Coal-rolling Trump’s enemies
The old, red-brick Memorial Auditorium where the spouse as a tween saw The Monkees is long gone. Its replacement sports a plaza in front, a modern, electronic marquee, and a name that expires with its corporate sponsorship. Before pyrotechnics, before Vince McMahon made professional wrestling professional and a media empire, the old joint is where Monday Night Wrestling was as much local culture as ambulances and cop cars outside west-end beer joints on Saturday nights. What the hell, I thought. A friend and I went out for pizza and beer, then took in the show once. Once.
Wrasslin’ wasn’t the spectacle it is now. It wasn’t even mildly entertaining. But for fans it was a weekly morality play of “The Drunkard” sort. Clean-cut heroes. Snidely Whiplash villains (heels) to hiss, and The Foreign Menace. Like McMahon’s empire, Donald Trump’s MAGA show offers obvious heroes and dastardly, America-hating villains. It’s more mildly threatening than mildly entertaining. But it’s a kind of theater with similar morality-play charm for a similar audience. As my high school journalism teacher said of supermarket tabloids, at least people are reading.
David Kurz of TPM sees the wrestling parallels in the just-averted budget showdown:
This week’s debacle is not your grandpappy’s horse-trading in a smoke-filled room or LBJ dishing out the Johnson Treatment. The only arm-twisting going on is the kind you see in pro wrestling, which is probably the best parallel for what the GOP’s performative politics amounts to. Spending bills, speakership elections, and other real and pressing matters of government put the GOP’s kayfabe under extreme duress. When that happens, we get eruptions like this one that periodically pull the curtain back on what is really up.
We’re more than a decade now into the GOP’s performative politics of destruction. It gains power by touting its aim to break stuff and then runs into a brick wall when it’s forced to make the hard choices that come with holding power. Any GOP effort to govern at least temporarily is susceptible to being undermined by its many bombthrowers, who can exert leverage by striking a purer “blow it all up” posture.
Performatively breaking “the rules” is part of the show in the wrasslin’ world. The bad guys become good guys and vice versa, just to keep things interesting. Performers getting even for “done me wrongs” sells tickets to the next event.
The financially struggling news media hasn’t caught on to that. Kurz provides examples of anodyne headlines from media outlets that while “literally true … fail to capture the true dynamic.” I’m not arguing that headlines should be as sensational as the tabloids, but if you want to sell papers and draw public attention to events that impact people’s for-real lives, perhaps a little more showmanship is in order. Republicans are hanging truck nuts on America’s trailer hitch fergawdsakes. MAGAs in Congress are coal-rolling Trump’s enemies. Maybe say so.
When is revenge not revenge?
The Bulwark’s Tim Miller spoke with recently incarcerated Steve Bannon, “Trump’s on-again-off-again adviser,” about plans for not-revenge against Trump’s enemies (and Kash Patel’s). The law firm of Bannon, Patel, Musk, and Trump will instead attempt “cleansing of institutions that Trump and the MAGA movement believe are fundamentally broken,” Miller explains, and break them some more. There will be a heavy focus on the January 6 “fedsurrection” plot by the FBI to pin the Capitol assault on MAGA “patriots“:
“I think there will be a massive investigation. The vast criminal conspiracy, including the media’s—what was it, Andrew Weissmann and all those FBI guys that work on MSNBC—I think there will be big investigations into all these people, I just do. I think there is going to be a huge investigation, I believe, into 2020. I think it’s going to be a huge investigation on January 6th, the fedsurrection, I think it’s going to be a huge investigation about the vast criminal conspiracy against President Trump.”
The facts won’t matter. The play’s the thing that will catch the attention of the MAGA king and his rabid fans. They want a show. He’ll give them the circuses if not the bread. The press will dish up bland.
Thank you for coming to our “show” each day.
Happy Hollandaise!