A small handful of psychological concepts transformed our understanding of the world, and each other. Firstly, Sigmund Freud’s discovery of the unconscious. Alongside that, Carl Jung’s hypothesis of the collective unconscious. Comedian Munya Chawawa’s fantastic documentary Wrestling With Trump (Channel 4, Tuesday, 10pm) offers a startling new idea: that the American president’s bullish political style has been cribbed entirely from WWE SmackDown. Let’s call it the theory of knocking everyone unconscious.
We meet the aide who advised Trump on how a crowd-rousing pantomime of good v evil could be politicised. We cringe at WrestleMania 23 footage, in which Trump appears, pushing promoter Vince McMahon and punching him in the head, the so-called Battle of the Billionaires. We’re reminded how many wrestlers, including the Undertaker and Kane, now stump for Trump; that Hulk Hogan ripped his shirt open at the Republican National Convention in 2024, shouting “Let Trump-a-mania rule again!” It’s all very funny, though of course it isn’t. Former wrestling executive Linda McMahon is currently the US secretary of education. Is that a punchline?
So, what exactly is Trump’s wrestling playbook? Three relevant elements: hyperbole, smack talk and kayfabe (more on this later). The first is the one we most associate with Donald: fact-allergic triumphalism, an “I met Michael Jordan and he said I’m better at basketball” type energy. The second is his strategic rudeness, the “crooked Hillary” and “sleepy Joe” nicknames, designed to enlist crowd-bullying as much as belittle opponents. The most far-reaching in its implications is the third term. (Which is something most of us hope Trump doesn’t get.)
Kayfabe refers to the willing suspension of disbelief around wrestling. It’s why fans don’t like to acknowledge that their favourite physical spectacle is pure theatre, staged and scripted. It’s far more entertaining and dramatic if you believe it’s true; though deep down, in some Bluebeard’s chamber, locked door of the psyche, you know it’s not.
Unlike Chawawa, and many of my school friends, I was not a pro-wrestling fan. When I questioned the terrible acting and obvious choreography, my feeble-minded peers would bristle. “How can you say it’s not real?” they’d howl. “Those bruises are real! They’re getting injured!” You might get scoliosis being the back end of a pantomime cow, I’d reply, but that doesn’t make Jack and the Beanstalk real. OK, I didn’t say that, because I was eight.
If Trump imported a destabilising, mass-delusion about truth from the wrestling world, Chawawa believes he was also inspired by the early 00s Attitude era of WWE, characterised by wilful controversy, ugly stereotypes and misogyny. Chawawa talks to a “villainous Arab” wrestling character from this era, played by an Italian-American now eaten up with guilt for his part in stoking prejudice. A haunting figure is Dan Richards, who played a character called Progressive Liberal. (His battle cry? “Hillarrryyyy!”) His job was to be beaten to pulp every match, while crowds hurled vitriol. After years of it, something has died in his eyes.
Moving to TV from social media, Chawawa may have sacrificed a little rapid-response satirical brilliance, but he’s still a natural. He pushes back against the aide who believes Trump’s incendiary rhetoric played no part in the violence of 6 January. He bravely attends a hostile Trump supporters’ night in a bar (a “Magathering”, as he quips). He’s confused by a woman there who describes her hero as a “blue-collar billionaire,” and another who claims to have personally investigated the 30,000 lies Trump is estimated to have told in his first term. Spoiler: she and discovered that those allegations are, themselves, lies. Twist! A swinging inverted DDT of a twist!
Like Louis Theroux prancing into the manosphere before him, you have to admire Chawawa’s balls. Not just because he’s stuffed socks down his leotard – though he does do this before enacting a childhood dream in the ring. He may well be right, that to understand our world, we need to look to “men in teeny tiny hot pants”. Maybe we’re all wrestlers now? Next time someone engages me in bad-faith discussion, I’m going to insist we put on Lycra. We all follow cultural and political scripts to some degree; it gets more dangerous when we forget that’s what we do.