This is where it started.
What Donald Trump learned about politics from pro wrestlingSometimes, the heel wins.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/postever ... 98a322b84cIn the 16 months between launching his campaign by calling Mexicans rapists and closing it with an ad that recalled the “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” President-elect Donald Trump broke practically every rule of politics and rejected the norms of conventional wisdom at every turn. He insulted women, Gold Star families and war heroes. He mocked the disabled and traded barbs with the pope. He lied consistently about his record and claimed that the whole election was rigged against him. In most years, any one of those actions would disqualify candidates from office and ensure their defeat.
Trump might not have been playing by the rules of politics, but he won the game. So how did he do it? Those looking to his career as a developer or reality TV host came up short in predicting Trump’s survival and eventual victory, because those are only part of the story. The most important lessons Donald Trump ever learned were in a pro wrestling ring.
Trump’s decades-long relationship with the world of pro wrestling — and its chief company, WWE, and chief mastermind, Vince McMahon — has been well-documented. He sponsored two early WrestleManias, endorsed Jesse Ventura for president at one and headlined another (he didn’t wrestle, but he did help “Stone Cold” Steve Austin shave McMahon’s head). In one storyline, he “bought” the WWE’s flagship program, “Monday Night Raw,” causing the company’s real-life stock to take a hit. He’s even in the company’s Hall of Fame.
Trump’s time in the squared circle wasn’t simply a business venture: It was a chance to commune with McMahon, with whom he shares a nearly parallel biography. Born to leaders of regional industries, both men took over their fathers’ businesses and turned them into national powerhouses. After ascending to the heights of American culture in the 1980s, they suffered setbacks — legal, financial, personal — in the ’90s before roaring back to prominence at the turn of the new millennium, with the same “You’re fired!” catchphrase, no less.
In pro wrestling, Trump found a world where his particular skills come in handy. Pro wrestling is a morality play where the hero (the “babyface” or simply “face”) battles the villain (the “heel”). The heel gets “heat” — a negative reaction from the crowd — by insulting his enemies and his audience, cheating at every turn and claiming that the game is rigged against him. The audience boos the heel and eagerly waits for the face to give him his comeuppance.
Throughout this presidential campaign, Trump relished his role as a heel, and nearly every one of his positions, statements and actions had an analogue in the annals of pro wrestling. This week, political junkies who were also attuned to the rules of wrestling expected Trump to finally get his comeuppance by losing in dramatic fashion to Hillary Clinton. Obviously, that did not happen. So is the pro wrestling rulebook yet another one Trump has managed to rip up?
Not quite. Heels do win. Arguably the best professional wrestler of all-time, Ric Flair, is a 16-time world champion who reigned for more than 3,000 days over his career, often for longer than a year at a time. Flair also dubbed himself the “stylin’, profilin’, limousine-riding, jet-flying, kiss-stealing, wheelin’ n’ dealin’ son of a gun,” which the Donald would surely appreciate. Even today, the two top champions in the WWE are heels. Heels win championships because it’s good storytelling to have a babyface chase after them. Eventually, a face will win and get the “rub,” or boost in stature within the WWE’s hierarchy, that vanquishing a bastard heel provides. But not every face can climb that final mountain.
If Donald Trump was the heel, then Hillary Clinton was the babyface (if a flawed one) in this campaign. She stayed cool, calm and collected, while Trump seemingly became more extreme as Election Day neared. Even though she played the face, though, a winning combination of voters never got behind her.
Unlike the election, pro wrestling really is rigged, from top to bottom. The booker picks the faces and the heels, plots the storylines and determines the outcomes. If it is done well, the fans cheer the faces, boo the heels and buy tickets, merchandise and pay-per-views. But even the best booker misjudges his audience, from time to time. It even happened to McMahon, a billionaire who built a global entertainment brand.
One of the biggest stars in the WWE today is Roman Reigns. He’s a 31-year-old former football player with the physique of a Greek god, movie-star looks and a prestigious pedigree: he’s a member of the Samoan Anoa’i family, which makes him a cousin of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. After he’d been wrestling for several years, it seemed as if Reigns had been chosen by McMahon to be the face of the company to succeed another star, John Cena, as Cena had followed The Rock and Stone Cold before him. Reigns won big matches, was thrust into the main event and was used as a PR spokesman, filming a PSA for the Ad Council’s “Fatherhood” campaign and other promotional duties.
Then the fans revolted.
Even though everyone knows wrestling is rigged, McMahon’s heavy-handed push of Reigns was a bridge too far. Most fans preferred Daniel Bryan, the scrappy, undersized vegan who up through the ranks of smaller, independent wrestling promotions before coming to WWE. Reigns is a prototypical babyface and the perfect candidate to carry the WWE into the next generation, but he can’t get over with fans. From his look to his in-ring skill to his lineage, he’s perfect on paper. Fans just refuse to root for him.
Maybe what this week taught us is that Clinton is the Roman Reigns of presidential politics. Trump — thanks to what he’s learned from McMahon — is Ric Flair. And with the conventional wisdom of politics in disrepair, perhaps we should be watching more WWE and less cable news to figure out what happens next.
WWE Fan Donald Trump Has Never Tapped Out of Pro Wrestlinghttp://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/wwe ... ng-n693611 When President-elect Donald Trump was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2013 before a raucous crowd, he made a point to single out and thank Linda McMahon, the matriarch of the wrestling empire, who would become his pick to lead the Small Business Administration just three years later.
Trump, who spent much of his acceptance speech bragging about how a WWE telecast he participated in had "the highest ratings, the highest pay-per-view in the history of wrestling of any kind," was hailed at the time by McMahon's husband Vince as a "Wrestlemania institution," but that might have been an understatement.
The future president has been a fixture in the theatrical world of professional wrestling almost since the beginning of its modern incarnation in the 1980s. He infamously appeared at Wrestlemania IV in Atlantic City in 1988, where he was seen on camera alongside the late mobster Robert LiButti, whom Trump claimed he'd never met and wouldn't recognize.
And in the years since, Trump has taken an even more active role in the McMahon family business, often playing a foil opposite Vince McMahon, who is usually cast as a villain.In 2007, he tried to show up McMahon by dropping "buckets of cash" on the crowd at a WWE Raw event ("How dare Donald Trump embarrass me like this!" an apoplectic McMahon bellowed).In 2009, he pretended to sell "Monday Night Raw" back to McMahon because "I can do whatever the hell I want."And in 2013, in the "Battle of the Billionaires" (a.k.a. "Hair vs. Hair"), Trump got physical, tackling McMahon to the ground and then pumping his fist in the air. McMahon, the loser of that bout, had his head shaved by Trump.Even in his Hall of Fame acceptance speech, Trump was still in character, challenging McMahon to a fight the following year. "I will kick his a-- if he wants, I will kick his a--," Trump said.However, behind the scenes, Trump has enjoyed a much more cordial and friendly relationship with the McMahons. Trump has even hosted two of their Wrestlemania events at his properties.
"Vince is an amazing man, he really is, we kid and we have fun, but everybody knows he's an amazing guy," Trump said backstage after his WWE Hall of Fame induction.Linda McMahon, who can be seen giving Trump a standing ovation at the end of his speech, donated $6 million to Rebuilding America Now, a super PAC that supported the Republican's presidential campaign, and she and her husband have also given $5 million to his foundation, which would make them that controversial entity's largest outside donor, according to the Washington Post.
Linda McMahon, a former U.S. Senate candidate in Connecticut, has been critical of Trump's past comments about women.
"He's not helping, certainly, to put women in the best light," she said in an interview with Yahoo's Katie Couric in March of this year. "Maybe he regrets them, maybe he doesn't. I realize he punches hard when he punches back, but that's just over the top."
Later, she conceded in an interview with the Associated Press that while Trump was not her first choice for president (she was a Chris Christie supporter) she believed he could be "a vessel that has housed this anger and this dissatisfaction" and called him "an incredibly loyal, loyal friend."Just like Trump, her husband and her two children, Linda McMahon has a penchant for playing a direct part in the wrestling action. For example, in 2003 she was 'tombstoned' by a wrestler called Kane.
And in 2005, she got 'stunned' by WWE star Stone Cold Steve Austin in a clip that would come back to haunt her (as well several other videos which highlighted the WWE's treatment of women) during her unsuccessful U.S. Senate bids in 2010 and 2012.Not all wrestling aficionados are pro-Trump. In wake of his rise up the political ranks last year, a Change.org petition penned by a wrestling fan called for his WWE Hall of Fame honor to be revoked.
"Donald Trump is promoting a violent and discriminatory war on people of different religions and nationalities right here in our country, but WWE still has him in their Hall of Fame! Please sign my petition urging WWE to remove Donald Trump from the Hall of Fame," the petition reads.
The petition argues that if wrestling legend Hulk Hogan was removed from WWE promotional material for past racist statements he made, than Trump should be too for his own incendiary comments about Muslims and Mexicans. The petition currently has just over 10,000 signatures.
The Politics of DistractionFirst Words
By MARK LEIBOVICH SEPT. 1, 2015
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/06/maga ... ction.htmlWe begin, as many discussions about politics today should, with an analogy to pro wrestling. Consider the ‘‘foreign object’’ routine: One combatant produces a concealed item, usually from under his tights — a pointed stick or some hand-size tool of menace — and proceeds to jab his opponent with it. He perpetrates this atrocity in full view of everybody except the referee, who remains oblivious because a complicit third party (perhaps a tag-team partner or a manager) is distracting him.
Now consider our current Republican primary battle royale. Foreign objects might not exist literally in modern campaigns. But there are figurative devices, known as ‘‘shiny objects,’’ that rely on the same principles of distraction, outrage and misdirection. They also involve a hapless dupe in the middle of it all — in this case, us.
There is pandemonium in the squared circle of public life. Pretty much every day someone (a candidate, or a campaign, or the media) will ‘‘hold up some bright, shiny object,’’ as Carly Fiorina put it on ‘‘Meet the Press.’’ That increasingly popular metaphor is an apt one, because the various images it conjures — an intergalactic body glowing brighter as it moves closer to dumbfounded earthlings, a ball on a string held by a hypnotist, a mobile hung above a baby’s crib — all, to varying degrees, seize attention, whether through their novelty or through manipulation. In politics, a shiny object is the preoccupation of the moment: the 14th Amendment, or so-called birthright citizenship and anchor babies, or, inevitably, any poll.
In these dazzle-me-now days, there can be grave consequences for a candidate who comes off as gray and plodding and bogged down in nuance — let alone in shame or embarrassment. Writing in Esquire, Charles P. Pierce said he had expected that Scott Walker would be doing better with the Republican electorate at this point. ‘‘What I did not anticipate,’’ Pierce wrote, was “the rise of the shiny object that is The Man Called Trump.’’ Pierce added that he also did not expect that Walker himself ‘‘would turn out to be such an unimpressive lump of cheese.’’
Donald Trump ‘‘is the brightest and shiniest of all the bright, shiny objects,’’ said David Axelrod, a longtime Obama political adviser. Trump is like a one-man meteor shower of this genre. He sprays exhilarating antagonism upon all manner of Megyn Kellys, Mexicans or whoever his ‘‘loser’’ target of the day might be. He tweets around the clock, rides around in a shimmering helicopter and has that noggin of shimmering hair. He hurls us into the ropes until we find ourselves disoriented, careening against a turnbuckle: Where are we? How did we get here?
The shiny-object metaphor is not confined to the realm of politics. Business strategy, technology and marketing consultants have all referred to ‘‘bright, shiny objects’’ (or ‘‘B.S.O.s’’) to describe the fickle tastes of modern life. Urban Dictionary identifies ‘‘S.O.S.’’ (‘‘shiny-object syndrome’’) as ‘‘a condition which causes an inability to focus on any particular person while online dating.’’ (By the same token, a number of commentators have dismissed Trump’s recent success in the polls as ‘‘just a summer fling.’’) Its origin may actually lie with an older sort of stump performer. ‘‘Magicians use sleight of hand, dangling a shiny object in front of their audiences to distract them from the hidden deception going on elsewhere,’’ said Christopher Cerf, a co-author of ‘‘Spin-glish: The Definitive Dictionary of Deliberately Deceptive Language.’’
To some degree, politics has always involved deception. The advent of television intensified this, shrinking attention spans, creating ways to distort and vilify and dramatizing the existential stakes of prosaic debates. Think Lyndon Johnson’s devastating ‘‘Daisy’’ ad in his 1964 re-election campaign against Barry Goldwater, which showed a little girl picking petals off a daisy and the sudden explosion of a bright, shiny mushroom cloud.
In 1962, the historian Daniel Boorstin published ‘‘The Image: Or What Happened to the American Dream,’’ in which he identified the dawning of the ‘‘age of contrivance,’’ marked by ‘‘pseudo-events’’: staged happenings that animate a cultural calendar (Hallmark holidays, anniversaries), as well as political set pieces (photo ops, candidate ‘‘announcement’’ speeches). Political pseudo-events have been the engine of television advertising, which focuses on smaller-bore matters, or ‘‘wedge issues,’’ that would have little relevance to an actual presidency but nonetheless shine a nasty glare on a candidate. George Bush attacked his Democratic presidential opponent, Michael Dukakis, by asserting that Dukakis’s support of a prison-furlough program in Massachusetts represented a permissive liberalism that he would take to the White House. (The shiny object here was Willie Horton, the escaped convict featured in an infamous campaign ad.) If television was a major development in the creation of shiny objects, the Internet was an Ursa Major development. Even the most isolated outrages become outsize on our little, attention-burning screens.
During the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama and his campaign team warned against becoming too drawn to the ‘‘shiny objects’’ that preoccupied the press. ‘‘It was basically a not-subtle way of saying that political reporters had attention-deficit disorder,’’ said Dan Pfeiffer, a former top adviser to Obama. In our defense, though, the A.D.D. of political reporters is fostered by a warped and warping system. Media bosses demand a constant flow of material, which ensures that much reporting remains undigested. Customers want speed or will click elsewhere; competitors spew their own undigested news, and campaigns are only too happy to concoct it, or their opponents will. Shiny objects become tools of our least resistance. Polls and gaffes take less time and brainpower to comprehend than, say, Jeb Bush’s book on immigration policy.
In other words, the press colludes with politicians in this culture of distraction-mongering. Meanwhile, a new class of political figures has built careers almost entirely on shiny-object status. It’s more fun than writing policy treatises and much easier than actual governing — and it pays better too.
Sarah Palin belongs on the Mount Rushmore of human shiny objects. She secured her place after John McCain made her his surprise running mate in 2008. In an appearance on CNN back then, the pundit Paul Begala lamented that Democrats seemed ‘‘to just not be able to resist’’ focusing on ‘‘the shiny object of Sarah Palin, who is not running against Barack Obama.’’ Less than a year after the campaign ended, Palin had quit her governor’s job and moved on to a lucrative career as a full-time media troll, pundit, author and rally headliner who has been paid eight figures since 2009. Like Trump, she became a reality-TV star (on a short-lived TLC series), which is always good for business in Shiny Object Land.
So is running for president. It’s good to convey a sense of being in play even if you clearly are not. Back in the innocent days of 2010, 2011 and 2012, reporters were always falling over one another to ask Trump whether he would run. NBC’s First Read memo summarized a Trump appearance on ‘‘Face the Nation’’ under the heading of ‘‘Your Sunday-Show Shiny-Object Alert: Donald Trump to CBS’s Bob Schieffer on whether or not he will eventually jump into the 2012 contest: ‘I hope I don’t have to. But I may — absolutely.’ ’’ No one really took it seriously.
But sometimes reality TV turns into reality. ‘‘The focus on the shiny object becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy,’’ Pfeiffer said. ‘‘It turns the shiny object into the actual object.’’ And the Summer of Trump shines on.
Former wrestling exec casts herself as a job creator http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ ... story.htmlDonald Trump and WWE: How the Road to the White House Began at 'WrestleMania'http://www.rollingstone.com/sports/feat ... a-20160201Edited to add:
Pro Wrestling's Greatest Angle Was Convincing Us It Doesn't Matterhttp://deadspin.com/pro-wrestlings-grea ... 1619415553If I knew all mysteries and all knowledge, and have not charity, I am nothing. St. Paul
I hang onto my prejudices, they are the testicles of my mind. Eric Hoffer
Let's stop, bud. Thanks.
