Donald Trump is ready to r-r-rumble
I have figured it out.
Ever since he lumbered onto the political stage, Donald Trump has confounded most of us. We’d never seen anything like him. Boastful. Ineloquent. Often outrageous. Completely unfamiliar with the concept of nuance. Impossible to shame. Unrepentant. Crude.
I always had the sense that I’d seen his kind before, but I had trouble putting my finger on it. Watching him at rallies where he would say whatever popped into his head, soaking up the cheers. Reading his tweets, full of venom, insults, exaggerations, lies. Listening to him substitute bluster for cogent thought as he answers questions from reporters. It has now struck me that Donald Trump has stolen his act from professional wrestling.
In my final year of university I wrote a research paper on professional wrestling and followed wrestlers around eastern Ontario and Quebec. The wrestlers knew it was phoney. The promoters knew. The referees knew. And they all knew that I knew. But not once did anyone say it out loud.
Wrestlers did their best to convince everyone that everything about wres- tling was 100 per cent on the level. The villains were the best.
I remember six-foot-eight Chuck O’Connor. Blond hair. Blue eyes. Nice enough guy outside the ring. But doing a TV interview to promote a match, he assured everyone he would win, here’s what he said. “I swear to God no other wrestlers will crawl into the ring with me for a long, long time because that ring is going to be covered with blood.”
How different is that from what Donald Trump said about what he might do to North Korea? “They will be met with fire and the fury like the world has never seen.” Or Iran. “They will pay a price like few countries have ever paid.”
Killer Kowalski once fought Mad Dog Vachon at Jarry Park in Montreal. More than 29,000 people showed up to watch, in part because Killer said, “I’m going to bury that crazy Frenchman. I’ll finish him off once and for all.”
Name-calling? Trump has made it a specialty. There was “Crooked Hillary” Clinton, “Lyin’ Ted” Cruz, “Little Marco” Rubio, “Sloppy” Steve Bannon, and “Slimeball” James Comey. He tells us the New York Times is “failing” and rails against “Fake news CNN.”
Tarzan Tyler was a nasty guy with steel-toed boot that he’d use to kick opponents in the head. He’d casually portray himself as sexist to get fans riled up. He once described how he would use the prize money he was going to win after a big match. “I’ll use about $1,000 to buy bikinis for my girls in Florida. The swimming pool is beautiful and I got a bunch of girls laying around.”
Trump’s degrading comments about women are legendary, and numerous. Here’s something he said right out of Tarzan Tyler’s book. It was 1997, just after he bought control of the Miss USA pageant. How was he going to change the pageant? “I’m going to get the bathing suits to be smaller and the heels to be higher.”
Professional wrestlers didn’t need managers, but managers added an element of mayhem so they became part of the show. The best I ever saw was Eddie Creatchman. He had lots of shticks. One of them was to pretend that his clients were too stupid to understand he was stealing their money. He’d look at a TV camera and say he split things with wrestlers 50/50. “Fifty cents for him, fifty dollars for me.” Compare that to Donald Trump. Trump considers himself the best business tycoon who ever lived. “Part of the beauty of me is that I am very rich,” he once said. He calls himself a genius. “My two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart.”
I’m guessing that the president of the United States understands that wrestling is a carnival of unreality. But he’s chosen to model his administration in its image. The outlandish antics and over-the-top testosterone ravings of professional wrestling’s squared circle have moved into the oval office.