Tag: wwe
Trump’s G-20: A World-Class Presidential “Kayfabe”

Trump’s G-20: A World-Class Presidential “Kayfabe”

The American president has long been described with the honorific “Leader of the Free World.” No more. Donald Trump basically surrendered the title during the recent G-20 meetings in Germany.

Even the Russians were offended by Trump’s pointless abandonment of the Paris Climate Accords—pointless because it’s a purely voluntary agreement with no enforcement mechanisms. The president imagines a worldwide scientific conspiracy, which most educated adults recognize as impossible.

Trump’s Polish speech was also seen as problematic. By endorsing a Manichean, good versus evil defense of “the West”—defined, Putin-style, entirely in racial and religious terms—Trump was widely suspected of scorning multi-ethnic European democracies like Germany, France, and Great Britain. Not to mention Asian ones like Japan, South Korea, and India.

The West, so defined, excludes most of the world’s population, although it definitely includes the Confederate States of America.

However, relatively few thought Trump actually grasped the full implications of the tribalized world-view he expressed.

Somebody wrote a speech; Trump read it. Our allies can only guess who’s in charge at the White House: traditional defenders of NATO like Defense Secretary James Mattis and National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster?

Or blood-and-soil “populists” like Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, the author of the Warsaw speech defining ISIS — an all-but defeated terrorist organization with no army, navy, or air force — as a grave civilizational threat?

In reality, of course, the single greatest threat to the integrity of Western democracy is the Kremlin. But hold that thought.

The correct answer to who’s in charge of U.S. foreign policy is nobody. And certainly not Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who served as the president’s minder during his ballyhooed meeting with Vladimir Putin.

At the White House level, the U.S. doesn’t have a foreign policy. Trumpism is best understood as a cult of personality with a world-view rooted in WWE professional wrestling, where race, ethnicity, and tribal loyalties prevail.

But equally important, where long-nurtured enmities and alliances alike can be reversed almost overnight.

Everything depends upon the whims of the protagonist, that is to say Trump himself. In the WWE, the operative term for these scripted melodramas is “kayfabe”—possibly what the president meant when he tweeted the nonsense word “covfefe.”

Wikipedia defines it thus: “portrayal of staged events within the industry as ‘real’ or ‘true,’ specifically the portrayal of competition, rivalries, and relationships between participants as being genuine and not of a staged or predetermined nature.”

Just so Trump’s meeting with Putin, which for all the hullabaloo, was basically a made-for-TV spectacle of little real import. One day Trump boasted that he and his new best friend Vlad were going to set up a U.S./Russian Cyber Security Task Force. But after Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) described this as maybe the dumbest idea he’d ever heard, the president abruptly dropped it.

Just kidding!

Otherwise, the headline on Russian expatriate Masha Gessen’s New York Times commentary said it all: “Trump gave Putin exactly what he wanted.” Specifically, a co-starring role, along with no serious criticism for such Kremlin pastimes as executing journalists and cyber attacks on other countries’ elections.

Otherwise, Putin got little in real world terms, apart from the ego-boost of occupying center stage with the President of the United States, whom, like an ambitious prostitute, he was clever enough to flatter.

Loosens Trump up like WD-40.

Every single time.

However, the good news is that even a GOP Congress won’t let the president give Putin anything concrete, such as a free hand in Ukraine, or redress from economic sanctions. Russia holds Crimea, but at a cost Trump can’t relieve. Putin’s scheming has pretty much backfired.

But what really seems to animate Trump himself is his ongoing feud with CNN—the cable network that basically made him president. Following the president’s recent tweeting of a WWE video showing him pummeling a figure labeled CNN—not so much an incitement to violence as to stupidity—I was struck by a remark from a Washington Post profile of correspondent Jim Acosta.

Covering this White House, Acosta said, is like “covering bad reality television.”

No kidding. Equally striking, however was White House spokesman Sean Spicer’s appraisal of Acosta: “He’s the prime example of a [reporter in a] competitive, YouTube, click-driven industry … He’s recognized that if you make a spectacle on the air then you’ll get more airtime and more clicks.”

Who better than Spicer to understand?

So were you aware that CNN president Jeff Zucker personally masterminded Trump’s program, The Apprentice, when he presided over NBC Entertainment? And that Trump received an estimated $5.8 billion in free coverage from CNN and its competitors—more than twice that of any other candidate—while cable news ratings and profits soared?

And that ratings continue to grow for CNN as the Trump/Comey/Putin kayfabe drives news coverage? You may disdain professional wrestling, or, like me, never seen a single episode of The Apprentice.

But we’re all watching it now.

When Trump Throws Post-Election Dung, How Will His Fans Respond?

When Trump Throws Post-Election Dung, How Will His Fans Respond?

So now the big crybaby says he’s losing because his opponent is crooked and the referees are blind. It’s straight out of the WWE “Wrestlemania” playbook. It’s not for nothing that Donald J. Trump was inducted into the professional wrestling Hall of Fame, as I’ve noted before.

It’s all there: the boasting, the strutting, the racialized taunts, and the simulated mayhem naïve observers sometimes mistake for real. But it’s all make-believe, and deep down nearly all WWE fans know it. I expect most Trump supporters do too. Having failed miserably in his televised debates with Hillary Clinton—if he hadn’t been so outclassed, it’d be tempting to say he choked—Trump now claims that the entire U.S. political system is corrupt.

“The election is being rigged by corrupt people pushing completely false allegations and outright lies in an effort to elect her president,” the GOP candidate whined. “We can’t let them get away with this, folks….Remember this, it’s a rigged election….It’s a rigged election…It’s a rigged election.”

No, Donald, you’re just a big loser. Possibly one of the biggest losers in the history of American politics. “A third-rate con man who wilted under pressure and was finally incinerated in a fireball of his own stupidity” is how Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi puts it.

From a purely psychological perspective, it’ll be interesting to watch how Trump copes with his seemingly inevitable defeat. Beaten by a woman, no less, which to a man with the psychological makeup of an adolescent chimpanzee—all chest-beating and ritualized threat displays—is doubly worse.  

Among the great apes, it’s common for a humiliated combatant to defecate in his hand and fling it at his rival.

But I digress. The big question is how Trump’s impassioned supporters will respond to his dung throwing. “Election officials brace for fallout from Trump’s claims of a ‘rigged’ vote,” the Washington Post warns. The Boston Globe cautions that “Warnings of conspiracy stoke anger among Trump faithful.”

Globe reporters definitely found a few real humdingers among the crowd at a Trump rally in Cincinnati. There was Joe, a 39 year old first-time voter who fears Sharia law but apparently dozed through eighth-grade civics. “This is my prediction,” Joe said. “Trump is going to win the popular vote by a landslide, and the Electoral College will elect Hillary, because of all the corruption.”

Then there was Steve, a 61 year-old carpenter planning to heed Trump’s call to monitor suspect precincts. “I’ll look for …well, it’s called racial profiling. Mexicans. Syrians. People who can’t speak American,” he said. “I’m going to go right up behind them…I want to see if they are accountable. I’m not going to do anything illegal. I’m going to make them a little bit nervous.”

Also Dan, a 50 year-old contractor who anticipates the worst:

“If [Hillary Clinton’s] in office, I hope we can start a coup. She should be in prison or shot….We’re going to have a revolution and take them out of office if that’s what it takes. There’s going to be a lot of bloodshed. But that’s what it’s going to take.  I would do whatever I can for my country.”

As I say, this is your basic pro-wrestling crowd. They’re mostly there for the spectacle–blowing off steam.

So my predictions are as follows: Joe won’t vote this time either. Why bother if it’s fixed?

Steve’s enthusiasm for racial profiling will fade after election officials inform him that harassing voters is a federal crime.

As for Dan, I’m guessing that the 50 year-old revolutionary’s zeal for a “Second Amendment solution” will vanish after the Secret Service knocks on his door. He’d probably been drinking.

Multiply those three by millions. Look, we’ve been hearing semi-hysterical rhetoric from Cow State white folks for many years. If it’s not the Tea Party, it’s the End Times delusions of the Left Behind novels. Only last year, a substantial proportion of Texans persuaded themselves that U.S. Army maneuvers code named “Jade Helm” constituted the opening wedge of an Obama-sponsored invasion.

Empty Walmart stores would serve as barracks for foreign soldiers; hundreds of miles of secret tunnels were being dug to help ISIS fighters infiltrate. Christian patriots would be imprisoned in FEMA re-education camps. Texas Gov. Greg Abbot promised vigilance. Sen. Ted Cruz made sympathetic noises.

And then? Nothing happened.

So this year’s mass hallucination is Donald J. Trump. Well, it says here that none of these dread outcomes are likely to happen. In Arkansas, where I live, Trump will probably win by twenty points. Obama Derangement Syndrome has turned the state deep red. So what happens after Hillary Clinton’s declared the winner come November 9?

Well, the Arkansas-LSU game in Fayetteville three days later. Don’t bother us, we’re busy.

Sometimes I think the only thing in American life as predictable as Cow State paranoia is Blue State intellectuals taking it far too seriously.

Endorse This: Jon Stewart Enters The Ring

Endorse This: Jon Stewart Enters The Ring

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Jon Stewart might be leaving The Daily Show, but he’s already exploring an unlikely new pursuit: Pro-wrestling, with a special appearance on WWE’s Monday Night Raw TV show.

Click above to watch Jon go one-on-one with wrestling heel Seth Rollins — and get out of trouble by thrusting his own foot up to a certain location — then share this video!

Video viaMonday Night Raw/WWE.

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