Donald Trump and the Art of Kayfabe

I have a confession to make. Back in the day, I was an incorrigible fan of "professional" wrestling. This included trips to Philly to see the Undertaker, Paul Bearer, Doink the Clown, Kamala and whoever else was on the card. But it did not end there. My kids, their friends and I also made regular trips to south Allentown, the Poconos and Plainfield Tp, where I even met Scary Sherri. I loved the suspension of reality and the blending of fact v. fiction until it would be impossible to distinguish what is real and what is not. After reading an article in Popular Information, I'm finally convinced that what makes Donald Trump so popular as a politician is that he blends fact with fiction (it's called kayfabe) in exactly the same way that wrestling personalities do.  He claims to follow in the footsteps of Andrew Jackson, but it's really the Vince McMahon playbook.

Speaking of Mr. McMahon, who portrays himself as the incredibly evil head of the professional wrestling empire, he was supposedly placed under arrest during a 2015 RAW production and taken to the hokey . Shortly thereafter, the "NYPD" released his mugshot:

Now, I'd like to think most of us realize this is pure entertainment. I love it myself, and think of these storylines as soap operas for males. But what Trump has done is bring these same zany storylines, in which he engages in bombastic behavior with little regard for the truth, into the world of politics and government. 

Like McMahon, there's mugshot of him as well. Entertaining? Yes. Statesmanlike? Hardly. 

Now we all know Trump is an inveterate liar. The MAGAs know this, too. Here's how author Judd Legum explains it:

"This ecosystem allows people to do horrible things and still succeed, even among people who are offended by the things that are being done and said. Because you operate from the assumption that everything you're seeing in the ring is fake, or at least most of it. And that's dangerous, because once you're assuming everything's fake, except for the things you want to believe are true, then you're just having a grab bag, personalized reality. So you can go, if you're a Trump voter, "Trump means it when he says [X], but he doesn't mean it when he says [Y]." And once you start just picking and choosing what you think reality is from a grab bag of truth and lies that you can't distinguish between, then you're in real trouble as a society. Every individual person is just picking their own hodgepodge reality."

As much as I love professional wrestling, good goverment requires a bit more than kayfabe.