Opinion by Abraham Riesman: What the fall of WWE’s Vince McMahon reveals about post-Trump politics
This confusion is appropriate. After all, McMahon made his billions by sledgehammering down the wall between fantasy and reality, leaving everyone else to wander in the dust. But this latest twist in McMahon’s long, bizarre story is a useful lesson in the difference between a real political win and a tantalizing illusion of victory.“Professional” wrestling has never been a legitimate sporting competition; the outcomes of wrestlers’ bouts are preplanned to inflame the audience’s passions.
But his greatest political innovation didn’t come in a lobbying campaign. It emerged in the wrestling ring.In the late 1990s, McMahon chose to make himself the primary character in his own programming. He became a supreme heel known as “Mr. McMahon”: a sadistic, greedy, womanizing billionaire who antagonized the fans’ favorite wrestlers. The character represented the worst impulses in the human spirit.
They’ve known each other since the 1980s, when Trump enthusiastically “hosted” two installments of McMahon’s annual WrestleMania extravaganza near his Atlantic City casino. Trump, playing himself, even engaged in a months-long rivalry with Mr. McMahon in 2007, culminating in a WrestleMania performance where he shaved McMahon bald.
Trump’s ascent to the Oval Office brought McMahon’s revolutionary anti-ethics to the highest echelons of power. Now, it has become common to describe politics as kayfabe, whether the illusion is playing out in staged debates between dueling paid commentators on cable news, or in the careers of a generation of conspiracy-theory-spouting Republican politicians.But there is a way out of the hall of mirrors that kayfabe represents.
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