Everything is Professional Wrestling
And it's everyone's problem
Most of the world paused with the curiosity of a car accident on the highway to gawk at former president Donald Trump surrendering to authorities in New York City on Tuesday afternoon. It’s the first time in American history a former president was indicted, so this isn’t exactly an occurrence with legal or social precedent.
For so much of Trump’s existence, he’s operated in the domain of a carnival barker. Otherworldly promises, half truths, misdirections, head fakes and the adeptness of a snake oil salesman fleeing town when his time ran out. Entering politics as a player and not commenting from the outside looking in fundamentally changed him.
While still the same huckster that New York City laughed and pointed at, his impact went beyond a headline of the tabloids on a slow news day. Trump was and still is all of our problem no matter how much we’d like to pretend he isn’t. In the context of American political history, the advent of the 24/7 cable news cycle presented a golden opportunity for those versed in the language of emotion.
CNN launched in 1980 as America’s cable news station, MSNBC in July of 1996, Fox in October of that same year. Cable news in a way was a blurring of the lines between news and entertainment. While the cable networks do have journalists who report news, their most well known personalities are commentators who give opinions on the news.
If the audience is flipping channels and come across a talking head giving an incendiary opinion, they’re going to put the remote down. If they’re angry, they’re engaged. If they agree with the speaker, they’re getting validated, even more engaged.
That blurring of the lines across society is a fundamental principle in modern media, regardless of platform. Trust in the news media is near an all time low in the United States at 34 percent according to a Gallup poll from October of 2022. Turning the news into entertainment is a winning proposition from a business perspective because it plays to people’s worst instincts.
Playing to people’s emotions is the bread and butter of professional wrestling. That blurring of the lines between sports and entertainment, the original sin of wrestling, has bled into every single aspect of media. News, sports, entertainment, it’s all rooted in trying to bait a reaction from the audience.
Understanding how to manipulate people’s emotions is the key to success in professional wrestling and lately politics at large. If you’re not familiar, Trump was inducted to the WWE hall of fame several years ago and has played an on screen roll several times during his time in the public eye.
Trump has a long standing personal friendship with WWE titan and noted bad guy Vince McMahon. According to a report in The Atlantic, McMahon was on a list of roughly ten people that Trump would take calls privately from while he was in the White House.
Oh and McMahon’s wife Linda served as the administrator of the small business administration during Trump’s presidency.
Professional wrestling and WWE in particular are all about the spectacle. WWE doesn’t just do wrestling, it does entertainment. The superstars (Vince’s coined name for talent, wrestling and wrestler are dirty words in the WWE style guide) are larger than life figures, they provide the motivations for a character’s path, how the audience is supposed to perceive them all stem from more than just their wrestling ability.
In professional wrestling, characters fall into three categories: baby faces, heels and tweeners.
Baby faces: The good guys, they play by the rules, have honorable motivations and are supposed to get a positive reaction from the audience.
Heels: The bad guys, they cheat, antagonize the crowd, act entitled and make the baby faces go through hell to win
Tweeners: The rare and hardest to execute, these are typically bad guys that are so good at their job, that the audience can’t help but like them. Not quite a Walter White or Tony Soprano level anti-hero but in the same school of thought.
The single most important component for success in professional reaction is audience reaction. As long as the audience is reacting with emotion, that wrestler will find a path forward. The biggest concern for a professional wrestler is the audience being indifferent to their presence.
It’s more than fine if the audience hates your character. If you’re an effective heel, you should have children pouting, thumbs down, voracious boos and heckling. You’re the mountain for the good guy to climb in the pursuit of their goal whether it be a championship or respect.
The parallels between Trump’s public persona and that of professional wrestling aren’t a coincidence. The former president knows how to cut a promo, he can get a reaction from his audience with ease. The true believers, those still wearing “Make America Great Again,” hats are effectively marks of the political world.
Oh and in wrestling parlance, a mark is someone who knows that wrestling is predetermined but honestly reacts to the results and characters.
So when Trump goes up to the podium and says the buzzwords about the out groups whether it be liberals, the LGBTQ+ community, political opponents, the CDC or anything else, it’s the same idea as The Iron Sheik going to the ring in the 1980s and shit talking America.
It’s all wrestling folks.
For all of the derision and smarminess that comes from perfectly respectable people towards those of us that enjoy wrestling, it’d do them some good to understand that world because the “real world,” is starting to resemble the circus of wrestling.
No matter what, the show goes on for Trump and for WWE. There is no off-season in professional wrestling, WWE is on TV twice a week and does house shows which aren’t televised every single week. Superstars typically are on the road 300+ days per year and their character has to hold serve in the pantheon of competitors.
It’s no different than Trump firing off posts on Truth Social calling political officials animals or corrupt. Trump full well knows what he did or didn’t do, but he has an image to maintain with his supporters. The marks need to be ushered along to advance the plot.
Unfortunately for us, professional wrestling only works because the superstars within the ring in front of the cameras know that it’s all a work. Out in the real world, we know that the heels aren’t actually bad guys and that the matches are worked out beforehand.
Of course, the audience knows that the guy laying on the mat perfectly square in the center of the ring while their opponent climbs to the top rope is in on the plan for the match. Trump carries himself as if that were a sound strategy in a street fight.
The rhetoric is all rooted in trying to get a reaction from his audience. Whether it be antagonizing his enemies or firing up his supporters, Trump needs to take up all the oxygen in the room.
There’s a reason the Marjorie Taylor Greenes of the world are rising to the top of the Republican Party. No matter what, the show has to go on. She knows her lines and sees the marks all around her. Using the Trump formula, Greene has carved out a role for herself within a directionless party.
By and large, the modern Republican party has no principles or policy positions. The uniting force of the right in today’s political landscape is that government doesn’t work. So, Republicans intentionally don’t govern, they grind the mechanisms of government to a halt and say “see, we told you it doesn’t work,” and their marks eat it up.
That’s the peril much of the world fell into in the wake of the neo-liberalism of the late 90s. Large swaths of the working class were left behind, the middle class shrunk, and people were left without answers for what happened to their former standard of living.
So, when a carnival barker comes into town and swears it’s their political opponent’s fault and you just need to vote for them to make things great again, it’s easy to see how so many marks were born.
The difference between radicalized citizens and wrestling marks isn’t that big. The outward showing of emotion is a core tenant of both’s existence. Their feelings matter, what’s going on in front of them elicits the most primal of reactions, cheers or boos.
But, the wrestling mark knows that when the show ends the wrestlers are people. They know that wrestling is entertainment, that it’s not the defining feature of their existence.
The radicalized citizen is not in on the work. One last bit of wrestling vocabulary for the road, “a work,” means part of the show, that it’s supposed to happen.
The person showing up to a Trump rally wearing a MAGA hat wants to hear the former president say the buzz words, buy a t-shirt in the parking lot and brag on social media that they saw the president.
Sounds a lot like a wrestling fan who went to a show to see their favorite superstar wrestle while wearing their favorite superstar’s shirt, bought something at the merchandise stand and posted a picture from the event.
The erosion of institutions only further plays into the carny angle that professional wrestling was born from. Well, if you can’t trust the powerful institutions anymore, you can always rely on what you can see with your own eyes. If you go to the show, no one can tell you what you saw or what you felt. It was real to you in that moment.
And that’s how a mark is born. An entire world of marks.