Trump’s insult act strikes some as straight from pro wrestling
President hits rivals with win-at-any-cost tactics, they say.
Making bombastic boasts. Dropping signature catch phrases. Attaching insults to rivals’ names. Shouting down perceived enemies.
If President Donald Trump’s recent attacks on television personalities, journalists and political rivals feel like something straight out of the pro wrestling circuit, it may not be a coincidence.
Wrestling aficionados say the president, who has a long history with the game, has borrowed the time-tested tactics of the squared circle to cultivate the ultimate antihero character, a figure who wins at all costs, incites outrage and follows nobody’s rules but his own.
“In our terminology, he’s playing it to the hilt,” said former World Wrestling Entertainment writer Dan Madigan.
On Sunday, Trump’s apparent fondness for wrestling emerged in a tweeted mock video that shows him pummeling a man in a business suit — his face obscured by the CNN logo — outside a wrestling ring. It was not clear who produced the brief video, which appeared to be a doctored version of Trump’s 2007 appearance on World Wrestling Entertainment Inc. But it was tweeted from the president’s official Twitter account.
Madigan was first struck by the parallels last summer when Trump was introduced at the Republican National Convention. There was a backlit Trump, unveiled in stark silhouette, who then sauntered onto stage at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, just like wrestling’s most infamous antihero, The Undertaker.
“His demeanor, duration of his walk to the podium. ... Pure Undertaker,” Madigan said.
And Trump’s pacing on stage behind Hillary Clinton during the second presidential debate last fall in St. Louis? That’s how wrestlers stalk their opponents during pre-match taunting sessions.
In subsequent Trump’s tweets and public feuds, it became clear to Madigan and others that, consciously or not, Trump was channeling professional wrestling in his politics.
“The parallels are uncanny,” said Domenic Cotter, a producer for WWE in the mid-2000s.
Depending on your political affiliation, the writers said, Trump is playing one of two classic wrestling characters: The “heel,” or ultimate bad guy, who wins at all costs; or the modern-day wrestling protagonist, dubbed a “face” or “baby face.”
“I think of Donald Trump as the ultimate baby face,” Cotter said, “almost in the ilk of ‘Stone Cold’ Steve Austin, who was this rage-againstthe-machine, anti-authority and establishment figure.”
Cotter saw Trump employ a classic pro wrestling tactic during his first news conference as president-elect, when he ordered CNN reporter Jim Acosta to be quiet and barked, “You are fake news!”
“In wrestling terminology, he cut a promo on that CNN reporter and got over him, basically,” Cotter said. “In wrestling, some swarmy heel is going on and on and on and the baby face quips a response right back and the audience goes crazy.”
Perhaps Trump comes by it naturally. He hosted backto-back WrestleMania events in his Atlantic City, New Jersey, Trump Plaza in 1988 and 1989. And then, most famously, there was a mock “Battle of the Billionaires” in 2007 when he body-slammed and then shaved the head of WWE boss Vince McMahon.
In wrestling, writers create season-long dramas that turn the mat into a stage for fantasy. Narratives pit good against evil, stronger personalities win over more subdued ones, and announcers legitimize the at-any-costs tactics of the “heels.”
When Trump publicly supports Russia’s Vladimir Putin, depicted by the U.S. intelligence services as a sort of global “heel,” he is effectively playing the role of the announcer who builds up the bad boy in the ring, justifying his alpha-dog behavior, Madigan said.
And when Trump assigns prefixes to his rivals’ names (think “low I.Q. Crazy Mika” Brzezinski or “Crooked Hillary” Clinton) he is emulating the wrestling announcer Bobby “The Brain” Heenan, who cheered “heels” over rule-following “baby face” wrestlers he disparaged.
“The hero is boring. He does the same vanilla thing,” Madigan said. “You always watch what the bad guy says and does.”