America’s political commentators have been looking for an appropriate (or, at least, appropriately titillating) precedent for Trump’s Madison Square Garden spectacle. Why now? Why Madison Square Garden, right in the heart of a non-competitive city in a non-competitive state? The natural comparison that people first reached for was February 20 1939 American Nazi rally organized by Fritz Julius Kuhn and the German American Bund. Over at this Substack,
makes a persuasive case for looking at the George Wallace-Curtis LeMay rally from October 1968. But I wonder if there’s another—one Trump certainly knows about and remembers fondly: WrestleMania, the massive pro-wrestling extravaganza first aired live from Madison Square Garden in 1985. It even featured Hulk Hogan, wrestling’s greatest star and the main attraction of the original WrestleMania.Trump loved WrestleMania so much that he hosted two of the successor events at his Trump Plaza Hotel & Casino in 1988 and 1989. Vince McMahon, the now-disgraced former chief of the WWE, is one of the few people Trump might call a real friend. And Trump himself appeared as part of the spectacle and was even inducted into the WWE “Hall of Fame.” As many have pointed out before, Trump as a public figure is a pro-wrestler, a kind of cartoon depiction of a billionaire who ping-pongs between babyface—the hero—and heel—the villain—all the while bragging and proposing to open up a can of whoop ass on his enemies and yours.
It probably will not surprise you to learn that I’m not much of a pro wrestling guy. Everything I know about the sport comes from documentaries like the recent Netflix special on Vince McMahon, or things written about such a special in the New Yorker like Vinson Cunningham’s great recent piece, or Abraham Josephine Riesman’s excellent biography of McMahon, Ringmaster, or most embarrassingly perhaps, from the French semiotician Roland Barthes. For Barthes, wrestling’s world is fundamentally mythological: it shares things in common with very ancient dramatizations of the world and its struggle, its characters are gods and tragic heroes, its stylized and exaggerated portrayals are the equivalent of ancient theatrical masks. Good guys triumph, bad guys are not just vanquished but humiliated and tortured. As Barthes writes, “Wrestling takes up the ancient myths of public Suffering and Humiliation: the cross and the pillory.” For Barthes, it is a “spectacle of excess,” the rules and regulations of the “sport” are there to be violated, just as Trump gleefully exceeds the bounds of the political sport and we eggheads gasp in shock. Wrestling depicts justice as the close kin to its primitive ancestor, revenge:
If the villain - who is of course a coward - takes refuge behind the ropes, claiming unfairly to have a right to do so by a brazen mimicry, he is inexorably pursued there and caught, and the crowd is jubilant at seeing the rules broken for the sake of a deserved punishment. Wrestlers know very well how to play up to the capacity for indignation of the public by presenting the very limit of the concept of Justice, this outermost zone of confrontation where it is enough to infringe the rules a little more to open the gates of a world without restraints…Justice is therefore the embodiment of a possible transgression; it is from the fact that there is a Law that the spectacle of the passions which infringe it derives its value.
“The embodiment of a possible transgression.” What better way to describe the entire phenomenon of Trump? Justice as transgression, as deserved comeuppance. Against whom? Well, anyone who’s ever made you feel humiliated, small, less-than. The elites. It’s left deliberately vague and abstract and it can be anybody you like or, rather, don’t like. It’s the They. It’s Them. It’s the **** who learn about wrestling from reading articles in the New Yorker. Peter Viereck, observing McCarthyism wrote “is the revenge of the noses that for twenty years of fancy parties were pressed against the outside window pane.”
The media elite recoils from the vulgarity of the Madison Square Garden spectacle, but the vulgarity is the point. It’s meant to violate norms. It’s meant to menace and upset hoity-toities. It’s meant to be excessive. In the 1992 “Right-Wing Populism” essay that I so often return to, Murray Rothbard wrote that it was McCarthy’s means not his ends that should be emulated:
The fascinating, the exciting, thing about Joe McCarthy was precisely his 'means"-his right-wing populism: his willingness and ability to reach out, to shortcircuit the power elite: liberals, centrists, the media, the intellectuals, the Pentagon, Rockefeller Republicans, and reach out and whip up the masses directly. And that, above all, was what they hated. And that's why they had to destroy him, why of all the anti-Communists in the country, they had to make his name a dictionary term ('McCarthyism") for political evil. Centrist politics, elitist politics, is deliberately boring and torpid. The people get put to sleep, as a Bush faces a Dukakis, or, as it looked for a while, Bush waltzes around with a Clinton or a Kerrey. But right-wing populist politics is rousing, exciting, ideological, and that is precisely why the elites don't like it: let sleeping dogs lie. With Joe McCarthy there was a sense of dynamism, of fearlessness, and of open-endedness, as if, whom would he subpoena next? The sainted Eleanor Roosevelt?
Rothbard lamented that McCarthy ultimately was not suited for T.V., but Trump with the experience of reality TV, talk shows, and pro wrestling knows how to put on a real spectacle. It’s possible that this ultra-high testosterone theater will turn off some of the voters Trump still needs and that the racist jokes will be too much for the minorities he is courting. But has Trump ever before reached a point that was just “too vulgar?” You might also comfort yourself that wrestling is not real. To that, I will just do my best impression of a pro wrestler: You better hope not, brother.