Trump just wants to occupy centre stage
As President Donald Trump heads for vacation at his New Jersey golf course, he is supposedly fleeing a very bad month, with chaos reigning and shocking developments occurring by the day. Trump, though, might well think he’s had a very good few weeks.
After all this time, many people still widely mistake Trump as being in Washington to govern. Trump is in Washington as the crowning achievement of his lifetime project, which is to be the centre of attention in America’s corrupted culture.
Trump did not come to Washington to implement a particular set of policies or advance a coherent philosophical agenda. He ran for president and unexpectedly landed in the White House as a cultural avatar. Trump knows American popular culture better than most, which is why he has occupied a central place in it for more than three decades, an astonishing achievement, such as it is.
American culture is like the nursery rhyme about the little girl with the curl in the middle of her forehead ( if one might be permitted a reference to tresses in the context of The Donald). When it is good, it is very, very good, but when it is bad, it is horrid. Trump has brought the worst of American culture to the White House: celebrity worship, professional wrestling, reality shows and gossip columns. Many Americans are appalled at Trump in the White House. Much of their culture is appalling too.
For more than a year, beginning in the 2016 presidential primaries, my coll eague at Convivium. ca, Peter Stockland, and I have pointed out that professional wrestling is the key lens with which to understand the Trump phenomenon.
“Watch Trump speak or, to use the word in its broadest possible sense, ‘ debate’ and you see the bombast, the braggadocio, the amphetamine- r un- on hyperbole, the sentence fragmentation and non sequiturs that are a staple of, and no doubt lifted from, the style of inring interviews,” Stockland wrote. “Even the downturn of his mouth when he humiliates an opponent is a simulacrum of the villainous wrestler’s disdain for the defeated opponent he has just left in a dazed and mewling heap. But more than just audio and visual effects are at work. Listen to the content, and you can hear the recycling of WWE levels of toxic cynicism between Trump and his supporters.”
Professional wrestling is not a marginal bit of American culture. World Wrestling Entertainment frequently sells out several arenas per week, every week of the year, in cities across America ( and Canada). Indeed, this past long weekend, WWE staged arena shows in Halifax, Saint John, Montreal, London, Ottawa and Kingston. Its flagship live show is the longest running weekly show on American television. Its annual Wrestlemania event sometimes sells more tickets than the Super Bowl.
People who object that professional wrestling is not real — meaning that it is scripted — miss the point. It tells a story full of outlandish characters alternatively villainous and heroic, playing to the prejudices of the crowd and their appetite for seeing people degraded. In that, professional wrestling was the precursor for reality TV shows, which truly made Trump a cultural colossus.
The past fortnight at the White House — with its summary firings, heroes turned villains, secret betrayals, ostentatious insults and public humiliations — was topnotch wrestling and reality TV screenwriting. The only Trumpian twist missing was the president showing up to sneer “You’re fired” in person.
A week ago, The New York Times ran a profile on the rise and fall of Liz Smith, the 1990s queen of Manhattan gossip columnists, a tawdry tabloid service that once made Smith famous, and in a toxic culture, influential.
“Maybe gossip is still amusing, but I don’t think it’s as much fun as it used to be, because it’s now all- pervasive,” Smith says. She made her name covering the (first) Trump divorce, but now her trade is superfluous. There is not a specialized market for celebrity trash; it’s the whole market. The news of the past weeks is that America’s political commentariat has belatedly realized that the White House is also part of it.
The NYT article quotes the Jeannette Walls book from nearly 20 years ago, Dish: How Gossip Became the News and the News Became Just Another Show: “A lot happened in the world that week. The Berlin Wall (had been toppled) and Germany was reunited. Drexel Burnham Lambert, t he wildly powerful junk bond company that spearheaded the 1980s financial boom, collapsed. And after 27 years in prison, South African civil rights leader Nelson Mandela was freed. But for 11 straight days, the front pages of the tabloids were devoted to the Trump Divorce.”
It’s not just the tabloids now. Everything is devoted to all things Trump, with the man himself at centre stage. And he, one suspects, finds that just fine.
PROFESSIONAL WRESTLING IS NOT A MARGINAL BIT OF AMERICAN CULTURE.