before he set foot in a WWE ring, and his media personality was not born of wrestling, but of reality TV, of decades of wealth and privilege, and of never needing to hear anyone say the word, “no”. Donald Trump is not a kayfabe wrestling character, who goes home to his wife and children at the day and turns off the gimmick, but a moneyed elite who speaks for the last panicked gasp of a dying cultural hegemony, an exploitative living symbol of late stage capitalism, and, above all else, an old-fashioned conman like thousands before him, of a kind that America specialises in producing. It’s impossible for me to look at the United States of America and ask how they ever elected a President like Donald Trump, only to wonder how it ever took them so long to do it. Wrestling never had anything to do with it.
Post-Script
The premise of my book is that Kayfabe is resilient and elastic, that far from dead, it constantly evolves and mutates to accept new information. Reality TV and social media, which ostensibly allow us a peak behind wrestling’s curtain, could have been the death knell of kayfabe, but instead have reinforced it with new layers, building wall upon wall separating the “real” person and the performance. But kayfabe isn’t indestructible, it’s susceptible to short, sharp shocks that call everything into question - injuries, accidents, little shocks of reality into our constructed world.
The real world is often no different. In The Image, historian Daniel J. Boorstin wrote of “pseudo-events”, political spectacles constructed purely to be reported on and, through being reported on, observers mistakenly believe that the pseudo-event itself is the essence of politics. A politician announces a press release, and the media speculates on its contents, so that the press release itself becomes the event, rather than its contents. A mayor cuts a ribbon to open a new public building. The President gives a pre-written speech decrying gun violence in pre-determined terms, and no action is taken, but the circle of discourse has been allowed to continue, we have been granted our event. Donald Trump upset the proverbial apple cart precisely because of his inability to stick to the script, to honour the ritual of the pseudo-event, to keep the political kayfabe.
There is perhaps no greater disruption of the staged predictability of political kayfabe than the sound of gunfire. The pseudo-event machine went into overdrive, as media outlets and conspiracy theories alike rushed to construct their preferred narrative. The chaos of the moment was reduced to one or two simple images. The political establishment engaged in the usual platitudes and empty messaging - we must come together despite our beliefs, we’re told, and all political violence and violent rhetoric is wrong, they insist, mere weeks after supporting police crackdowns on college students, and amid the ongoing genocide in Gaza. It’s little wonder conspiracy theorists think they are on to something when the network of pseudo-events is so endlessly self-reinforcing, so openly contradictory, so incapable of stepping off-script and allowing in new information.
Corey Comperatore was killed during the assassination attempt on Donald Trump. At the time of writing, Donald Trump has not contacted the Comperatore family to offer any condolences. In June 2007, Vince McMahon’s character was “killed” in a staged limo explosion. Donald Trump called WWE headquarters to ask after McMahon’s safety the very next day.
