Everything Louder than Everything Else
By Jason Tang
Die deutsche Übersetzung findet ihr unter diesem Link.
In the period since his inauguration, President Trump has placed tariffs on Canada and Mexico, rolled them back, declared Liberation Day, started mass deportations of illegal immigrants, bombed the Houthis, had a very public meltdown with President Zelenskyy, and a panoply of other endeavors (or misadventures). And that was just the first 100 days. Depending on your political persuasion, the pace of headline news coming out of the White House is either exhilarating, exhausting, or existential (or possibly some combination of the three). Much like his first term, the wider public often finds out about President Trump's actions via his social media feed. I would argue that he is the first social media President – other Presidents have used various platforms, but their statements tended to be anodyne, focused, and highly scripted. Whatever you think of Trump, his posts on Truth Social are anything but.
Successful American politicians have always been adept at adapting to the latest communication technology. The founding fathers would quote from Joseph Addison's play, Cato. FDR had his fireside chats over the radio; McCarthy was partly undone by just how much of a bully he came across on the then-novel technology of the television. Next to the photogenic JFK, a tired Nixon hardly seemed like the kind of man who had what it takes to be president. Reagan, of course, was an actor and was supremely comfortable in front of the camera. But Trump seems qualitatively different with both the media and the public. Whether on social media or at a press conference, he seems to dispense with many of the norms of being "Presidential." After all, instead of a boring policy speech at the GOP convention, viewers were treated to Hulk Hogan ripping off his shirt and cutting a promo.1
Pundits and analysts have spilled gallons of (digital) ink on the substance of Trump's proposals, but in the spirit of the day, let us focus almost entirely on the style of Trumpian spectacle. I argue there's a direct throughline to how President Trump comports himself and the grand tradition of American professional wrestling.2 I hope to provide an analogy that will help understand why Trump is bringing the theatricality of professional wrestling into politics. But to do that, we'll have to do a quick overview of how Donald Trump and World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) found each other.
History of Trump and the WWE
The origin of American professional wrestling has its roots as an offshoot of Greco-Roman wrestling traditions held at carnivals in the 19th century. It experienced a resurgence after World War II, as entrepreneurs staked their claims to various territories around North America. In the interest of brevity,3 I want to focus solely on the WWE (then known as the World Wrestling Federation), run by Vince McMahon. During the 80s, Vince focused on expanding WWE to reach a national audience via network television and aggressive talent acquisition. This period, known as the Golden Era of the WWE, featured larger-than-life characters and gimmicks4 that looked like they popped off the pages of a comic book. Hulk Hogan, Andre the Giant, Randy Macho Man Savage, and The Undertaker became household names.
In 1987, the WWE was coming off an incredible high after WrestleMania III. A sold-out crowd at the Pontiac Silverdome and on cable TV watched Hulk Hogan body slam Andre the Giant5 and witnessed a classic match between Randy Macho Man Savage and Ricky “The Dragon” Steamboat that is still considered one of greatest matches of all time. At this point, Donald Trump enters the picture. Trump had recently acquired casinos in Atlantic City, and it seemed like a perfect match – he and Vince were both men with a reputation for being “self-made” mavericks with no time for the outdated shibboleths of the old guard. Thus, WrestleMania IV and V were held at Atlantic City Convention Hall, though cleverly rebranded as “Trump Plaza.” WrestleMania V culminated in the violent dissolution of the “Mega Powers,” an informal alliance between Hulk Hogan and Macho Man. Hulk Hogan went on to win the WWF World Heavyweight Championship and became the top guy in WWE for years to come.
Trump didn’t have much of a role in the production outside of some schmoozing with wrestlers like Ted DiBiase, aka “The Million Dollar Man. If you look at interviews with Trump in the 80s and 90s, he is still distinctly Trump. But unsurprisingly, he also sounds like a member of the Ivy-league-educated New York coastal elite. Less bombastic, longer and more obscure words, and seemingly less confrontational, at least for the camera. However, the relationship between Trump and WWE didn’t end there – in an uncanny parallel, both would struggle in the 90s before reinventing themselves in the 2000s.
WWE went from the larger-than-life Golden Era to the rocky transition in the New Generations Era, ultimately (like the rest of pop culture in the late 90s and early 2000s) embracing an aggressive, risqué aesthetic and edgy storytelling to see how far they could push the boundaries. Donald Trump changed the narrative of being yet another hotshot real estate developer who paid too much for property and blew himself up to appearing on the reality show “The Apprentice” as a tough, no-nonsense boss who got things done.
As the rest of society woke up from the nightmare of how many edges we could put on things, the WWE transitioned into the “Ruthless Aggression” era. There was less focus on being shocking for shock value and a greater emphasis on the athletes and more “grounded” characters compared to the quasi-superheroes of the Golden Era. More importantly, for our purposes, the WWE dropped the insistence that wrestling was not scripted and that the various wrestlers were, in fact, personas. We’ll return to this point in the next section, but as wrestling went post-modern and no longer insisted that everything was real and nothing scripted, it opened the door to once more bring Trump back into the fold but in a much more direct way.
The Donald Trump character in Wrestlemania XXIII (2007) is much closer to how we see him behaving on social media and his various rallies today. Confident, loud, and bombastic, he’s much more comfortable in front of the camera and even cuts a few promos. The WWE integrated his penchant for deal-making into a storyline of Trump purchasing one of its flagship products, the show WWE Raw.6 This blending of reality and fiction seems to be a key tenant of how Trump interacts with the public today. And no matter what else happens, Donald Trump will be the only president to have ever taken a Stone-Cold Stunner7 live on pay-per-view.
Sources close to the president say that the talks were “frank and constructive.”
Kayfabe: Take a walk on the wild side
This may come as a shock, but professional wrestling is scripted. But the critical word here is scripted, not fake – there is no way to make jumping off a ladder to crash into a table or getting thrown on tacks not hurt. And there is an actual mental and physical cost to sometimes spending 200 days traveling to different hotels and subjecting your body to that kind of physical abuse for years. In professional wrestling, the term kayfabe8 (pronounced “kay-fayb” not “kay-fab”) refers to treating the masquerade of pro-wrestling as if it were real. This is not unique to professional wrestling; we see it in any form of fiction where we need to suspend belief. We still enjoy Batman even though he is a billionaire illegally siphoning money to fund an illegal arms industry so he can dress up to beat up mentally ill people, sometimes with the help of his child soldiers.
The meaning of kayfabe and how we understand it has also changed. During the early history of professional wrestling, up to the Golden Era, both wrestlers and management carried on with kayfabe, even off camera. These athletes were engaged in competition; the personas in the ring were the same as those out of the ring. Indeed, the WWE stuck to this line even when the real world rudely intervened. In 1987, the arrest of Hacksaw Jim Duggan and the Iron Sheik in the same vehicle caused a firestorm of controversy. Not so much because they got arrested, but from the absolute betrayal of having the All-American patriot Jim Duggan and the evil Iron Sheik sharing the same vehicle together like they were co-workers, or even worse, friends.
That all changed with the “Attitude Era.” Vince McMahon announced that kayfabe died so that the WWE could pursue more sophisticated storylines and move beyond comic book characters and good vs evil. That was only part of the story. There were also economic factors as well. One of the downsides of insisting that you are a sport where the outcomes are not pre-determined is that you automatically come under the jurisdiction of many state sports regulators, which involves fees. It also led to strict limitations on what you can and can’t do, and the WWE got tangled up in the steroid investigations of the time. The question is, did the WWE throw the old kayfabe tradition under the bus because they wanted to provide a better, more mature product to match the changing audience's taste? To avoid paying regulatory fees? To shift the narrative and claim victory from defeat? The answer, surprisingly, is that it does not matter.
The late philosopher Harry Frankfurt wrote about this very phenomenon in “On Bullshit.” We generally think of people as either telling the truth or telling a lie. Frankfurt suggests a third option – they might just be bullshitting. That is to say, the actual truth content of their statement is irrelevant. They are trying to elicit a specific emotion or engagement or just draw attention. They may not even be sure if what they’re saying is true or not in the first place. The difference between a bullshitter and a liar is that the liar tries to obfuscate or misdirect from the truth. The bullshitter does not care whether you fact-check them or not because the truth value of whatever they’re saying is not at all related to what they want to achieve.
Professional wrestling makes a distinction between scripted events (works) and spur-of-the-moment improvisations (shoots). Sometimes, you must change the plan in a wrestling match, whether on television or in front of a live audience. Sometimes, there’s an injury; sometimes, you need to remind your opponent to be a little more careful. Sometimes, the crowd isn’t buying what you’re selling. A frequent debate among nerds on the internet is whether a promo or an in-ring event is a shoot or work. As we’ve moved into the social media era, that blurring of the lines has also gone outside of the ring. We can also apply this to Donald Trump – to his supporters, his bluster is 4D chess and grand strategy (work); to his detractors, he’s out of his mind and just making stuff up (shoot). Or maybe it’s the other way around because, as noted earlier, what matters is the emotion and the engagement.
Heels just want to have fun
Professional wrestling storylines typically revolve feuds around a babyface/face (the hero) and the heel (the villain). The lines blurred slightly as we moved from the Golden Era to the Attitude and Ruthless Aggression Era. Stone Cold Steve Austin was a babyface, but he was also an anti-authority, anti-conformity, anti-hero with a penchant for chugging beers. The narrative structure you commonly see in a pro-wrestling feud feels like it comes straight out of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. The heel does something to instigate the babyface, who is thus forced to respond by cutting a promo and throwing hands (the departure). The heel accepts, and usually through devious means like using a steel chair hidden under the ring or having a mate knock out the referee to win the bout, proceeds to gloat at the crestfallen babyface (the initiation). The babyface regroups and triumphs over the heel, usually in a poetic manner that defeats the heel and humiliates them. And along the way, the audience gets catharsis. A fine example is the feud between Ricky “The Dragon” Steamboat and Ric Flair. Flair is known for his excessive extravagance and playboy lifestyle, while Steamboat is a salt-of-the-earth family man and consummate babyface. In one memorable promo, Steamboat beats up a smartly dressed Flair, ruining all the clothes he was so proud of.9
The not-so-secret trick, though, is heels control the narrative. They are the instigator, without which the babyface would be content to live their life. They allow us to see the hero’s motivation, inner steel, and ability to overcome seemingly impossible odds. It is through this gauntlet that our babyface must run through that legends are forged.10 “Put over” is a term used in wrestling to describe the act of granting another wrestler credibility or kudos in the eyes of the audience. And the babyface needs the heel to put them over, for there is no existential conflict amongst friends and peers. The heel does this by generating “heat,” getting you involved with the storyline by triggering your moral outrage at the grave injustice done to our hero. The heel is the character with all the agency, the one who is forcing the unbalanced hero to react. A good heel makes you cheer for their downfall; a bad heel makes you indifferent. Simply put, there are no great heroes without great foils. After all, what would Batman be without his rogues’ gallery?11
This isn’t limited to the world of professional wrestling. Muhammed Ali shocked the world when he went around calling himself the GOAT (greatest of all time). Floyd Mayweather Jr., the highest-grossing pay-per-view boxer of all time, had the dual misfortune of being a technical, defensive genius and a welterweight. In a world where people preferred heavyweights knocking each other out, it seemed inevitable that he would have had a solid career but remain known only to boxing aficionados. So, he decided to pivot from “Pretty Boy” Floyd to “Money” Mayweather, focusing on ostentatious displays of wealth, that he was not only a boxing prodigy but also a business and marketing genius. His critics and opponents? Well, they were just poor, stupid, and jealous. If he couldn’t get people to watch him for his defensive prowess, he’d get people to watch, hoping he would get punched in the face.
We humans are also drawn to villains, even if we find their methods and ethics abhorrent. Witness all the Joker and Darth Vader cosplays or people writing love letters to serial killers. There is a certain panache in being perfidious. I am sure that Trump would prefer being universally adored. However, as the President himself noted in his recent State of the Union, he is a divisive figure. So rather than be a reactive babyface in a world full of shoots, it's better to don the mantle of the heel. To his supporters, he is bringing out the steel chair from under the ring to finally deliver comeuppance to the elites that have looked down on and oppressed them. To his detractors, everything he does is beyond the pale; every setback, Trump suffers a victory against an unconscionable foe. The one lesson Trump learned from being a NY tabloid fixture in the 80s, and possibly from the WWE, is that the only thing worse than being hated is being ignored.
The Real World
If you’ve made it all the way through, one issue you might have is that all this kayfabe and bluster is acceptable in the scripted world of professional wrestling, but in the real world, the President of the United States of America has real power. And you’re right. The results of any given wrestling event are unlikely to have any measurable, long-term impact on your life.12 The President, from the powers vested in the office and the power of the United States, literally makes life-and-death decisions daily. So, it can be disconcerting when it sounds like he is cutting a promo in what we view as more “buttoned up” affairs, be it addressing the nation or a State of the Union speech. But maybe this is how communication will work in the social media era. Much as how we dress has become less formal over time, perhaps how we communicate will become shorter and more like a TikTok video than the Gettysburg Address. Maybe the best way to cope with the torrent of information the internet can churn out is to churn out even more content. The times they are a changing.
I don’t know if anyone can say whether the Trump administration is pre-planned or just barely constrained chaos. It likely varies from topic to topic and even day to day. Some of the executive orders and policies he is implementing at a breakneck pace will have long-term consequences, but no one, certainly not me, can say for sure what they will be. For example, USAID has the Famine Early Warning Systems Network, which provides advanced warnings to help mitigate famines worldwide. By shutting down USAID, even if it is temporary, critics of Trump might say lives will be lost as we lose the ability to track and respond to famines, hurting our soft power as well. Supporters might argue that if it was so important, why was it not duplicated at organizations ostensibly tasked with preventing famine, like the World Food Program, instead of dumping it on the American taxpayer like everything else? Is this an example of the isolationism and destruction of American soft power and democratic values that Trump’s critics claim? Or is it the painful but necessary steps needed to fix a broken and sclerotic federal government that no longer serves the needs of the American people?
To mix my idioms, we may not know whether the emperor wears any clothes until the tide goes out. Noise is at an all-time high, and signal is at an all-time low. We live in interesting but exhausting times. And like any good wrestler, whether you love or hate him, President Trump wants you to tune into the next event to see what happens.
Additional Reading/Watching
Full match of Randy Savage vs Ricky Steamboat, official WWE YT Channel:
Charlie Rose 1992 interview with Donald Trump: https://charlierose.com/videos/14730
Harry G. Frankfurt (2005). On Bullshit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
Footnotes
A “promo” is wrestling lingo for a speech designed to engage and sometimes enrage the audience.
Of course, professional wrestling isn't a uniquely American phenomenon – Japan, Mexico, and others all have their own unique and storied traditions. However, that's beyond the scope of this article (and, frankly, my knowledge base).
There is an absurd amount of drama and politicking that went on during the territory era that would make for a fantastic prestige show.
A gimmick is the term pro wrestling uses for the character or persona a professional wrestler plays when they’re in the ring or cutting promos.
Andre the Giant’s billing weight was 520 lbs., though that was almost certainly taking some creative liberties.
This is somewhat fitting, as WWE had two main shows, Raw and Smackdown. Raw tended to focus more on the storylines, while Smackdown was geared toward fans who appreciated the more technical aspects of professional wrestling.
A dramatic wrestling move used by the wrestler “Stone Cold” Steve Austin to close out his matches.
The etymology of kayfabe is a subject of considerable discussion, but it probably originates from the same carnival culture that created American pro wrestling.
Proving that clothes do not make the man. At least not in the late 90’s World Championship Wrestling.
Also, sometimes we just want to see jerks get their asses kicked.
As observed earlier, probably just a war criminal.
Unless it's Nov. 9, 1997, in Montreal, and your name is Bret “The Hitman” Hart. The best there is, the best there was, the best there ever will be.