General Discussion

How Professional Wrestling Explains Donald Trump's Washington
Trump has a deep connection with the world of professional wrestling — he is a WWE Hall of Famer himself. Trump hosted two early WrestleManias in the late 1980s. He purported to “buy” Monday Night Raw, WWE’s flagship program, in 2009.
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Trump also embraces another central tenet of wrestling: “kayfabe,” which refers to maintaining the illusion that pro wrestling is real. Kayfabe is the agreement between fans and wrestlers that we’re all okay with accepting that somewhere-in-the middle reality for the sake of the show. Wrestling fans know it’s all fake — that The Undertaker is not actually an undead mortician with mystical powers, but a real human being that just so happened to have candidate Trump as a guest on his podcast. But most of the fun of wrestling comes from the blurred lines of real and make believe. Those in Washington may be familiar with kayfabe by another name: taking Trump seriously, but not literally.

“No one knows what is a bluff or isn’t, and the world hangs in the balance,” Josephine Riesman, the author of the biography “Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America”, said of Trump. “There’s the spectacle of the fact that the world hangs in the balance. But what got us there is an information environment in which a lot of information outlets contributed to Donald Trump’s melting of reality.”Trump lives and dies by kayfabe, where friend and foe alike never seem to know what’s real and what’s all for show. (Just ask Republicans explaining themselves in a circle on every recent tariff move.) Perhaps the only person to more fully embody kayfabe is wrestling impresario Vince McMahon himself.

McMahon and his wife Linda have been significant financial supporters of Trump’s political career — Linda McMahon served as Trump’s first Small Business Administration head and now serves as his secretary of Education. You don’t have to squint too hard to see the similarities between Vince McMahon’s on-screen persona — the swaggering, braggadocious, larger than life “Mr. McMahon” — and in how the president carries himself.