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A These little ideas have changed our understanding of the world, and each other. First, Sigmund Freud discovered the unconscious. Additionally, Carl Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious. Comedian Munya Chawawa’s entertaining documentary Wrestling With Trump (Channel 4, Tuesday, 10pm) offers a surprising new idea: that the American president’s political appearance has been removed from WWE SmackDown. Let’s call it the theory of knocking everyone unconscious.
We meet with the aide who advised Trump on how the many people who evoke the good and the bad can be put into politics. We worry about the footage of WrestleMania 23, in which Trump appears, pushing Vince McMahon’s agent and punching him in the head, called Battle of the Billionaires. We are reminded of how many wrestlers, including Undertaker and Kane, are now Trump’s stump; that Hulk Hogan tore off his shirt at the Republican National Convention in 2024, shouting “Let Trump-a-mania rule again!” It’s all very funny, even if it’s not. Former wrestling director Linda McMahon is now the US education secretary. Is that a punchline?
So, what is Trump’s wrestling playbook? Three important things: hyperbole, smack talk and kayfabe (more on that later). The first is the one we most associate with Donald: true-allergenic triumphalism, “I met Michael Jordan and he said I’m good at basketball” kind of power. The second is his insults, the “crooked Hillary” and “sleepy Joe” names, designed to register abuses as they diminish the opposition. The most far-reaching of its consequences is the third dimension. (Which many of us hope Trump doesn’t get.)
Kayfabe refers to the voluntary suspension of disbelief in wrestling. This is why fans don’t like to admit that their favorite shows are clean, filmed and scripted performances. It is interesting and fascinating if you believe it to be true; even down, in Bluebeard’s other room, the closed door of the psyche, you know it’s not.
Unlike Chawawa, and many of my classmates, I was not a fan of wrestling. When I asked about bad behavior and obvious behavior, my weak-minded friends were horrified. “How can you say it’s not real?” they cry. Those bruises are real! You can get scoliosis from sitting on the back of a pantomime cow, I’d say, but that doesn’t make Jack and the Beanstalk real. Well, I didn’t say that, because I was eight years old.
If Trump has sent a distraction, a massive deception about the truth from the wrestling world, Chawawa believes that he was also inspired by the early 00s Attitude era of the WWE, characterized by deliberate conflicts, negative attitudes and misogyny. Chawawa speaks to the “bad Arab” he has fought since this time, played by an Italian American who is now consumed with guilt for his role in promoting apartheid. The man of concern is Dan Richards, who played a so-called Progressive Liberal. (His battle cry? “Hillarrryyyy!”) His job was to get hit to end every match, while the crowd threw vitriol. After many years, something has died in his eyes.
Moving to television from television, Chawawa may have lost his quick response, but he is still a natural. He is pushing back against an aide who believes Trump’s claims had nothing to do with the January 6 attacks. He boldly goes to the night of hatred of Trump supporters in the bar (“Gathering”, as he laughs). He was interrupted by a woman who described her hero as a “blue-eyed billionaire,” and another who said she personally researched 30,000 lies Trump allegedly told during his first term. Spoiler: he and he found out that the claims were false. Collect it! A twisting twisting DDT!
Like Louis Theroux running into the manosphere before him, you have to admire Chawawa’s balls. And not just because he has put socks under his leotard – although he does this before putting his childhood dream into the ring. He may be right, that in order to understand our world, we need to look to the “men in hot pants”. Maybe we’re all fighters now? The next time someone brings me up to talk about bad faith, I will insist that we wear Lycra. We all follow social and political norms to some extent; it’s so dangerous when we forget that’s what we do.
