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BERITA BAHASA INDONESIA
TOK PISIN
By Rhiannon Stevens
Topic:World Politics
Donald Trump prepares to shave the head of Vince McMahon — husband of his incoming education department head — in the 2007 WWE "Battle of the Billionaires". (AFP: Bill Pugliano)
Nothing is more enjoyable, Dr David Moon says, than being swept up in the theatrics of a professional wrestling match.
But in the interest of self-preservation, Moon shed his teenage love of professional wrestling when he went to study politics.
"There are very few things in life which people look upon as worse than being an admitted fan of professional wrestling," the associate professor of politics at UK's Bath University says.
Over the years, Moon has remained fascinated by what motivates wrestling fans to barrack so passionately when they know the outcome of the wrestling match is predetermined.
When Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, worlds collided. Political observers began looking to professional wrestling to explain Trump's swagger, and later his success.
Fast forward to 2024 and Moon says, "the notion professional wrestling helps us understand Donald Trump has become quite mainstream, now you see it popping up as an aside".
Ex professional wrestler Hulk Hogan speaking at the Republican National Convention in July 2024. (Reuters: Mike Segar)
The long hair and sparkly spandex of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) might seem a long way from the hallowed halls of the Capitol, but perhaps they have more in common than you'd think.
Incoming president Trump has a long association with WWE. Twice he has been the host of Wrestlemania — WWE's season finale, or grand final in sporting terms — and he has appeared in WWE storylines. Most famously, he played himself in the "battle of the billionaires" storyline, where he shaved WWE owner Vince McMahon's head in the ring. Trump has even been inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame.
Trump's pick for secretary of education Linda McMahon is the former CEO of WWE. (She has also been involved in bizarre WWE storylines, some involving her marriage to Vince McMahon. Once she pretended to have had a nervous breakdown and sat mute in a wheelchair ringside while Vince kissed another woman.)
The McMahons have also been large Trump donors, Moon says.
Most often, Moon says, political commentators have observed that Trump "was almost trained for politics in the WWE". "You see a lot of people talking about the fact that his rallies and his style remind people a lot of a professional wrestling event," he says.
From the music and the fireworks to the crowd signs, Trump rallies include many of the same production elements of a WWE match. (Reuters: Go Nakamura)
Trump's call and response with campaign rally audiences ("Who's going to build the wall? Mexico") to the nicknames he's made up (Lying Ted, Crooked Hillary, Sleepy Joe) to the production style of his rallies — they all bear traits of WWE, Moon says. Trump's association with WWE has also given him anti-establishment, anti-elite credentials, Moon says.
To what point Trump has strategically drawn inspiration from WWE, or it has come naturally for the long-time fan, is up for debate.
As R. Tyson Smith put it in a 2017 Conversation article "even if [Trump] isn't consciously drawing from the professional wrestling playbook, at the very least he intuitively understands its performative power — its ability to enrapture audiences, tell a story and dominate headlines". After all, Smith continues, what matters in pro wrestling isn't winning but "the strength of the emotional response you generate from fans".
Reporter Dave Meltzer keeps it simple when he describes professional wrestling to the uninitiated.
"A large play with large people," he says of the intricate universe where simulated fighting by muscle-clad men wearing tiny pants is only part of the spectacle.
This is not Olympic wrestling. In WWE, the winner of a fight is predetermined, and the wrestlers are characters involved in sprawling sagas and rivalries, which is why Meltzer describes WWE as "theatre… with the trappings of a sport".
The storylines are ultimately what draws the crowds, he says.
Meltzer fell in love with pro-wrestling as a child in the 1970s — then it took over his life. From his home in California, he has written about WWE for the past four decades in his well-known publication The Wrestling Observer.
Meltzer says he is more of a business analyst than a sports reporter. And he has covered all aspects of WWE — including its seedy underbelly: the vast number of wrestlers who have died premature deaths, the issues with steroids and other drug use, the injuries and unregulated nature of the industry.
In WWE, wrestlers perform daring and physically demanding moves with names like "spinebuster", "chokeslam" and "the undertaker's tombstone: as they leap and dodge and pound each other into the mat. It's complicated and painful manoeuvring. It might not be sport, but injuries are common — even death has occurred in the ring.
As one Australian wrestler wrote, "great wrestling is part complex choreography and part improvisation — with wrestlers feeding off each other and the crowd to create a unique work of art".
You've probably heard of professional wrestling. But do you know what it really is?
Outside the ring, wrestlers never step out of their carefully crafted personas. Managers and administrators — often playing outlandish versions of themselves — are involved in the storylines too.
In WWE, crowd reaction and a wrestler's ability to elicit emotion is everything. "The idea is creating stars, stories, adversaries and getting people interested in it", Meltzer says. Asked if part of WWE's appeal is as a place where emotions can be freely expressed, especially by men, Melzter says "if you want to call it soap opera for men, I mean, there's something in that".
The storyline currently dominating WWE, Meltzer says, is a years-long family feud involving shifting alliances and power battles between a stable of wrestlers who are related in real life.
WWE's 'Raw' is considered one of the longest running TV shows in US history. On January 6 Raw will move from cable television to Netflix, potentially bringing it to a much larger audience. (Australia is excluded from this license agreement).
That WWE's streaming premiere occurs the on the same day the US Congress will certify the election result is amusing synchronicity for those who have been watching politics and wrestling coalesce.
A match at the 2024 Wrestlemania, the WWE's annual finale to crown its champion. (Reuters/Joe Camporeale-USA TODAY Sports)
For decades, a lot of energy was expended disguising the lie that professional wrestling matches were real. With its roots in carnival sideshows, US professional wrestling matches began to be fixed — or "worked" — to provide a more entertaining product.
In 1989, the lie was officially put to bed when officials testified in court that wrestling was only "entertainment" to avoid regulations that applied to sports.
The illusion professional wrestlers are actually fighting was upheld for most of the 20th century. (Reuters/Joe Camporeale-USA TODAY Sports)
In wrestling parlance maintaining this illusion is known as "kayfabe". "Kayfabe was the business held lie that the product was real," Moon says. The shift over time has been that kayfabe is now held by the audience too, he says. "Nobody actually watches professional wrestling and goes 'this is real'… maybe very small children, but people know it's not true," Moon says.
"The pleasure, in fact, comes from that engagement, the fact that you know it's predetermined, you know its scripted, but you've followed along to know the storyline. Where is it going to go? Who's up, who's down, what's the backstage shenanigans?"
With audiences in on the illusion, and as more real-life events and people became inspiration for WWE storylines, wrestling has appeared to a growing number of people as a hallmark of our cultural moment.
"Is everything wrestling?" Jeremy Gordon wrote in the New York Times. "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," Gordon wrote. "So when I think of how politics and pop culture are often compared to wrestling, this is the element that seems most transferable: not the outlandish characters or the jumbo-size threats, but the insistence on telling a great story with no regard for the facts."
The concept of "keeping kayfabe", where the audience is in on the conceit, Moon says, is where WWE might provide insights into Trump's success and his relationship with his supporters.
"[Trump] taps into this element where people enjoy the pleasure of going along," he says. Trump's supporters are willing to suspend disbelief to enjoy the show, despite the often-blatant lies, Moon says.
"If politics is something which more and more people are quite cynical about it, and they don't really believe it, a lot of people are going to go with the one which is entertaining and allows them to say stuff they might feel not able to say comfortably otherwise."
But Moon says "Trump is the extreme phenomenon" of something much bigger.
"The more politics becomes presentational… you're seeing people keeping kayfabe in politics rather than truly believing it," he says. Citizens know, Moon says, that the politician's speech "is written by a team of speech writers based on focus groups".Yet they cheer along, he says. "They follow along as though they don't know that while at the same time discussing 'OK, so why are we giving this speech? Who we aiming it for?'"
It's now eight years since probably the most pellucid observation of all about Trump: "The press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally."
For Abraham Josephine Riesman, author of the acclaimed Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America, WWE's influence on politics, particularly Trump's Republican party, is sinister.
She has coined the term "neokayfabe". In an opinion piece for the New York Times, she wrote "after a while, the producers and the consumers of neokayfabe tend to lose the ability to distinguish between what's real and what isn't. Wrestlers can become their characters; fans can become deluded obsessives who get off on arguing or total cynics who gobble it all up for the thrills, truth be damned".
Neokayfabe, she argues, is the essence of the Republican strategy for campaigning and governance today — a force which "turns the world into a hall of mirrors from which it is nearly impossible to escape".
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