For all the ink spilled analyzing Donald Trump’s success in US politics over the last nine years, nearly everyone in legacy media has missed the obvious. More than anything, Trump’s return as the once and future king of our national stage signals the complete professional wrestlization of our democracy, with the White House now becoming the arena for both of America’s favorite pseudo-sports.

If you watch Rachel Maddow or Sean Hannity’s cable news shows and think of “Mean Gene” Okerlund doing his iconic 1980s promos with “Macho Man” Randy Savage or the Ultimate Warrior, the entire spectacle of American politics makes much more sense. The “journalist” plays the part of a solemn straight man, but in reality is nothing more than a glorified prop assisting the scripted theatrics of their outlandish subject, who rants and raves on cue. Behind it all, there’s no substance whatsoever. Cheer for the babyface. Jeer at the heel. Buy your fanboy merchandise, but don’t go asking tough questions about how, much less why. 

Professional wrestling’s relationship to American politics isn’t just metaphorical — it’s literal. Glenn Jacobs, the WWE star “Kane,” known for his menacing, horror-movie masks, is now the governor of Tennessee. Linda McMahon, wife of WWE chairman Vince McMahon, was tapped by Trump to serve as Secretary of Education. The lines between the wrestling ring and the political arena have never been thinner. Trump, though, isn’t responsible for this grotesque devolution of our national politics. But like the carnival barker he is, Trump must be credited with sensing an untapped element simmering just beneath the surface, and bringing it triumphantly to light. 

Trump’s own detour into the muscle-bound soap-opera world of professional wrestling was as fitting as it was tawdry and over the top. Back in 1988 and 1989, during the “Say your prayers, eat your vitamins” glory days of Hulkamania, Trump hosted WrestleMania IV and WrestleMania V at Trump Plaza in Atlantic City. Technically, both events took place in the neighboring Atlantic City Convention Hall, but Trump’s gold-plated brand was slapped all over the promotional material and his physical presence was palpable. A still-handsome, fresh-faced Trump sat ringside, basking in the chaos, interacting with wrestlers and fans alike.

In 2007, nearly two decades and several bankruptcies later, Trump’s involvement in wrestling reached new heights. At WrestleMania 23, he dove headfirst into the spectacle with the “Battle of the Billionaires” — a program that pitted him against the much-reviled “Mr. McMahon” version of then-WWE chairman Vince McMahon, a persona which now, after all the recent sexual harassment lawsuits and sex trafficking allegations, seems distinctly less than fictional. In a staged feud brimming with adolescent farce, each of these larger-than-life tycoons chose a wrestler as their champion. However, when all was said and done, Trump broke the fourth wall and joined the fray himself — foreshadowing his gleeful take-over of the Republican Party less than a decade later.

At the climactic WrestleMania match, wearing one of his favorite pink neckties, Trump ran up from behind McMahon and executed a “surprise” clothesline. Then, our future President delivered hammer fists to the back of McMahon’s head while the WWE television commentators squealed in orgasmic joy:

donald trump

donald trump

oh my god, DONALD TRUMP

Not long after the delivery of these lines, Trump’s avatar, Bobby Lashley, triumphed. Per the program’s stipulations, Trump and Lashley immediately took center stage to shave McMahon’s head while “Stone Cold” Steve Austin (who, for some reason, was dressed as a referee) aggressively held his boss’s head in place. 

Arghh. 

Oh no. 

It HURTS

Don’t do this to me. . . Don’t HUMILIATE me

McMahon shrieked in feigned, hand-puppet anguish. Rewatching Trump and Austin gleefully scalp their friend Vince McMahon’s head at Detroit’s Ford Field, two things become clear. First, Trump and professional wrestling were made for each other: tacky, tongue in cheek, and larger than life. Second, American politics would be an infinitely more entertaining affair if every presidential election ended the same way: the victorious candidate shaving the loser’s head while man-children scream drunken obscenities, high-five, and hurl plastic cups at the defeated politician's head. 

“Oh no. Don’t do this to me… Don’t HUMILIATE me!” shrieks a Nazi-witch-costumed “Hindenburg Hillary” from the center of a theatrical recreation of the Oval Office. Trump and Mike Pence then shave her head while out-of-work Rust Belt workers pelt her with half-eaten burritos.

Call me crazy, but wouldn’t American politics be far more representative of working people’s desires — not to mention a better reflection of our taste-free, nouveau riche culture — if this kind of medieval public shaming awaited all losing US presidential candidates? At the very least, voter turnout among the poor and working classes would skyrocket. The mere prospect of seeing Kamala Harris or Donald Trump shaved bald — or better yet, choke slammed while pleading for mercy — on national television would have motivated 95-plus percent of the population to make it to the polls. I guarantee it. And if you truly believe in democracy, this is what you want: Maximum participation, from all walks of life, including the unwashed and uncouth, who have no less of a right to determine the fate of our nation than men in ermine robes and ladies in petticoats.

Democracy, lest we forget, hardly originates with the American revolution but is rather a political structure birthed nearly 2,300 years earlier. Both as a concept and a system of governance, democracy was born in ancient Athens — 500 years before Christ. The word comes from the Greek dēmokratía, which derives from a combination of the words dēmos — meaning “the people” — and kratos, meaning power or sovereignty. To the Athenians, democracy was understood as a form of class rule. One diametrically opposed to aristokratía, i.e., aristocracy: the rule of the áristoi, or the best and “noble.”

Ancient Athenian political offices were largely staffed not through elections but by drawing lots from among the Greek citizenry. There were no protections for the negative consequences of one’s speech, assembly, or any of the other legal niceties modern scholars label as liberal “individual rights.” If you opposed the will of the Athenian majority, there was no safety net. Even if you were, like Socrates, considered one of the wisest figures in the country, opposing the will of the dēmos was a dangerous game. It could sentence you to death for the high crime of “corrupting the youth” and “not believing in the gods of the city.” And, of course, that is exactly how Socrates met his end.

No matter how you slice it, though, ancient Athens remains the purest form of democracy the world has ever seen. Direct — and unrestrained — rule of the people. Few elections, no campaigning for leadership, no limits on the power of the majority. Leaders emerged organically from among the commoners, and those who could speak in a way that persuaded the dēmos held the conch. They were the dēmagogoi — the demagogues.

Even though Trump wasn’t born poor and has never wanted for wealth or opportunity, there’s no doubt the orange man would have thrived in that ancient Athenian atmosphere. Make no mistake, this demagogue quality is precisely what establishment elites fear and loathe about Trump. And their fear isn’t misplaced: He’s a man whose views, tastes, and mannerisms mirror those of America’s commoners. A man who, through sheer charisma and everyman appeal, has rallied the American dēmos in a revolt against the “entrenched interests” that run this country (and as a man personally wielding $1.3 billion, it is remarkable stuff). A successful revolt of the American common folk, by the way, is something that’s never happened in our nation’s history. 

Despite the patriotic myths we’re drip-fed from kindergarten on about the “democratic” and “freedom-loving” intentions of our “Founding Fathers,” there’s a grim truth most Americans willfully ignore. For nearly all of our history, those who have held the reins of power have had no concern for democracy. Worse, they have viewed, I would argue, the country’s poor and working classes as subservient and inferior. Worse still, this repulsive classism has been a feature, not a bug, of our governing culture since the constitutional era of the late 1780s. 

Take our nation’s first six presidents: George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, and John Quincy Adams. All were deeply ensconced in the political and economic upper class, with direct ties not only to the revolutionary era’s elite but to the even wealthier framers of the 1787 Constitution. Let’s be honest: 1787 was the moment the dream of a genuine American people's republic was hijacked by the moneyed classes, as I have argued in these pages before.

It took nearly half a century — and Andrew Jackson’s election — before someone from outside the privileged gentry managed to seize the presidency. And even then, Old Hickory’s rise was almost accidental, fueled by the westward expansion of the early republic. 

As new Western states joined the Union in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, they drafted more populist constitutions with expanded voting rights. States like Tennessee, Ohio, and Kentucky refused to impose property restrictions, setting a precedent for broader suffrage that the entrenched Eastern states couldn’t ignore for long. These Eastern states, controlled by vested interests — where only the wealthy, property-owning elite could vote — were suddenly faced with a stark choice: drop the property restrictions or risk a tidal wave of demotic anger, and maybe even a second revolution.

  In the decades that followed, public pressure forced Eastern states to abolish property qualifications, and by the late 1820s the American electorate had been transformed. No longer was voting a privilege reserved for the wealthy elite. Enter Andrew Jackson: a living legend, his body famously scarred with multiple gunshot wounds earned not only during military combat but also in a pistol duel — the 19th-century equivalent of MMA fighting.

Elites loathed Andrew Jackson and his unruly “Jacksonian Democrat” followers with an intensity rivaled only by their unrestrained contempt for Donald Trump and one other president: Franklin D. Roosevelt, an archetypal “class traitor,” whose New Deal dared to prioritize tangible aid for working people over the whims of the stock market and the swollen fortunes of industrial titans. For that sin, the financial elite wanted him dead.

Even though Roosevelt — like Trump — was born into the country’s upper crust, he turned on his class and became America’s first true, and arguably its only, man-of-the-people president. No historian worth their salt can deny that Roosevelt’s wealthy peers (just like Trump’s) detested him for betraying his roots. The hatred ran so deep that Prescott Bush, the patriarch of the Bush political dynasty, along with a cabal of Wall Street bankers and investors, conspired to stage a coup d’état to remove Roosevelt from the White House. They sought out a willing US general to overthrow F.D.R. and install a fascist, military-led regime more accommodating to corporate America and the banking industry. You heard that right: a Wall Street-backed dictatorship, planned out in the open.

For all the pearl-clutching about Donald Trump representing “America’s Hitler,” it’s telling that the attempted Wall Street Putsch of the 1930s is never discussed in breathless warnings about rising “MAGA fascism.” And why is that? Well, because the American establishment — at least during Trump’s first presidential run — stood in opposition to him. Also, the political and media elite’s real problem with Trump isn’t that he threatens “democracy.” Quite the opposite. What they loathe is his raw demagogic quality — a leader whose views, tastes, and mannerisms validate those of American commoners more directly than any president since Andrew Jackson. Through the sheer magnetism of his demotic stage presence, Trump possesses the unique ability to rally the masses against the cabal of uber-wealthy elites who have controlled this country’s institutions, with only a few brief respites (namely, the New Deal era) since the nation’s founding nearly two and a half centuries ago. Sure, Trump belongs to the financial elite himself, but he’s made no pretense of concealing the swindle at the core of America's so-called democracy.

Donald Trump’s greatest sin in the eyes of the legacy media and political establishment isn’t his vulgar rhetoric or his unruly, chaotic style of governance as demonstrated during his first term. It isn’t even the unending parade of sex or financial scandals. Bill Clinton was guilty of a laundry list of similar offenses, yet the Democratic establishment — and their media lackeys — fawned over him and his dutiful but ever-resentful prop wife. What truly infuriated the American elite was Trump’s brazen unwillingness to play along with the kayfabe that buttresses American politics: the unspoken pact to keep the performance convincing and the inner workings hidden, in order to perpetuate the illusion that the players are all earnest, responsible defenders of American “democracy.”

In professional wrestling, kayfabe refers to the meticulously maintained illusion that everything in the ring is real: the melodramatic rivalries, the improbable alliances, the blood feuds. Wrestlers and promoters commit to this act because they know that their pretense of belief allows the audience to suspend its own disbelief, allowing the entire spectacle to seem real enough for followers to remain emotionally engaged. 

For the last 50 years, American politics has operated under an identical framework. The two-party system relies on its actors — Democrats and Republicans — to perform their choreographed conflicts while both quietly serve the same masters: Fortune 500 CEOs, the K Street-led war machine, and the hedge fund elite. Neither party gives a damn about building an economy that preserves the middle class, much less serves the poorest quarter of the US income bracket. Then, along came 2016. 

When no one was expecting it, Trump and Bernie Sanders shattered the carefully manicured illusion of the DC duopoly. Let’s not forget, elites despised the “left-wing” Sanders just as much as they did the “right-wing” Trump when it looked like the former might swipe the Democratic nomination from their anointed figurehead, Hillary Clinton. Together these two men did the unthinkable. They spoke openly about what was happening behind the scenes, breaking the magician’s oath of Washington politics: Never reveal that everyone is in on the con. 

The “magician’s oath,” similar to professional wrestling’s kayfabe, is a sacred vow among illusionists that promises to keep the mechanics of deception hidden from the public. Magicians know that the illusion works only as long as the audience remains in awe, unaware of the sleight of hand. But in his bull-in-a-china-shop way, Trump dared to do what no one else had. He started talking — almost casually — about how the sausage gets made. 

One especially memorable moment came on January 9, 2016, at a campaign speech in Clear Lake, Iowa. Trump laid it out plainly:

“When you give, they do whatever the hell you want them to. 

I was a businessman. I give to everybody. 

When they call, I give.”

Even in transcript form, you can hear Trump’s bombastic delivery, his self-assured, no-nonsense cadence. If you followed the 2016 campaign closely, you know that this was the moment the mainstream media’s coverage of Trump pivoted — from curiosity and amusement to terror and outrage.

Whether by accident or design, Trump dared to become the unrepentant magician who broke the oath, yanking back the curtain to expose the gears and pulleys. He was the wrestler who turns to the camera, grinning, and says: “The blood’s fake, the chokeholds are staged, and we rehearse every move ahead of time to make sure that no one gets hurt.” Trump shattered the illusion of American statesmanship. And for that the establishment threw the kitchen sink at him — the defamatory hallucinations of Russiagate; incessantly labelling him a “fascist”; and last, but certainly not least, relentless legal warfare against himself, his family, and his associates. Breaking the magician’s oath of American politics isn’t a misdemeanor. It’s a capital offense.

However, via Trump’s now-trademark ass-backward path to victory, the kayfabe of American politics is about to crumble, in favor of something rawer and less scripted. The same shift happened by fortuitous accident for professional wrestling almost 30 years ago in an incident hardcore wrestling fans refer to simply as the “Curtain Call.”

The moment took place in Madison Square Garden and involved the performers Hunter Hearst Helmsley (Triple H), Scott Hall (Razor Ramon), Kevin Nash (Diesel), and Shawn Michaels (self-named). Outside the ring, the four were such close friends that business insiders referred to them simply as “The Kliq.” At the time, Hall and Nash were leaving WWF to join the new Ted Turner-backed rival WCW. There in the Garden, at the end of their last match together — dripping in sweat and standing in the middle of the ring — the four embraced in a bizarre, almost homoerotic, group-hug. 

Casual fans in the arena were stunned. Some cheered, but most stood frozen in the “surrender cobra” position — hands on top of their heads, elbows outstretched, mouths agape. Even for the so-called “smart mark” fans — fully aware of the orchestrated nature of the industry — watching these supposed rivals hugging it out was surreal. It wasn’t supposed to happen. These men were bitter enemies on-screen. They were employed to power-bomb each other into oblivion. What the hell kind of postmodern BS was this? 

Afterward, Vince McMahon was furious. But he couldn’t punish Nash or Hall since they were leaving the company. So, Triple H and Shawn Michaels bore the brunt of his wrath. Ironically, this moment of MSG chaos proved pivotal for professional wrestling. It forced the industry to adapt, ushering in the self-dubbed “Attitude Era,” where the sacred boundaries of kayfabe began to blur. Babyfaces (good guys) and heels (bad guys) no longer adhered to clear-cut, exaggerated moral codes. Storylines became darker, grittier, and more self-aware, reflecting a jaded audience no longer content to cheer for simplistic good-versus-evil narratives. The transition revitalized the wrestling industry, even as it stripped away the moral simplicity fans had once adored. 

The impetus was accidental, but that weird moment with four shirtless juiceheads hugging it out in the Garden saved professional wrestling. It forced the industry to confront its own worn-out artifice and move into a new, unrestrained era of creativity and unapologetic depravity.

In the post-Curtain Call era, wrestlers leaned into their real-life personalities and began incorporating them into their characters — like Stone Cold Steve Austin flipping off authority figures and chugging beer in the ring. Other performers created disturbing alter egos unthinkable in the previous era of goofy heels like Iron Sheik and “Million Dollar Man” Ted DiBiase. 

After infantilizing the audiences of the eighties and early nineties, antiheroes emerged in the kayfabe, like “Mankind” bringing buckets of thumbtacks and barbed wire belts into his performances, only for his opponents to — of course — use them against him. 

With time, the gore and debauchery of the WWF’s Attitude Era wore out its welcome with sponsors and fans alike. Still, it was a necessary transition, as nearly all observers would agree. The days of Terry Bollea instructing his “Hulkamaniacs” to obey mom and dad, eat their Wheaties, and “say no to drugs” were gone for good, never to return.

Similarly, Trump’s against-all-odds return to the presidency is poised to force the same reckoning for America’s institutions. Like a three-act play, with Trump’s COVID-induced loss to the poster-child of decrepit neoliberalism as its frustrated second act, Trump’s political rise now has a clear narrative arc. And it’s curtains for the old kayfabe of American politics.

Trump is the Great Disrupter of the post-Cold War order. His second administration will launch US politics into its own version of the Attitude Era. The outgoing reign of the baby boomers, where corporate elites operated in the shadows and powder-puffed TV anchors ran cover for them, is now little more than a zombie industry. 

In less than a decade, Trump has accelerated the Democratic Party-aligned legacy media’s slide into the dustbin of history. What’s replaced it is a chaotic information ecosystem fueled by YouTubers, Substacks, and citizen-journalist bloggers — some of whom are infinitely more honest and insightful than the New York Times or cable news networks ever were. Yet, many have already proven to be just as propagandistic, and some are dangerously unhinged. 

Get ready. A crumbling fortress hides its darkest treasures deep, and strange things always unfold in moments of historic transition. This new epoch of American politics will be markedly less predictable than what preceded it, and — much like the performances of Mick Foley’s “Mankind” character — frequently unsettling.

The comforting archetypes of American “democratic” statecraft have given way to a murky new reality where every motive is questioned and every performance is suspect. This transition, like wrestling’s Attitude Era, will be both shocking and exhilarating, often at the same time. It will force us to grapple with difficult truths about the origins and alignments of institutions we once trusted.

Will this transformation renew America’s democratic spirit or hasten its collapse? The answer remains unclear, but one thing is certain. For the fakers, there’s no longer any curtain to hide behind. The trick has been exposed, and the audience grows restless.