In a September
2016 article about the Donald Trump campaign, Salena Zito noted that when the
soon-to-be president makes counterfactual statements, “the press takes him
literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not
literally.” This turn of phrase became widely used by pundits to describe the
popularity of Trump and his ultimate success in the November 2016 election. The
notion of taking something seriously but not literally easily applies to two
phenomena in popular culture with which Trump is quite familiar—popular
wrestling and reality television. To both of these cultural institutions,
ostensibly savvy critics denigrate them by pointing out that neither of them
are “real.” As with Trump, to question the reality of pro wrestling or reality
television is to engage on the wrong register—the reality of each is beside the
point. While wrestling and reality TV may not be real, their fans maintain a
strong affective relationship to the characters and the morality plays that
structure their narratives. These audiences are already primed to think about
truth in ways that are seemingly incompatible with rational truth, and thus
were able to see the appeal of Trump while pedantic fact-checkers were busy
taking him literally. In this paper, I attempt to take Donald Trump seriously
using the logic of professional wrestling and reality television, and to show
the ways that all rethink and reconfigure the logic of reality and ultimately
the consequences of that for representative politics.
In a 2015 Think
Process article, Judd Ledlum offered this provocative clickbait: “This French
Philosopher is the Only One who Can Explain the Donald Trump Phenomenon.”
Ledlum reads Trump through the semiotician Roland Barthes and the theorist’s
reading of professional wrestling. Writing in 2015, very early in the
presidential campaign, he notes that “in the current campaign, Trump is
behaving like a professional wrestler while Trump’s opponents are conducting
the race like a boxing match.” Barthes notes the distinction between a boxing
match and a wrestling match, the former is focused on the outcome, while the
latter is concerned with the spectacle of individual moments and is ultimately
unconcerned with who wins. He writes that “wrestling is a sum of spectacles, of
which no single one is a function: each moment imposes the total knowledge of a
passion which rises erect and alone, without ever extending to the crowning
moment of a result” (16). This logic applied to the debates, after most of which
pundits declared that Trump had surely lost, and would subsequently fall in the
polls and lose the election. Just as the public for a pro-wrestling match does
not ultimately care who wins or loses, the logic of Trumpism holds that he wins
by simply being the center of attention. He flaunted this logic during the
Republican debates involving many candidates on stage. Trump was always situated
in the center and received the most questions and the most media attention—that
was what mattered to him. In a blogpost for Salon,
Chauncey Devega argues that traditional media institutions were not prepared
for a candidate who defined winning and losing by the amount of press coverage
that he received. He writes that “supposed journalistic standards of balance
and neutrality were ill-equipped to deal with a presidential candidate who
learned from reality TV and professional wrestling that the way to win is to
always keep the camera focused on him.” Trump’s multiple encounters with
professional wrestling and his long tenure on reality show prepared him to
strive for attention at all costs even if it meant sometimes playing the part
of the heel.
Ledlum
is not the only pundit to associate Trump with professional wrestling, and the
President’s past in which he hosted wrestling events, infamously shaved the
head of WWE president Steve McMahon with the help of “Stone Cold” Steve Austin,
and was eventually inducted into the pro-wrestling Hall of Fame encourage those
connections. In the midst of the campaign, Aaron Oaster penned an article for Rolling Stone titled “Donald Trump and
WWE: How the Road to the White House Began at ‘WrestleMania.’” Vann Newkirk’s Atlantic article from the campaign was
titled “Donald Trump, Wrestling Heel,” and a Chris Kelly piece in the Washington Post notes in the wake of the
election that “sometimes the heel wins.” In The
New York Times, Jeremy Gordon asks “Is Everything Wrestling” and argues
that the performed reality of the wrestling ring now proliferates in many
aspects of contemporary society. Gordon writes: “With each passing year, more and more facets
of popular culture become something like wrestling: a stage-managed ‘reality’
in which scripted stories bleed freely into real events, with the blurry line
between truth and untruth seeming to heighten, not lessen, the audience’s
addiction to the melodrama.” Donald Trump invites his supporters and the media
to indulge in this world in which reality and ‘reality’ comingle. He insists
that thousands of Muslims in New Jersey celebrated 9/11. He asks the public to
disbelieve visual evidence about the number of attendees at his inauguration,
and his Press Secretary assures journalists that the unemployment numbers were
bogus during the Obama Administration, but suddenly were accurate once he took
office. Sean Spicer quipped: “They may have been phony in the past, but it’s
very real now.” Spicer and the journalists at the press conference laughed at
this moment when the Press Secretary, and the humor stemmed from the savvy
acknowledgement that Spicer was involved in the construction of reality. They
all recognized that the strange ritual of a press conference is no different
from a pro wrestling match in the way in which its reality is constituted by a
mutual understanding between the performers and the audience.
Ironically,
though Trump offered a version of truth that did not always conform to the
confines of objective reality, his authenticity was one of the qualities that
supporters cited as a reason to vote for him. Silicon Valley tycoon Peter
Thiel, one of Trump’s more famous supporters, uses wrestling terminology to
explain Trump’s success. In an interview with the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd, he maintains that “many people
assumed Mr. Trump was “kayfabe” — a move that looks real but is fake. But then
his campaign turned into a “shoot” — the word for an unscripted move that
suddenly becomes real.” He goes on to note that “maybe pro-wrestling is one of
the most real things we have in our society and what’s really disturbing is
that the other stuff is much more fake. And whatever the superficialities of
Mr. Trump might be, he was more authentic than the other politicians.” French
theorist Jean Baurdillard presaged this move in his 1983 essay “The Precession
of Simulacra.” He writes that “when the real is no longer what it was,
nostalgia assumes its full meaning. There is a plethora of myths of origin and
of signs of reality—a plethora of truth, of secondary objectivity, and
authenticity” (6-7). Trump’s “authenticity” exists in the same way Thiel
suggests that pro-wrestling is one of the most real things we have in society.
Like Trump, it’s meant to be taken seriously, not literally. Just as
Baudrillard contends that Disneyland exists as imaginary to convince its
consumers that the rest of Los Angeles is indeed real, pro-wrestling exists as
fake in order to convince its audience that the rest of the world is indeed
real. Trump’s authenticity is a secondary authenticity that is produced and
constructed like wrestling’s kayfabe.
Scholar
Benjamin Litherland examines the notion of kayfabe, specifically its
complicated role in the multi-mediated experience of contemporary professional
wrestling. Litherland explains that the term comes from old carnival slang and
“refers to the practice of sustaining the in-diegesis performance into everyday
life” (531). While he does not write about Trump, he does talk about the ways
in which Twitter, Trump’s medium of choice, complicates the relationship
between a celebrity’s real self and their persona. In Litherland’s schema, Twitter
calls into question any distinction between a celebrity’s true self. For him,
“the borders of diegesis and ‘in’ and ‘out’ of character performance are
stretched to breaking, especially in the wake of structured reality television
genres. The complexities of kayfabe, therefore, may serve as a useful starting
point for considering the layers of performance in modern celebrity, both on
Twitter and beyond” (533). Trump uses the ambiguity of Twitter as a means of
allowing himself to play multiple roles and to create a gap between the
presidential Trump who appears in meetings in the Oval Office, and his Twitter
handle, which is ostensibly the same as his presidential persona, but through
which he can blur the lines between reality and celebrity in ways consistent
with WWE performances and reality performances.
Gregory
Quinn specifically links Donald Trump with the practice of kayfabe in a piece
for the blog Bullshitist. He asserts
that “Donald Trump is our first kayfabe president” and goes on to note that
while wrestling is fake “it’s complicated
fake. It’s fakeness treated as real.”
The complicated nature of the fake stems from the fact that the performers do
not break character or break kayfabe. Many in the media keep hoping or assuming
that Trump will break character and “pivot” to being more presidential. They
assume that it’s in the best interest of Trump to transition from his role as
“heel,” to one that assumes the more traditional “face” status of the president
or one that more closely resembles who he is. They see his undisciplined
Tweets, acknowledge that they’re “part of the act,” but assume that at some
point he’ll move beyond the character or caricature of himself who appears
undisciplined, buffoonish, and potentially unhinged. The astute wrestling fan
understands that such a pivot is unlikely, and even if it does momentarily seem
that Trump is playing the role of the Face or the good guy, the potential for a
heel turn persists. Trump has committed to the role of performer and the logic
of kayfabe; a similar logic undergirds reality television, the genre in which
Trump played his most famous role.
Scholars
of reality television have linked the genre to professional wrestling. Mark
Andrejevic references an MTV show called Tough
Enough which is a pro-wrestling themed reality show. He notes that “the
marriage of these two formats seems particularly appropriate, since pro
wrestling represents the culmination of the demise of symbolic efficacy: it
thematizes cynical savviness by not even trying to make viewers believe the
action is real” (226). The consumer of both reality television and
pro-wrestling knows very well that the events are staged, but nevertheless
participates in the conditions that construct reality. Andrejevic goes on to
say that “the impasse of the savvy subject position is that, even as it
collapses the imaginary into the real, it remains locked into the desperate
search for some reality that would sustain its dismissal” (212). In this
schema, the consumer of reality television and professional wrestling continues
to crave something authentic despite knowing very well that the authentic is
exactly that which is being produced and manipulated in these genres. The Trump
supporter lauds their candidate because he “tells it like it is,” despite
knowing full well that what Trump says does not have any basis in objective
reality. The Trump opponent becomes frustrated because they can see through the
ruse, but is playing the game on the wrong terrain. The former is taking him
seriously, the latter is taking him literally.
The rise of Trump occurs against a backdrop of
popular culture in which reality television has become normalized and
established as an entertainment genre. Trump has of course been in the reality
show business since 2004, and for two decades before that he gained his
celebrity and notoriety through tabloids and televised magazine shows such as Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, which
are forbearers of reality TV’s halcyon days in the 2000s. Writing in the 2000s
in “Training Camps of the Modular,” scholar Barry King notes that “reality TV
advances its own reality principle which is based on notions of authenticity
and the value of exposing the ‘false’ faces that the participants present to
the camera” (43). For him, the crucial aspect of this reality principle is that
“truth is to be found in the subjective and personal.” The notion of truth
being subjective is paramount to Trumpism and has its roots in theories of
postmodernism and reality television. Kellyanne Conway’s coinage of the term
“alternative facts” exemplifies the postmodern undercurrents of Trumpism. In
the blog Quartz, Max de Haldevang
identifies Trumpism as postmodernism and makes a distinction between
politicians who massage the truth or “spin” the facts; instead, “Trump has
moved beyond that, ushering in an era where truth plays literally no bearing on
what he says.” Astonishingly, this strategy was effective in elevating Trump to
the presidency, and while it’s too early to tell if it will foster a successful
presidency, Trump and his administration show no signs of realigning themselves
with a more traditional notion of truth.
As a genre,
reality television has often been linked to postmodernism in part because of
the ways that it reconfigures truth and reality. Randall Rose and Stacy Wood
make the connection between reality television and postmodernism explicit in
“Paradox and the Consumption of Authenticity through Reality Television.” They
outline what they call the postmodern paradox in which “although authenticity
is desired and earnestly promoted, consumers of reality television revel in the
ironic mixture of the factitious and the spontaneous” (286). Like the
postmodern pleasure that Rose and Wood suggest provides pleasure for the
reality television viewer, Trump supporters, and indeed the media who play a
part in this morality play, luxuriate in Trump’s ability to meld the factitious
and the spontaneous. The most intriguing version of Donald Trump is when he is
making “off the cuff” remarks rather than reading off of a teleprompter, or he
his Tweeting with little discipline at odd hours of the day or night. What is
real or true becomes secondary to what Trump feels at any given moment.
Both professional
wrestling and reality television create staged events in which the audience is
heavily invested despite knowing that the events are not real, or rather, they
complicate the notion of objective reality. Political media events such as
debates are inherently imbued with a level of gravitas because they portend to
real consequences in the real world. Despite the supposed gravitas, however,
the media eschew policy for style, and reward candidates who can dominate a
crowded stage or those who say outlandish or shocking things. In a Salon thinkpiece, Sonia Saraiya subtitles
her piece “Hate-Watching the GOP: The Debates are Officially Trashy Reality TV,
and by those Rules, Trump’s Winning.” Writing in the middle of the seemingly
never-ending primary debate season, Saraiya acknowledges the staged aspects of
the debates, noting that “it’s all theater, and more to the point, it’s theater
that refuses to acknowledge that it’s theater.” Her piece was written in the
wake of perhaps the most surreal debate moments in which Trump and Marco Rubio
exchanged jabs about the size of each other’s hands and insinuations about the
size of their penises. That debate was indeed great theater, but I question
whether it did not acknowledge itself as such. Perhaps the moderators and
political pundits acted as if this had any semblance of a storied tradition of
American democracy, but Trump was deeply aware of the theatrical elements of
his performance. In the wake of an earlier debate in which Megan Kelly grilled
him for his past transgressions against women, Trump responded that “I frankly
don’t have time for political correctness.” He goes on to state that “frankly,
what I say, and oftentimes it’s fun, it’s kidding. We have a good time.” Here
Trump tries to elide his horrible behavior towards women by maintain that he
was “kidding.” Here, Trump is getting at the crux of his campaign. He chastised
anyone for taking him literally and suggests that voters should not take those
words seriously; however, his supporters understand that the “serious” issue is
political correctness run amok, so he’s able to allow people to take him
seriously while maintaining that he’s kidding. Rhetorical scholar Paul Johnson responds
to Trump’s exchange with Kelly by noting that “the inability of all those
captured by political correctness—to distinguish between sincere commentary and
joking tacitly figures Trump as the avatar of authenticity, the actor capable
of exercising judgement about what matters and what does not” (21). Once Trump
is able to determine which issues are important—which should be taken seriously,
he controls the terrain of the contest, and the terrain on which he wants to
compete is that of reality television.
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