How Pro Wrestling Explains Today’s GOP

Kruse: Former Trump campaign adviser Sam Nunberg told you there are only two people in the whole world whose calls Trump would take alone — Mark Burnett and Vince McMahon. And you say McMahon is likely the closest thing to a friend that Donald Trump has. Beyond the reality that Trump is a preternaturally lonely man, why do you say that?

Riesman: I talked to a lot of Republican operatives. Trump and Vince are extremely close. I think he likes to talk to Vince. I think Vince and he understand each other. I think he greatly admires and looks up to Vince. And that you can just find from his tweets — that’s something that’s very much on the record — it is a consistent picture of, you know, this is a great man, Trump referring to Vince, this is somebody who has a good philosophy, this is somebody who knows how to thrill an audience. And for better or worse, we’re shaped by our role models.

Kruse: For our readers who certainly know politics but might not know pro wrestling, what is kayfabe, rhymes with hey, babe, and what is neokayfabe? And what specifically is neokayfabe in the context of politics today?

Riesman: Kayfabe is this old multipurpose term that emerges from traveling circuses, which is where wrestling emerges from. It is all centered around the big lie of wrestling, of pro wrestling, theatrical wrestling, for the first century of its existence. And that big lie was that what you see in the ring is what you get — that it’s real, that this is a legitimate sporting competition. Everybody had to be in character. You really had to commit to it anytime you were out in public. What happens in the mid- to late ’80s is Vince takes power at his father’s company, buys it from his father, and he starts making this product that is a lot more outlandishly ridiculous in some ways than any wrestling that had come before — stuff that was just so obviously entertainment and not a sport that he started calling his product sports entertainment.

And kayfabe is basically over at that point, and wrestling sort of flounders for a number of years. It’s very difficult for the promoters in that period to get people interested because old kayfabe is gone. The suspension of disbelief isn’t there anymore. So what ends up happening, and it’s not just Vince that does it, but it’s Vince who really codifies it, is you get this phenomenon that I, perhaps vainly, have named neokayfabe. You are operating not with the assumption that what you’re seeing is real; in fact, you are operating with the very firm belief that what you were seeing is fake. But in that fakeness, a promoter or a wrestler will toss in little bits of seemingly behind-the-scenes truth, what appears to be behind-the-scenes truth, in the context of this wider lie. And that I think should hopefully sound familiar to all of us who pay attention to politics these days.

Think about Trump. He would say stuff you’re not supposed to say, and that was what everyone who loved him said about him. I mean, Frank Rich wrote a story for the magazine that I was working at about how Trump was saving our democracy — this was in 2015 — saying that he was saying what other people weren’t willing to say about how stupid this system was and maybe that would wake people up. Well, I don’t know that it woke people up to make them change the world for the better, but it certainly grabbed their attention. And that’s all that matters. That’s all that matters now. Can you grab people’s attention? And Vince figured out a while ago that a great way to grab people’s attention is just have people say the unsayable and do the unthinkable and toss out things that are true. I think the parallel is kind of obvious, and I hope that this is a moment where we can sort of wake up to the fact that the strategy of just fact-checking the other side doesn’t work. Because that’s not what fascism believes. It doesn’t believe in consistency. It doesn’t believe in all the truth or all the lie. It believes in total chaos. And that’s what we have under neokayfabe.

Kruse: The well-meaning fact checkers did not imbibe the lessons of professional wrestling in the ’80s and ’90s.

Riesman: They didn’t.

Kruse: You make the point in a number of places and in a number of ways that this is not just a Trump thing. That it is the generations of the children of the ’80s and ’90s. And that it is a both-sides-of-the-aisle phenomenon.

Riesman: Wrestling was a widespread phenomenon for millennials when we were in our impressionable teen years. I do think you have an easier time translating the ideology of neokayfabe into politics if you’re operating within a party that is really resolutely anti-truth — the Republicans now. That said, I do think the phenomenon of neokayfabe, such as it is, has infected both parties. The parties aren’t the same. I would never say that. I’m saying both parties have interests and have advantages when it comes to saying one thing, meaning another and then saying yet a third thing and meaning a fourth thing. These layers of confusion are advantageous for politicians.

Kruse: And one of the more interesting arguments in this book is the idea that the generation that grew up with wrestling is now running stuff or about to run stuff and that matters a lot. How are Republicans and Democrats both doing politics differently now because they watched Hulk Hogan in the ’80s and ’90s?

Riesman: We learned that the most important thing is entertaining people — basically the most important thing is pushing people’s buttons. And also learning that you can be a heel and be successful — you can be somebody who is hated and you can profit off that hatred.

Kruse: Attention above all else, button-pushing over policy-making …

Riesman: And success in being hated. That’s such a key part of the Trump phenomenon. People think that by hating him and tweeting about how bad he is they’re somehow stabbing against him. But that’s the same way that people thought they were making a point of taking down Vince McMahon by buying T-shirts that say “Stone Cold” because “Stone Cold” Steve Austin was Vince’s rival in a storyline. But Vince McMahon owns it. He makes all the money off the T-shirt. That’s what happens with Trump. And not just Trump. George Santos. Any number of politicians. It’s how you succeed now.

Kruse: It pays to be the heel just as much or maybe even more than it pays to be “the face.”

Riesman: Oh, I would say much more. Being the face doesn’t pay because you’re always going to have another side that reflexively hates you. You’re not going to win over the other side. Whereas if you’re a heel, you have one side loving you, and the other side you’re profiting off their hatred. It’s the only way to actually make it now.