Kayfabe Nation : Professional Wrestling, Donald Trump, and the New Cynicism

Abstract

What do a pudgy, orange autocrat, and pumped-up men in tights have in common? The connections, while profound, all rest on specific strategies employed by World Wrestling Entertainment during the early 2000s (known as WWE’s “Attitude Era”) when Donald Trump was centrally involved with the promotion of WWE. These are: (1) universally breaking kayfabe, the code of people in the industry not to reveal or admit fakery; (2) Vince McMahon (WWE’s CEO at that time) playing a fictional version of himself as someone constantly humiliated in storylines; (3) the vicious affirmation of traditional gender roles through parables of male domination; and (4) telling stories that encourage viewers to ignore the actual material conditions of WWE “superstars” in favor of conspiratorial fictions involving powerful individual actors. In Kayfabe Nation: Professional Wrestling, Donald Trump, and the New Cynicism, Hebert and Cogburn present a trenchant analysis of Attitude Era WWE, showing the extent to which MAGA is just is a function, or symptom, of Trump’s internalization of WWE’s most objectionable tropes. Neal Hebert and Jon Cogburn’s goal is not to use WWE merely to understand Trumpism and the related autocratic turn in countries as diverse as El-Sisi’s Egypt, Putin’s Russia, Erdogan’s Turkey, Modi’s India, Bolsonaro’s Brazil, Orbán’s Hungary, Netanyahu’s Israel, and of course Trump’s own America. Beyond that, Kayfabe Nation is a defense of truth against the lie that culminates in the widespread adoption of self-defeating conspiracy theories among the constituency of the right, as well as against the idea, popular in corrupted center-left parties across the planet that political success comes down to adopting better rhetorical strategies, strategies that exist in part to cover over their abandonment of New Deal and socialist ideologies where the material conditions of their constituencies would actually improve.