The fans of wrestling want to get “worked”; they want to believe the spectacle is real, even though they all know that it is not. The way to get the fans to open up their wallets is to get them sucked into the fictional world of performances and rivalries, and so the companies and actors try very hard to make it all stick.

In contrast, a “shoot” is when the wrestling performance goes far enough that something actually crosses over into reality. As a wrestler, it is possible to “work” yourself into a “shoot”; to have the act you’re playing go so far as to take on a life of its own, outside of your control. A fan could begin stalking you, or could even attack you for things you did to the babyface in the ring; a fake rivalry could turn into a real one.

Today, a very similar dynamic has sunk its fangs into American society itself, and the consequences are becoming increasingly deadly. When Trump began his second term in office, he came in promising a far-reaching revolution in the basic assumptions that underlined American politics. In area after area, the status quo was to be overturned: industries would be onshored rather than offshored, US allies and enemies alike would be brought to heel by tariffs, and the results of decades of mass immigration would be upended through a titanic deportation effort. Having promised his voters the moon, Trump and his administration have struggled to actually deliver. Reindustrialization has turned out to be a bust, for US manufacturing employment is actually contracting. The trade war against China is de facto already over, resulting in only limited changes to the status quo but still causing huge damage to American farmers.

Centrally, the new project of mass deportations has also struggled to get off the ground. While the number of deportations are high in historical terms, they fall massively short of the goal of one million deportations per year that Trump set for his administration. The White House has found it tougher than expected to change the reality of slow enforcement, limited resources and the often glacial pace of legal proceedings. To make matters worse, there are a number of contradictions baked into the idea of massively expanded deportation efforts, and these contradictions don’t have a neat solution.

From the very start of his second term, the various parts of Trump’s coalition have been at loggerheads with each other about the direction and goal of the administration’s immigration policy. 2025 began with a bitter conflict between the “tech bro” wing and the broader Republican base over the need for, and scope of, the H1B visa program, a conflict in which Trump actually sided with the tech bros. On top of that, Trump has consistently wavered on the question of going after employers, even going so far as talking about extending some form of amnesty for illegals working on farms: an idea that the now-late Charlie Kirk warned could break the MAGA coalition. Like Saint Augustine, who supposedly cried “Lord, give me chastity and continence, but not yet!”, the Trump administration is caught between wanting to make good on its promises to ordinary voters, and the basic economic and political reality of having very wealthy donors who don’t actually care about any of that. This contradiction is nothing new in American politics — in fact, it’s been the status quo for the GOP stretching back decades. The GOP has long been the party of voters who are sick of illegal immigration and the employers who want more of it and in fact rely on it to maintain their profit margins. Historically, this awkward marriage has generally produced a politics that is heavy on the rhetoric and very light on the actual follow-through. Trump has not actually managed to transcend this fundamental contradiction; what he has done is come up with a very novel way in which to handle it.

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If you can’t meet the goals you set out for yourself when it comes to actual mass deportation numbers, and your political coalition includes business interests who risk losing serious money if they can no longer access cheap, illegal labor, then what can you do? Well, you can turn it all into wrestling. ICE agents — who tended to keep a low profile and work mostly in plainclothes — now ride around in the open, heavily armed and wearing masks, with massive WWE-style media blitzes announcing their arrival. Until recently, ICE generally took some pains to avoid announcing their presence, particularly in blue states where they were known to be unpopular. But all that has been replaced with heavily promoted and hyped-up ICE “campaigns” in blue areas; campaigns that invariably lead to protests, clashes with governors and mayors, and recalcitrance from local law enforcement. All of this of course makes the process of actually finding and deporting illegal immigrants much slower and more dangerous than it would otherwise be. But that isn’t really the point: just like in wrestling, the administration is in the middle of a “work”; building a story and a hyperreality that their “fans” can make themselves part of.

On one level, the administration is truly pushing the envelope: Trump talks regularly about sending in the uniformed military to police Democrat cities, either to solve crime or to simply arrest all the dumb liberals who have supposedly ruined places like Chicago or Los Angeles. But when you actually dig into the details, these plans and suggestions for military deployments are almost entirely hot air, often involving dozens of soldiers for cities of hundreds of thousands. When deployments do happen, like in Washington, D.C., they go on only for a short while before they are quietly rolled up. Just like in wrestling, what matters is the storyline: actions like these are calculated based on what will move the media cycle and on what sounds impressive to the base. As with wrestling, the point isn’t actually to be real; the point is to feel real.

To millions of Americans, what is happening right now is starting to feel very real indeed. Republicans cheer as masked officers finally take off the kid gloves and roughhouse their political enemies. Democrats increasingly feel that the country is becoming lawless, and that the talk about having marines and Army soldiers use their cities as “training grounds” for future military conflict might just be real after all. And even if the actual mass deportations are fake, even if Trump ends up deporting fewer people than Barack Obama or Joe Biden, even if the plans to send in the military to “clean up Chicago” fall apart under even the faintest scrutiny, it doesn’t actually matter. The rocks and snowballs being thrown by protesters right now are real; the tear gas and the batons and the bullets are real. Slowly, surely, the work is morphing into a shoot.

On 7 January, the city of Minneapolis saw a “shoot” happen in the most tragic and literal sense of that word. Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother with no previous criminal record, was fatally shot in her car after being stopped by ICE agents. There is a great deal of footage available of the scene and the shooting itself, taken from multiple angles; the reader is thus free to make up his or her own mind about the incident. Yet whatever conclusion you draw about the details, the reality is that the details actually do not matter. They do not matter in the slightest, because before the body of Renee Good had even cooled, Donald Trump had already taken to social media to denounce her as someone who had “viciously” attempted to kill ICE agents. The US Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, minced no words either, going so far as to essentially declare Good a domestic terrorist.

This kind of rhetoric is fantastically irresponsible, but it’s also not surprising. Rather than compelling people to tone down their rhetoric and back away from the brink, Good’s death immediately became another part of the hyperreality; in death she was transformed into another stereotypical, villainous heel for the crowd to boo and jeer. Pundits on Fox News immediately began talking about how this now-dead woman had written her pronouns — she/her — on her social media profiles, and that she apparently was in a lesbian relationship of some kind. At the same time, angry crowds in Minneapolis began pelting retreating ICE agents with jeers and snowballs, as videos of Good’s crumpled body spread like wildfire. One half of America had a new babyface, the other part got a new heel. Republicans could cheer that another dangerous and potentially terroristic liberal got what she deserved; Democrats received further evidence that the fascists in jackboots really were coming to kill them all.

America is busy weaving a great and terrible fantasy; one where the country is slowly inching toward civil war. Trump is talking about defeating the “enemy from within”, Steve Bannon is warning that Republicans will go to jail if Democrats win the midterms. Social media is increasingly filled with shrill talk about how the other side is dangerous and cannot be reasoned with, and polling indicates that a very large number of Americans are now worried about the risk of democratic decline and even civil war itself. People have already died as a result of this fantasy; even worse, their deaths rapidly become the fuel the fantasy needs to keep growing stronger and more believable. As the story grows in urgency, it is drawing in more and more people, making future confrontations and further deaths all the more likely. Neither side in this conflict has anything even remotely resembling clean hands. Before Renee Nicole Good, there was Ashli Babbitt. Before Donald Trump dismissed his own countrymen as seditious radicals and terrorists, Joe Biden and his party did much the same thing.

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Increasingly, this kind of wrestling-like dynamic seems to be applied everywhere. The now almost entirely abandoned trade war between America and the rest of the world, going even further than the trade war with China, was one great big spectacle from start to finish. Massive, business-destroying hikes to tariff rates got announced through late-night social media posts. Trade delegations of important allies like Japan, upon visiting the White House to try to work out new trade policies, found themselves part of what turned out to be mere photoshoots: the Americans were neither prepared for nor particularly interested in actually settling on the details of some new agreement. In his various feuds with countries like Canada and Denmark, Trump has strayed far beyond geopolitical norms; but the feuds are reminiscent of Trump’s own history inside the wrestling world. Indeed, Trump has the rare honor of being the only president in American history to have been inducted into World Wrestling Entertainment’s coveted hall of fame, engaging in fan-favorite feuds such as the “Battle of the Billionaires” match between him and WWE co-founder Vince McMahon, the outcome of which led to Trump shaving McMahon’s head inside the ring.

But acting out the fake wrestling version of an incipient civil war is fantastically dangerous. The level of dehumanization, cruelty and bloodthirstiness one now sees on social media is already reaching a boiling point. Without some kind of reconciliation — which there appears to be zero interest in — more people will die, and the fantasy will slowly begin to turn into reality. America already has all the prerequisites for dangerous levels of social unrest and internal violence. The national debt is exploding, internal dissatisfaction with the state of the economy keeps rising, and the growing AI bubble is looking increasingly unstable. On top of that, it is engaged in multiple simmering conflicts over the world: trying to strong-arm Venezuela, guard against China, counter Russia and Iran, while also antagonizing all of Europe and threatening to annex Greenland from Denmark, a Nato ally. It has few friends and a growing list of enemies, forcing an increasingly overstretched and under-resourced military to try to be everywhere all at once. Historically speaking, the combination of social and economic crisis at home, and overstretch and wars abroad, is a dangerous one.

Moreover, America’s recent spate of high-profile assassinations should put to bed any lingering delusions — popular in the Joe Biden era — that a domestic conflict would be neat, easy, and containable. The US military, for all that’s impressive about it, cannot actually do much against the kind of internal violence that would be relevant here. Even Donald Trump himself, a man one of the most expensive security details in the world, was an inch away from losing his life to an assassin’s bullet only recently. If a concerted outbreak of political violence happens, very few people will be safe.

But that outbreak of concerted mass violence has not yet arrived in America. All talk of dealing with “the enemy within”, of sending in the troops to clean out Chicago, of calling in the National Guard to defend against Trump’s fascism, of “communists” or “fascists” about to take over the country and kill your friends and family: it’s all just fake. It is made up, it is a story. Yet people have already begun killing each other over that story, and as things stand nobody seems inclined to stop. As the late wrestling legend, Hulk Hogan, would have put it: sometimes, when you work a work, you work yourself into a shoot.

To that piece of wrestling wisdom, we could perhaps somberly add: if the work you’re working is about how dangerous enemies of the republic lurk around the corner, and how every political enemy is a domestic terrorist, a bloodthirsty communist, or goose-stepping fascist, it’s usually only a matter of time before the shooting starts.

In the carny argot of the sport, the word for this is kayfabe. Kayfabe is something more artful than a lie and more profound than a fiction. It doesn’t simply substitute a narrative for the truth: it turns the truth into an element of the storyline, and those storylines in turn shape the truth. A kayfabe feud can sour a real professional relationship. Kayfabe romances turn into real romances, and the real romance is written into the kayfabe. The end result is a world where even the most serious possibilities can be inoculated with irony.

The king of sports entertainment until very recently was Vince McMahon, who both ran WWE in real life and kayfabe played a domineering boss character called Mr McMahon. But last week, after four decades in charge, McMahon resigned, following the publication of sexual misconduct allegations against him in the Wall Street Journal. Perhaps coincidentally, just days earlier, he’d signed a major deal to take wrestling to Netflix.

The allegations are extensive and distressing: a former WWE employee name Janel Grant claims he took turns sexually abusing her in a locked room with another executive, trafficked her to other men in the company and defecated on her during a threesome. McMahon denies them all, stating: “Ms Grant’s lawsuit is replete with lies, obscene made-up instances that never occurred, and is a vindictive distortion of the truth.”

But these are not the first allegations to be made against McMahon, or the culture of wrestling he presided over. As far back as 1992, Rita Chatterton, the first female referee in what was then the WWF, gave an interview in which she said McMahon had raped her in 1986 then frozen her out of the company. (He denied this.) By then, though, the statute of limitations had expired. For the mainstream media, which had limited interest in women’s allegations anyway, wrestling was a niche concern. For the specialist wrestling press, pursuing the story would have been suicidal — McMahon controlled access, and would hardly indulge a journalist pursuing an unflattering angle. McMahon dictated the storylines in the ring, but he also had the power to control the stories told beyond it.

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A few years later, in 1999, Rena Mero (who wrestled as Sable) sued what was then the WWF: she said she’d been stripped of her championship belt after refusing to do in-ring nudity, and had been pressured to participate in lesbian storylines. The parties had settled, in an agreement that barred Mero from wrestling for three years — and even from using her ring name. As standard, WWE contracts give the organisation copyright over wrestlers’ characters. This meant that if you left McMahon’s kingdom, you’d usually leave your career behind: the “real” you was of considerably less value than the kayfabe version.

So, anyone who valued their wrestling career would be advised to play nice with McMahon. Given that WWE essentially held a monopoly over the sport, your career and reputation were in his gift. It’s understandable, then, that after her three-year ban was up, Mero returned for a storyline where she played the in-ring McMahon’s mistress. At one point, her breasts were exposed on live TV. It was a twist that reduced Mero’s lawsuit to a piece of kayfabe, effectively invalidating her claims and furthermore, those of any other woman in wrestling who might speak out about harassment. Taking your accuser back is, cynically, the quickest way to make her look like an unreliable witness; and as Harvey Weinstein’s victims would later describe, leaving is not a simple thing when the man you’re trying to leave wields absolute control over your profession.

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I knew nothing of these allegations when I was watching wrestling in the late Nineties. McMahon was protected by his power, but also by the convention of kayfabe. Wrestling fans pride themselves on their ability to suspend their disbelief in just the right amount — to confuse the ring with real life was to make yourself a dupe, or a “mark” in wrestling slang. The character Vince McMahon played was a womanising monster, but only the most childishly naive viewer would confuse that character with the man.

It’s the same gaslight logic that has sustained Donald Trump — a friend of McMahon’s and, thanks to the 2007 “Battle of the Billionaires”, the only president to also be a member of WWE’s Hall of Fame. We’ve seen it when Trump has faced his own allegations of sexual misconduct. “Grab them by the pussy” was “locker room talk” — essentially, the kind of thing that the character of Donald Trump would say. Yes, he was found by a jury to have sexually assaulted the writer E Jean Carroll, and further ordered to pay her $83.3 million in damages for subsequently continuing to insist that she is lying about it — but in Donald Trump kayfabe, he’s the victim of a leftist conspiracy and this is simply more evidence that his enemies are out to get him.

Kayfabe is a way to talk about the art of wrestling, but really, it’s a term for the ability of the most powerful to impose their version of reality, and confound everyone else’s. And every MeToo story is a story, at bottom, of who is powerful enough to dictate the truth. It’s telling that, for most men, their MeTooing coincides with a decline in their authority. Weinstein was well past his Oscar-minting prime. R Kelly had ceased to be a reliable hit machine, spending more time with his grooming victims than he did in the studio. Jimmy Savile — who was MeTooed before MeToo was a thing — had to be dead first. If Trump seems impervious, it’s because he is, so far, too big to fail.

It’s telling, too, that the men who have paid the highest price for MeToo allegations have often been low in the social pecking order. Stephen Elliott was a minor figure in literary journalism when he was anonymously accused of rape via journalist Moira Donegan’s MeToo-inspired “Shitty Media Men” open-source spreadsheet. The unsubstantiated claims led to his social and professional ruin; when he sued for defamation, that was seen as further proof of his turpitude, regardless of whether he was right. Last year, he reached a settlement with Donegan in which she would pay him damages.

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McMahon has already resigned from WWE once, in 2022, when the WSJ initially reported that the company had made millions of dollars in payouts to women alleging sexual misconduct against him. He was replaced by his daughter Stephanie, and reinstated a few months later, leaving it unclear as to whether it was a real defenestration, or a kayfabe one. But this time, the reality of Netflix’s corporate reputation appears to have imposed itself over the preferred reality of Vince McMahon. At 78, it could finally be the end of his reign.

When the reporters who broke the Weinstein allegations for the New York Times wrote a book about it, they called it She Said. It’s a title that explicitly references storytelling: who is listened to, and who is deemed an unreliable narrator. A “she said” story is one you don’t have to pay attention to, until something changes and suddenly you do. Maybe that’s why the entertainment industry is where MeToo started: it takes a storytelling business to shift a storytelling problem. And maybe that’s why it’s taken so long for wrestling to have its MeToo moment: when one man rules the narrative, his word is not only the law, it’s the (kayfabe) truth.

This reflects a profound anxiety among boys, that no matter how intellectually superior you are, physical defeat trumps everything. Even the ever-triumphant protagonists of the Revenge of the Nerds film franchise never manage to shake a sense of profound inadequacy, regardless of how many bullies they “school” by other means. And the anxiety of a boy can be formative as he grows into a man.

In the world of internet celebrities and tech tycoons, a trend has been picking up steam over the past few years: high-profile figures from the digital realm have been donning boxing gloves and stepping into the ring, to square off in physical matches. This isn’t the scripted amateur wrestling of the past, as in WrestleMania’s “Battle of the Billionaires”. These are real, bare-knuckle brawls with genuine stakes.

These “creator clashes”, as they’ve come to be known, rake in millions of viewers and generate substantial revenue for the participants. They’ve even served to revitalise the careers of D-list celebrities whose stars had begun to dim — or been snuffed out by cancellation — such as Epic Meal Time host Harley Morenstein and controversial comedian Sam Hyde. But why would men in need of neither revenue nor a reputational boost engage in such an activity? Why are Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, men whose combined worth is over $300 billion, hinting at an upcoming cage fight?

These creator clashes are just the latest chapter in a long tradition of intellectuals seeking to prove themselves physically. Norman Mailer, for instance, wasn’t just a literary giant; he was also known for his penchant for physical altercations. And his two instincts, of the writer and the fighter, often collided. Mailer’s book, The Fight, centres on the legendary “Rumble in the Jungle” between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman. Not content to be an impartial observer, Mailer implicated himself in the narrative, showcasing his gritty, tough-guy literary persona as both participant and spectator.

The bookish Mailer graduated from Harvard at the age of 20, the archetypal “geek”; yet he worked towards proving that intellectual prowess and physical strength aren’t mutually exclusive. Another Harvard man, George Plimpton’s project was similar. His book, Shadow Box, recounts his experience training and then sparring with light heavyweight champion Archie Moore. In elite circles, Plimpton’s Ivy League pedigree and physical delicacy might have been celebrated, but in a wider society that equates masculinity with physical strength and courage, his was suspect. Through his participation in boxing, his manhood was validated — even though Moore thrashed him.

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Political leaders, too, also prefer to appear strong rather than nerdy, even though an analytical mind is more useful in running a country. Barack Obama never missed an opportunity to show off on a basketball court. And RFK Jr has recently made a lot of headlines by bench-pressing. But the best American example is undoubtedly Theodore Roosevelt, a prolific author who was also renowned for his love of boxing, wrestling, horse riding and judo. He extolled the virtues of “the man in the arena” — one who actively challenges himself — and a “strenuous life“; in pursuit of one, he was actually blinded in one eye, during a boxing match with Colonel Daniel Moore, his military aide.

The injury became part of his public persona, a testament to his unwavering dedication to his ideals. As did his response to an assassination attempt on the campaign trail in 1912: after he was shot in the chest, he waved away concerned aides and gave a scheduled speech. But it was actually his textbook knowledge of anatomy, rather than his courage, that convinced him to go on: he knew that if he wasn’t coughing up blood, the wound didn’t need urgent attention. His mind was, in a crisis, more valuable than his courage. It was this that allowed him to present himself as not simply brain or brawn, but a thorough amalgamation of both.

At its heart, the trend of creator clashes might just be the same, age-old attempt to reach for this masculine ideal, but with a modern twist: as we increasingly live our lives in the digital realm, becoming more and more disembodied, there is something subversive about proving ourselves to be physically powerful. It’s also fused with the imperative to create and maintain a personal brand online that can be ranked in terms of followers, retweets — or victories in the ring.

The concept of getting famous people to beat each other up took off in 2002 with Celebrity Boxing. The two-episode Fox series attracted millions of viewers, despite the backlash against its exploitative nature. (One match featured the legendary basketball player Manute Bol, whose 7’7″ height and deteriorating health raised ethical questions.) Still, celebrity boxing remained a spectacle, occasionally resurfacing in various forms.

Earlier iterations of celebrity boxing often leaned towards the sensational (boxer versus wrestler!), and the absurd (watch physically unwell men like the giant Bol and obese former American footballer William “Refrigerator” Perry flail about in the ring!). But the advent of digital media has introduced a new dynamic. When influencers, entrepreneurs and digital celebrities face each other now, they are engaged in something more than physical contests with a small television audience. Social media platforms allow these events to be staged, promoted and consumed in real time, on a global scale; they have become major vehicles for personal and brand promotion, strategic tools for audience engagement.

A case in point is the boxing forays of YouTube personalities Logan and Jake Paul, influencer-turned-boxers whose fights are part spectacle, part marketing strategy. The build-up often involves an array of promotional activities — including viral videos and social media sparring — that riles up digital audiences. The payoff comes in the form of millions of viewers worldwide, heightened brand visibility and increased follower engagement, all of which can lead to substantial revenue streams.

Hence the hype about an impending clash between Musk and Zuckerberg, which suggests a future where the convergence of physical sports and digital personas becomes increasingly commonplace. Few tech bros are happy with their level of visibility, just as few nerds feel secure in their physicality. Some digital elites, such as Jeff Bezos, have invested heavily in developing impressive bodies.

However, this trend is not solely about transforming from the bullied “geek” into the well-respected “jock”. It’s also about embracing the spectacle. The internet age has taught us that visibility equates to power, and what better way to grab the spotlight than to step into a boxing ring? It’s an audacious move. But there’s another, more nuanced dimension to this phenomenon. In the digital age, the lines between “geek” and “jock”, between intellectual and physical, are blurring. With the rise of online entrepreneurs, success no longer fits into neat categories.

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Today’s digital elites have access to the best drugs and trainers needed to succeed both intellectually and physically. They can be someone who can code a groundbreaking app, run a billion-dollar company and throw a knockout punch. Someone, in other words, who is simply better than you, the mere spectator and consumer of content, in every conceivable way. Someone superhuman.

So, as the spectacle of celebrity boxing goes mainstream, we’re not just watching a fight; we’re witnessing a cultural transformation. Society that is increasingly recognising the multi-dimensionality of success and power: money really can buy everything. Capital, rather than hard work, can fuse the geek and a jock. The boxing ring has become a stage for the reinvention not only of masculinity, but of the limits of humanity itself.

There is a longstanding theory that “wrestling explains Trump”, who has hosted and occasionally even performed on McMahon’s WWE shows. Vann Newkirk first made the case in The Atlantic in May 2016 and several articles with similar arguments followed. Trump had successfully navigated a chaotic primary “fight” to become the Republican frontrunner. A few months before he was elected, Jeremy Gordon asked, in the New York Times, if “everything” was wrestling. Back then, the discourse profoundly misunderstood the relationship between sport and politics. So why is it, like Trump and McMahon, making a notable comeback?

Last month, for instance, Abraham Josephine Riesman published a book that attempts to explain — to a mainstream audience — McMahon’s rise as a wrestling tycoon in relation to Trump’s emergence as a national politician. Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America, argues that “neokayfabe is the essence of the Republican strategy for campaigning and governance today”. Here, “kayfabe” refers to what was an unspoken rule of the wrestling world, until 1989: that everyone pretends that the outcomes of the matches weren’t predetermined. “Old kayfabe was built on the solid, flat foundation of one big lie: that wrestling was real”, Riesman writes in a New York Times op-ed. (The “real” matches of a century earlier often degenerated into long, boring grappling affairs on the mat, eventually necessitating some fakery to spice them up.) Even outside the ring, the industry’s employees were expected to uphold the illusion that the matches were genuine athletic contests, and the wrestlers’ emotions authentic.

That is, until 1989, when McMahon publicly disclosed that match outcomes were predetermined, to evade regulatory costs imposed on legitimate sports — as opposed to mere sporting exhibitions — by the New Jersey State Athletic Commission. This revelation marked a major turning point in the industry. From then on, companies promoted wrestling as entertainment, rather than simply a contest of excellence — concentrating on storylines, characters and theatricality, in addition to the performers’ athletic prowess. Neokayfabe, Riesman writes, “rests on a slippery, ever-wobbling jumble of truths, half-truths, and outright falsehoods, all delivered with the utmost passion and commitment”. It’s not hard to see why he’s tempted to draw political parallels.

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But there are many oversimplified accounts of wrestling, and alas, Riesman’s is one of them. The “kayfabe” boundary was never strict. The audience was always at least vaguely aware of the sport’s falsity, in part due to the periodic exposes that appeared throughout the 20th century. Yet most wilfully participated in the ruse — some for fun, others to honour the commitment of the performers to the illusion. Besides, McMahon’s “neokayfabe” was merely an amplified version of what came before — an exercise in entertainment, bolstered by aggressive national marketing, branding, intellectual property protection, and numerous collaborations with celebrities.

However, Riesman, to make his point, has to oversimplify. He offers few fresh insights into McMahon’s life or career — because McMahon is intended to represent more than just himself. He is, rather, the cunning businessman who provided a “neokayfabe” blueprint that his old pal Trump adapted to craft a vivid, aggressive, and anti-truth strategy. It was this strategy that the American Right adopted, to sow discord across a country recently united by Obama’s calm, paternalistic centrism.

It is a straightforward, superficially appealing narrative — especially for those who casually watched wrestling in the late Nineties, when McMahon, with his steroidal physique and signature swagger, would confidently stride onto Monday Night Raw as the villainous boss. However, as Joe Biden might say, it’s simply “a bunch of malarkey”. Both Trump and McMahon owe their fame and fortune to something much bigger and older than both of them. Something at the heart of the American Dream: marketing.

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Marketing and advertising are America’s most original contributions to global culture. This nation, best known for refining and selling the ideas of others, has produced great evangelists, poets, and statesmen — all of them more skilled at promoting concepts than actually articulating them in any detail. The myth of America’s founding, as an uninhabited land with unlimited opportunities, served as a necessary fiction to persuade immigrants to endure a treacherous ocean journey and start anew. Americans have, ever since, been particularly susceptible to marketing strategies promising a destiny of endless prosperity.

And it was through ever-evolving marketing methods that pro wrestling evolved — from a carnival attraction with roots in the collar-and-elbow and catch-as-catch-can grappling styles imported from the United Kingdom into a multi-billion-dollar global phenomenon. These methods also transformed a portly man with a poor hair weave and a knack for composing oddly memorable tweets into the world’s most powerful leader. Trump harnessed marketing to achieve exceptional worldwide name recognition; McMahon used it to consolidate control over the somewhat disorganised wrestling industry that operated throughout the United States until the mid-Eighties, transforming the $1 million company he bought from his father in 1982 into a $9 billion sale in 2023.

The reductive comparison between the intricate landscape of US politics and the spectacle of pro wrestling is just another form of marketing. Much of the media reduces political events to us-versus-them narratives, in order to boost ratings or clicks. It’s easy to forget that politics is a multifaceted system with various influences — and that it directs all our lives. Politicians can only talk to us through the media, after all. Marketing must necessarily play a crucial role in shaping their decision-making. It took an entire team of millennials to write Hillary Clinton’s tweets, for instance.

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Politicians work on their personal brands more than most businesspeople, and promote policy positions like any other “product” in the marketplace of ideas, constantly competing to employ new tactics and technologies to reach voters more effectively. This approach is working in politics: the 2020 election saw a record number of ballots cast. It worked, too, in wrestling. In the Nineties, McMahon’s company and its main competitor, World Championship Wrestling, combined to achieve remarkable ratings, through the innovative strategies that fall under the umbrella of “neokayfabe”. But it doesn’t follow that wrestling guided politics; merely that both were guided by the eternal American undercurrent of marketing.

Indeed, comparing the producers and consumers of “neokayfabe” to politicians and voters is both misleading and condescending. While there may be some parallels in the blurring of reality and fiction, the stakes, motivations, and consequences of political actions are vastly different from those in professional wrestling. Equating the two undermines the seriousness of the political process, and to reduce Republican campaigning and governance to “neokayfabe” ignores the multitude of forces — class, race, gender, international relations — shaping political decisions and strategies. Entertainment may influence politics, but politics is not, ultimately entertainment.

Wrestling, too, is more than entertainment. Reisman’s narrative does a disservice to the sport, by telling its story through the lens of one vague concept from McMahon’s life. Pro wrestling, while diverging from its ancient roots by becoming scripted, maintains a connection to the motivations that drove ancient Greeks to compete in it: the desire to use each agon, or contest, to prove arete, or excellence, still motivates daredevil wrestlers such as Kenny Omega and Will Ospreay. The physical techniques and manoeuvres used in pro wrestling are often derived from traditional wrestling styles. And wrestlers still train rigorously to develop their physical abilities and execute complex moves in the ring — even if their performance in matches is ultimately governed by employers seeking a good spectacle.

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It’s crucial to distinguish between — rather than conflate — these forms of performance, and the consequences they have. Even seasoned political commentators, who primarily observe and analyse, can occasionally misinterpret the the sort of performance they’re watching (“Trump is just taunting us like a pro wrestler trying to sell tickets to his match; he’ll drop out soon!”), and thereby fail to understand the possible outcomes (Trump, conducting an unconventional yet highly effective political campaign, secures the presidency).

In wrestling, fan-driven publications known as “dirt sheets”, such as Dave Meltzer’s Wrestling Observer Newsletter, play a role comparable to that of Vox and Politico in politics. These publications provided insider knowledge, enhancing fans’ enjoyment of the sport. However, a fixation on firings, hirings, booking decisions and television ratings sometimes overshadows the fact that there are actual matches to appreciate. This situation parallels the way an obsession with political gossip, which bears at least a passing resemblance to “dirt sheet” reporting, can divert attention from the substance of politics itself.

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The Ozempic class war has begun

By Oliver Bateman

Wrestling’s deeper meaning is not found in the destructive rhetoric of its interviews or the “neokayfabe” that supposedly blurs the lines between backstage manoeuvring and centre-stage presentation, but in the camaraderie among athletes of diverse backgrounds. Gatherings such as Red Bastien’s Shootout in Dallas exemplify this, as wrestlers get together to reminisce and refer to each other as “brother”. Riesman reduces the sport, fundamentally the business of these performance-bonded “brothers”, to a mere prop for a partisan argument. Hasty to criticise McMahon, Trump, and an entire political party, the author neglects to provide an insight into the wrestling business, instead peremptorily declaring the demise of “real” wrestling and “real” Right-wing politics. In so doing, Riesman also dismisses the substance of still-extant “real” Right-wing politics and its impact on the 70 million Americans who support it — people who voted for Trump because they had faith either in him or the Republican Party.

Both modern wrestlers and Trump excel at emotional appeals — but both realms of performance are merely marketing-improved variants on carnival hucksterism. Wrestling emerged from carnival sideshows, and its goal, as with any field of endeavour that utilises sales and marketing, was to extract as much money as possible from unsuspecting customers. Trump’s continuing scorched-earth tactics — such as using his recent arrest as a means to dominate the news cycle and overshadow his chief Republican competitors for the presidential nomination — resemble short-sighted promoters who enflame fans’ sentiments for immediate gains, perhaps risking long-term destruction.

This marketing-centred approach is not exclusive to politicians and wrestlers; it is also employed by tech bros, bankers, and rappers. Indeed, marketing tactics are so prevalent in American society that it is easy to forget that, beneath surface-level spectacles, there are still some shared values and meaningful relationships. But by focusing on these deeper, more enduring aspects, we may find ourselves able to engage with everything, from politics to sport, in terms of what truly matters in our lives.