Hunting Big Game: Trump’s Use of Kayfabe

In a previous entry, I drew attention to kayfabe as a crucial dimension of professional wrestling media, a genre of entertainment with which Donald Trump has been intensely involved.

What does kayfabe have to do specifically with Trump, and particularly his politics? According to Sharon Mazer, Trump’s rhetoric and style may be drawn from his time with the WWE, and he deploys them outside the wrestling ring, namely in the political arena. He has used these techniques to taunt rivals and rile up his supporters, much in the same way a villainous wrestling character (known as the heel) mocks opponents to gain support from fans. Some, such as Shannon Bow O’Brien, follow Mazer and go further, arguing that kayfabe techniques might even enable Trump to warp perceptions of reality among his fans to more closely align their beliefs to his interests. Others, such as David S. Moon, challenge the notion that Trump’s supporters are merely duped by him, arguing that Trump’s deployment of kayfabe techniques showcases a “co-performative relationship” between Trump and his fans, which “facilitates an intellectual and even emotional engagement with Trump’s campaign” (57). On this interpretation, Trump’s supporters do not simplistically believe in the facticity of the performance in which they participate, including the content of Trump’s speech. Indeed, according to Moon, Trump’s supporters maintain an intellectual distance from him for the purpose of thinking through the world in which they live.

I suggest that this situation can be illuminated by J. Z. Smith’s account of ritual practitioners in “The Bare Facts of Ritual” (1980). After summarizing several anthropologists’ (including A. I. Hallowell’s and Evelyn Lot-Falck’s) accounts of the ceremonies of bear-hunting societies – including Finnish, Sami, and Siberian groups – Smith asks his characteristic critical “blunt questions”: “[C]an we believe what has been summarized above on good authority? This is a question that cannot be avoided. The historian of religions cannot suspend his critical faculties, his capacity for disbelief, simply because the materials are ‘primitive’” (122). Such accounts suggest specific hunting etiquette; rituals – ostensibly portraying the hunters’ own depictions of the hunt – involving politeness, apologies, and poetry relayed to the hunted bears; and sacred treatment of the spoils of the hunt, including a refusal to distribute all of the bear’s remains for consumption or other material purposes.

So Smith asks:

“Can we believe that a group which depends on hunting for its food would kill an animal only if it is in a certain posture? Can we believe that any animal, once spotted, would stand still while hunters recited dithyrambs and ceremonial addresses? Or, according to one report, sang it love songs! Can we believe that, even if they wanted to, they could kill an animal bloodlessly and would abandon the corpse if blood was shed or the eye damaged? Can we believe that any group could or would promise that neither dogs nor women would eat the meat? Is it humanly conceivable that a hunter who has killed by skill and stealth truly views his act as an unfortunate accident and will not boast of his prowess?” (ibid.)

Smith’s (tentative) conclusion is that the rituals do not aim to perform magic, nor do they represent some so-called ‘primitive’ perception of the hunt. Instead, “The ceremony performed before undertaking an actual hunt demonstrates that the hunter knows full well what ought to transpire if he were in control; the fact that the ceremony is held is eloquent testimony that the hunter knows full well that it will not transpire, that he is not in control” (127). Indeed, the bear hunt rituals are ways to cope with the unreality of the idealized event. They are ways of thinking through the contradictions of the world, including the contradiction that the expectation of the world, how it ought to go, is rarely how it actually goes. Ritual performances, accordingly, can be ways of emotionally and intellectually processing problems, paradoxes, contradictions — including “the fact that the world cannot be compelled” by the human agent (ibid.).

A type of inquisitiveness like Smith’s must be brought to social psychology and the study of politics.

The Trumpian Insight: Politics was Already Wrestling

My own ongoing research on Trump’s political style attempts to do so by examining his use of kayfabe during the 2016 US presidential election and after. Here, it is helpful to consider data on the US electorate. Polling data released in 2022 by University of Chicago suggests that only 56% of Americans overall, and 33% of Republicans, believe that their political system is fair. Research prior to Trump’s political rise already suggested decreasing confidence in the US electoral system’s fairness, especially among Republicans. In short, Americans had already begun doubting the genuineness of the political contests they participated in and watched on TV.

In 2016, Trump’s use of kayfabe techniques – riling up the audience and threatening opponents on and off the debate stage – did not only generate excitement. It also tapped into the pre-existing skepticism about US electoral politics, especially among Republican-leaning voters. To this day, Trump’s unapologetic theatrics continue to involve performances that allege that the political establishment is fake or merely performative; Trump calls out the contest of US politics as scripted, rigged, and thus inauthentic. American electoral politics itself is characterized, by Trump and his supporters, as a type of kayfabe.

Here it is important to keep Smith’s approach (and Moon’s observations) in mind: Trump’s fans, indeed his political followers, may not be fooled by him or his approach. They may indeed be engaging with him in a way similar to how Smith interprets the bear hunters to face their group’s rituals: they may act as though what they are hearing and seeing reflects reality, but they are in actuality using the discrepancy between the performance and their anticipation of (less than ideal) reality as the medium for apprehending, critiquing, and reshaping their world.

Accordingly, Trump’s political successes may not precisely be indebted to his followers’ belief in the facticity of his verbal claims that political institutions are elitist and broken. Instead, with his blatant WWE-style antics, his success has resulted from how he more confidently controls the kayfabe arena than his opponents, and invites his fans to reflect on the authenticity and normative legitimacy of US electoral politics more broadly. Trump, in short – for better or worse – has generated an arena in which his followers can entertain whether a different form of politics than the American electoral norm is possible. (For my part, it is lamentable that in the United States, this interesting type of political provocation has been taken up primarily by the populist right-wing, rather than by a less selfish and destructive political agenda.)

This is not to suggest simplistically that Trump transformed politics into wrestling or tossed American electoral politics into the wrestling ring. Indeed, in 2016, as with a wrestling match, a crowd joined in to support the heel (Trump), against the face (and representative of the system) Hillary Clinton. Here I believe Trump’s kayfabe style issued an implicit critique of establishment politicians, namely that they are as fake as he is, but badly pretending otherwise— as opposed to his more authentic posture: not even bothering to pretend. Accordingly, Trump accidentally functioned as the Shakespearean fool, letting his audience in on a secret truth they long suspected but couldn’t speak aloud: Politics was already fake; politics was always just wrestling.

Conclusion

It is unclear whether Trump’s antics will work in his favor in the 2024 US federal elections. On the one hand, the novelty of Trump’s kayfabe critique of US politics may have already worn off. Perhaps there are only so many times that an electorate can get excited about the allegation that the political system is rigged. Recent claims by Trump about the unfairness of the DNC replacing Joe Biden with Kamala Harris as their candidate feel, in the wake of Trump’s wrestling kayfabe rhetoric, like the whiny protests of a sore loser— harder to root for, than against, in the wrestling ring. On the other hand, now that Trump has been marked as a felon – and after surviving an assassination attempt – he might wield his role as the heel even more convincingly, consolidating support among his most diehard fans. Time will tell; the script is, so it seems, still unwritten. Or maybe it is simply that the events to transpire in November have not yet been spoiled to the audience.