Brief: Trump the Babyface, Trump the Heel (w/Abraham Josie Reisman)
Journalist and author Josie Reisman says we can’t understand the Trump era without understanding his life-long pro-wrestling fandom, and his bonds with one of his closest friends, WWE tycoon Vince McMahon.
Reisman argues that McMahon’s invention of “neokayfabe,” in which storylines and real life are purposefully and artfully confused, blurs the distinction between fact and fiction. It makes consumers, followers, and voters complicit in creating a spectacle of cruelty.
It’s the kind of argument that once seen, can’t be unseen. It helps explain the contradictory and performative politics of Trump—and how, under his leadership, the administrative state may not be destroyed by fascism directly, but by a theatre of cynicism and catharsis that will allow the latent fascism of the American Empire to explode.
Show Notes
Welcome to Neokayfabe
Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America — Abraham Josephine Riesman // Writer
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We have a brief today for you called Trump the Babyface, Trump the Heel with Josephine Reisman.
Josephine, welcome to Conspirituality.
Thanks so much for taking the time.
It is wonderful to be here, and I'm looking forward to this conversation.
Josie, you're a journalist and essayist, and your first big book was called True Believer, The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee from 2021. I need to get to that next, but what we're going to talk about today is the findings, the core findings of Ringmaster, Vince McMahon, and The Unmaking of America, which came out in 2023. And I just want to say to the listeners, please read this book.
I would say that it's an epic of neoliberal American empire, a real Mahabharata of Americana.
You cannot imagine the incredible cast of gods, freaks and monsters and their survivors that Josie has put together here.
And Thank you.
So to that effect, Josie, I've got kind of an opening thesis that I want to run by you, if that's okay.
Fire away.
Okay.
You have come up with this super compelling lens through which I think we can more fully understand the Trump era as being inseparable from his lifelong fandom and active role playing within the WWE alongside one of his closest friends, Vince McMahon.
active role-playing within the WWE alongside one of his closest friends, Vince McMahon.
And you argue that McMahon's invention of neo-K-Fape, and I'll have you define that in a bit, in which storylines and real life are purposefully and artfully confused so that the distinction between fact and fiction is blurred.
And this gives consumers, audience members, voters, followers' complicity in creating the spectacle.
And I think once one sees an argument like this about Trump, it just can't be unseen because I think it explains the chaotic, contradictory, performative politics and how under Trump, really, this is key for me,
the administrative state isn't going to necessarily the administrative state isn't going to necessarily be destroyed by fascism directly, but by a theater of cynicism and catharsis that will allow a kind of latent fascism of the American empire to explode unchecked.
Do you think that's fair?
Yeah, yeah.
I think you more or less nailed it.
I mean, we have this situation where for the first time in the initial Trump administration, we had a president who liked pro wrestling better than any other athletic event.
Now, that might seem like an insignificant detail that's just sort of biographical, but Like, you know, Ronald Reagan liking jelly beans.
But it's so much more than that.
Because Trump has been watching wrestling since he was a child, growing up in Queens.
We have evidence of that.
And throughout his life, he has...
It increasingly embodied a lot of what wrestling stands for and a lot of the tools that wrestling uses have become very commonplace in mainstream culture thanks to Trump.
A lot of approaches to reality that were previously sort of verboten in politics, or at least you weren't supposed to acknowledge, are now out in the open.
Because of wrestling.
Well, wrestling is a huge factor in it.
I mean, Trump understands to the extent that he understands anything that if you have an audience that is so overwhelmed with the spectacle and most importantly, the confusion of that spectacle, then you can get away with pretty much anything.
Maybe I'm jumping the gun here, but basically the problem we face is that people are caught in these brackish waters between fact and fiction, and life can't really thrive in waters like that.
The human mind wants to be in either fact or fiction.
It wants to know where it is.
And when you have a Trumpian display or a, you know, McMannonian display of what I will come to, you know, define as neo-k-fabe, when you have that giant spectacle of stuff where you're going, is that really happening?
Right.
Is Trump really saying that?
Is that possible?
Could he do that?
All of those things.
That is a very vulnerable state for an individual mind and for sort of a collective consciousness.
This is a great place to start.
And I think that in order for us to navigate the brackish waters from within the terms that you're setting out here, I have a lightning round of definitions that I think we can go through.
Great.
Usually the lightning round's at the end, but I love to get it over with in the beginning.
Okay, well, I'm just going to run through these things so we can get the 101 on who all of the sort of archetypal figures are.
Okay, so tell us about the baby face.
The babyface in wrestling is the role played by the wrestler who is essentially, for lack of a better term, the good guy.
The one you're supposed to be rooting for.
The babyface, the name sounds pretty self-explanatory.
You are as pure and wonderful as a young baby.
And of course, there is the opposite of the babyface, which I'm imagining you're going to ask me about next.
Who's the heel?
The heel is the role in a wrestling match that is best defined as the bad guy.
The person you're supposed to be angry about winning or that you want to see lose.
And these two figures, the babyface and the heel, are the yin and yang of the entire system.
And they fit together.
You're speaking to like, you know, this is what we want to do as audience members is we want to pull for the baby face, we want to pull for the heel, or we want to boo when the heel comes into the ring.
And the theater of that and the expectations of that and how that's supposed to work, this has something to do with kayfabe, right?
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Kayfabe is a term of unclear linguistic origin, but it came out of carnivals, out of carny culture.
And Kayfabe, it may have been pig Latin for be fake, which would make sense given that Kayfabe was all about fakeness.
Kayfabe, for about a century, from the invention of pro wrestling, which is roughly in the late 1800s until the late 1900s, you have this regime where The public-facing fictions of wrestling, that kayfabe is the law.
If you are a wrestler or someone else affiliated with wrestling, you are not allowed to say that wrestling is fake.
You are not allowed to let on to the fact that it's more theater than sport.
You are absolutely not allowed to.
This was the status for about 100 years was kayfabe meant the omerta, the public-facing image that you were supposed to uphold if you were within the wrestling.
And then, of course, that all goes away in 1989 when Vince McMahon and Linda McMahon, his wife, who is now nominated to be the secretary of education, end up doing away with old kayfabe because they saw it as advantageous to themselves to seek deregulation and end up doing away with old kayfabe because they saw it as advantageous to themselves to seek deregulation and get out This isn't even real.
It's fake.
And the deregulation part of that is in various states, they're having to jump through hoops to figure out how to be regulated by sporting commissions.
Right.
As for a long time across the United States, there's...
Wrestling was regulated in the same way, usually by boxing commissions or other athletic commissions within states.
Now, this was, of course, a little absurd because that meant that the state had to provide the referees, for example.
And a referee in a wrestling match is not really a referee.
They're a performer who are a part of the fiction.
But the fact is there were some health and safety standards and they had to pay certain taxes.
And the deregulation effort led directly to this sort of break in the firmament of reality.
This effort to just pay less money and have less oversight eventually has this unforeseen consequence of the news finds out about all these legal proceedings that We're good to go.
You had a big flat lie that everybody sort of bought into, even if they knew it was a lie, which was wrestling is real.
And once that was gone, there was no foundation.
There was nothing to stand on, and it was all fantasy.
For a few years, you have wrestling that is all flights of fancy, And then eventually you land in this new zone that we are in now, both in wrestling and then eventually in culture and politics more broadly, which is neo-KFAB. This is a term I made up, but I needed a term to describe what KFAB after the mid-90s is, because it looks very different from old KFAB. Now...
The statement that the wrestling industry is making to the audience is no longer, hey everybody, everything you see tonight is real.
Let's have fun and enjoy how real it is.
You are actually saying, hey, everything here is fake, so don't worry about it.
You can enjoy it safely because it's fake, but there's always a corollary.
Neo-Kfabe is key.
The key in Neo-Kfabe is that you have a corollary, which is everything you're seeing here tonight is fake except fake.
you want to be real.
Oh boy.
Because there's going to be some reality here tonight, folks, who knows where it might peek out.
You have to decode it and it will always be between the lines or an in joke or whatever.
And that mix of expecting total fantasy, but also with reality poking in leads to chaos.
Well, reality poking in versus the continued fiction of what the wrestlers are actually doing on the mat comes up in the definitions of work versus shoot, right?
Yes, we're back at the lightning round.
Yes, so in wrestling, a term of art, if something is made up If it is not grounded in reality...
Scripted.
Right, scripted.
You'd call that a work.
So if somebody gets into a fight backstage on one of the broadcasts and it's all pre-planned and staged as part of the storyline, that fight would be a work.
Now, if two people get into a fight backstage and it's not planned...
Or if anything else happens that's unplanned, or at least one party wasn't party to it, then that is a shoot.
That is like shoot from the hip.
That means what you are seeing is more or less real.
Now, of course, there's a term that is much more important than either of those because it's what we all deal with, which is the essence of neo-kfabe, the worked term.
Shoot.
That is where we live.
The work shoot is hard to define because it can either start as a shoot or start as a work, but you end up in this weird mumble jumble of, oh, on the one hand, this is real.
For example, you might have a wrestler who has very real grievances with another wrestler in real life.
You might say, hey, go out there and say all the stuff you really hate about this person, and everyone will think that we didn't plan this.
And we'll tell everybody, oh my god, this was so unplanned, but it'll look like a shoot, but it's worked.
So it's a worked shoot.
And that's kind of where we're at in politics now too and culture more broadly where nothing is just real or just fake.
The stuff that we're presented with, it gets back to those brackish waters.
We're stuck going like, do I swim east or west?
I can't tell whether I'm going to fiction or fact here.
And when you're trapped there, you're very vulnerable.
One last lightning round definition.
Please.
This is heat.
Yes, heat.
It used to generally mean if you were a heel, you were getting a lot of boos and getting lots of attention, negative attention, which is what you want.
And heat has come to sort of just generally mean the crowd is worked up.
You've got heat with the crowd.
There's something happening here.
With those in mind, the next thing I want to do is look at some broad historical implications, and then I want to look at how specifically these mechanisms and terms come to bear in Trumpian politics, how they actually cash out.
Sure.
Absolutely.
Historically, it seems like the transition between kayfabe and neo-kayfabe is this kind of fall from innocence in a way that kind of parallels, I would say, philosophies of modernity to philosophies of post-modernity, for example.
It involves a movement from a Fordist institutional economy to a neoliberal deregulated economy.
And then it's also an age in which the heel can be someone that the public fully aligns with.
Are those things fair?
I'd say so, but...
You know, the one thing I would caution is you say it was a fall from innocence.
In a way, it was, and I completely sympathize with that.
There was something beautiful about the old kayfabe system.
But much as people like to draw lines between modernism and postmodernism, you know, liberalism, classical liberalism, postwar liberalism, neoliberalism, all those things— I kind of come down on that famous line that 90% of history can be explained by vulgar Marxism.
The problem is the other 10%.
And I really do think when you look at the history of wrestling, although the tools of control, both of the audience and of the wrestlers have changed, That will to power of some crazy promoter with a huge ego at some small wrestling company that's using old kayfabe 70 years ago, that's the same will to power that you see in Vince McMahon.
This was something that really came to me as I was...
Finishing the first draft of Ringmaster, I was kind of trying to show how much Vince had innovated, but by the time I got to the end of the first draft, I was like, there's so much here that was just terrible aspects of old wrestling that he held onto and figured out how to deploy at scale, and that's important to remember.
But yes, there was something...
To put it in terms that your listeners may be more familiar with, think about the way American politics was pre-Trump.
Was it great?
Absolutely not.
No one's going to argue that.
And it was all, and especially politics, maybe 50, 60 years ago in more of the post-war consensus mold, you have lots of people believing a big flat lie, which is we have a purely representative democracy where the people's will is sovereign.
Now, this has never been true, but that lie was useful, not just for the evil people.
It was also useful for the good, because when you have at least some kind of delusion that what this system does works, it allows people to continue to participate and make it better than it otherwise would be.
And then you get the neo-kayfabe reality, which is much closer to the Trumpian political reality, where nobody believes anything.
Every lie you can say is actually the truth.
Every truth you can say is a lie.
There's no foundation.
It's a slippery set of boulders that we're all tripping on.
And I can't even remember what your question was now, but yes, that's sort of where I was.
You were sort of pushing back on, was this really a fall from innocence?
Right, that's right.
But it was a fall from innocence because that's my point.
I do think politics was not good, but better than pre-Trump, than it has become under Trump.
One of the things that I've heard you say is, and this is a significant change, I've heard you say the human mind cannot process neo-kayfabe.
So what does it do instead?
Because I get the sense that if we're talking about the world of Don Draper, we kind of know what's going on.
We kind of understand what's going on.
Who's in power?
What they're doing?
Whether they're lying?
When they're lying?
What advertising means?
What is outside of advertising?
But when all of that gets jumbled together and accelerated, the human mind cannot process it.
Right.
And what happens instead is when you're in that vulnerable sort of stunned state of, my God, is this really happening?
And what is really happening?
I can't even fully articulate it.
The people who are Deploying that Neo Cave Habes spectacle, know they can get away with a lot because you're distracted.
You're trying to sort out this one crazy thing while they're doing a bunch of more conventionally evil things in the background.
Or it can really allow you to be led in a direction.
Because here's the other element of Neo-KFib that's sinister, is you have this ability in its practitioners to take a lie, a total fiction, and you bury it in the ground.
And you tell people there's truth buried beneath the surface somewhere.
Go digging.
And as soon as they dig up that lie, because it was buried, they assume it must be true and the secret truth.
This is so true in so many different dimensions.
If you are smart enough to learn how to plant a lie and make people think that just because they found it It must be true.
That's QAnon.
That's QAnon.
You're ding, ding, ding.
That's exactly right.
It's QAnon.
Wrestling, the Neo-KFib approach is what gives you the kind of things that you see in QAnon where nothing is true except everything is true.
And you're just constantly trying to find that perfect explanation for everything.
You're trying to find the secret that is beneath the secret, beneath the secret.
And either there's nothing really there or somebody has found some manipulative lie planted it beneath the surface and expects you upon finding it to go, Eureka, I found the truth.
And that can be accelerated and enhanced by the charisma and the atavistic conviction of whoever is leading people.
And this is where I come to.
Yes!
This is where I come to.
There's this part in your book where I think it's WrestleMania VI, and And Hulk Hogan is giving a promo backstage before he goes out to fight Ultimate Warrior in one of the most ridiculous, incredible matches I've ever seen.
I watched it again after reading this thing.
I probably watched it back in 1990. I'm from Toronto, so it was here at the Sky Dome.
Oh, no kidding!
Wow!
That was a big deal in Toronto that year.
It was huge.
And that's why I was aware that I guess I didn't go.
I'm sure I watched it on TV or pay-per-view or whatever.
Sure, sure.
Anyway, I've got to quote Hogan here because I'm going to sort of propose that Trump has learned his shtick from a lot of people, but Hulk Hogan is one of them.
And here's what he says.
Hulkamania is running wild like it's never ran before.
I mean, you just replace that with Make America Great Again.
Yeah, MAGA, the movement.
MAGA, exactly.
Ultimate warrior, you must realize that when you step in the sky dome, when you feel the energy that's going to run wild throughout the arena, those are my people.
That's my energy, brother.
And once I get you down on your knees, ultimate warrior, I'm going to ask you one question, brother.
I'm going to ask you, do you want to live forever?
And if your answer is yes, Ultimate Warrior, then breathe your last breath into my body.
I can save you.
My Hulkamaniacs can save you.
We can turn the darkness that you live in into the light.
First of all, holy fuck.
What great writing!
I know, it's all off the top.
How did this guy come up with this?
I know, this guy who's not a writer, not Shakespeare...
But off the top of his head, he was able to cut stuff like that back in the 80s.
It's really something.
Not only was he able to cut stuff like that, but he's doing it while he is hopped up on so much stuff.
I know!
He's purple.
He's purple and sweating, and it's just flowing out of him.
He's spinning all over Gorilla Monsoon.
Anyway, we have him referring to himself in the third person.
We have him using the royal we.
He's talking about my energy, my people.
And so here I'm reading this and then I'm remembering, oh, I have just watched over the last, how long has it been now?
It's going to be eight, nine years.
Liberal media trying to parse Trump's speeches as though they were anything else.
Other than wrestling promos.
This is all he's doing.
Am I going too far with that?
No, you're totally right.
There's all these times when he gets out there and does a stream of consciousness attack on his opponents or self-glorification.
And when a lot of the mainstream outlets cover it, they try to go, well, this presidential speech was unconventional, but here are the policy points in it.
And it's like, there weren't any policy points.
It's a wrestling promo.
It was vibes.
He's not arguing policy.
Now, unfortunately, this is often how it works in wrestling as well, the vibes can become policy, but he's not out there thinking, here's my policy speech.
They're going to become policy based upon what sticks, right?
Right.
Yes, based on what sticks.
And the audience is a huge part of that, which is what's so scary about American politics right now is there really is an audience for Trump.
Okay, so that's out of the way.
Let me talk about the contradictions of Trump as endemic in wrestling culture.
So what normie pundits view as hypocrisy is I think, according to this theory that you've developed, we can now sort of see as performance requirements.
So if somebody in the cabinet or if somebody who's a businessman ally or a foreign ally is hypocritical, if they are somebody who is able to sort of show that they are two-faced or that they are not playing by conventional rules, that's a performance requirement because that's entertaining, right?
Yeah.
It's entertaining, but also it's a statement of loyalty.
I mean, that's the part that I think is more relevant when it comes to wrestling because there are no unions in wrestling.
There's no worker protections.
Everything is top-down.
Unless you are asked to contribute something, you are doing what your promoter is telling you to do.
Right.
When you're saying something ridiculous in wrestling that you don't believe and maybe you even find repugnant, you think won't be good for your character, that you think is bad for wrestling but your promoter told you to do it.
Right.
That's very similar to what we're talking about with Republican politicians and allies right now where the challenge for them is you have to do this absurd thing to prove that you are committed to the business, that you're committed to the business so hard you will say that you're committed to the business so hard you will say that hurricane extended out X number of miles just because Trump drew it on a And you're also implying that all of Congress, they're all private contractors now.
Basically, there's no union.
I don't see one.
I mean, no, they're all independent contractors who are competing with each other as much as they are competing with the other side.
Let's just note here, too, that Hulk Hogan was the snitch who...
Who busted...
Allegedly, he was the snitch who busted a unionization attempt at WWF, the predecessor originator of WWE, right before WrestleMania II. Yeah, I don't think it's allegedly anymore because he's in that Netflix special currently saying, yeah, I... Oh, right, of course, I'm...
I'm so used to saying allegedly.
That's right.
He came clean on it.
And just so we know, former Minnesota Governor Jesse the Body Ventura was actually leading the unionization ever.
And after it didn't work, he said, screw you guys, I'm going back to Hollywood where I can have my SAG card.
Right, exactly.
Screen Actors Guild, which makes sense.
And by the way, they should all be members of the Screen Actors Guild.
They're all on television every week.
Okay, so next contradiction.
Trump is a domestic war hawk, you know, militant.
He's going to send the military to round up migrants, but he's also going to end all the foreign wars by cutting the best deals.
So is this sort of, you know, does this come out of the realization that good entertainment demands that he plays Sergeant Slaughter and Hulk Hogan at the same time, or that he has both of them on his staff?
You mean like having the good guy and the bad guy or all the top stars?
Yes.
I mean, that is part of the game in politics in general is there the promoters are less Trump and more the big business interests who want to make sure that no matter who is fighting and winning in an election, they are ultimately the winners.
They are behind.
They have a dog in the fight either way.
I think that Trump has been relatively uniform in the kind of awful person.
It's not like he's lifting up some virtuous soul who's a real true babyface to the cabinet to try and mix things up.
They're all pretty venal.
But the fact is, they will be competing with each other.
It's going to be weasels in a sack, and that's something that Trump loves.
Okay, next contradiction.
In Neo-Kfabe, the promoter can flip the faces and heels according to audience desire or according to the needs of the storyline.
Okay.
Now, is this what is part of what's happening with, oh, Putin's not such a bad guy?
Orban, Kim Jong-un, we got along great.
We got along great.
Is that storyline?
Is that storyline?
I think it's something like that, because in...
I mean, Orwell called it too, but Orwell in 1984 was writing a lot about what became Neo Kayfabe in terms of doublethink, but also in terms of we are at war with East Asia, and we've always been at war with East Asia.
There's this ability to flip moral valences at the drop of a hat in wrestling.
This is something you don't get in most fiction.
Usually in fiction, and especially in real life, We at least have a perception that people have to work their way towards redemption, or they have to go down a path towards evil.
But in wrestling, it can really just be one night you're the good guy, then you do one action that's despicable, and then the next night you're the ultimate bad guy.
And the reverse can happen.
And I think that is part of what we're seeing with these Republican reversals on...
I mean, Russia, my God, for decades upon decades, Russia was the boogeyman for Republicans.
And because of various flips and manipulations and personalities, now it has to be, well, Russia's not so bad.
Russia's our friend.
And Orban, same thing.
And I think that that is not so much Trumpism...
Well, it is Trumpism, but we've had versions of that in the past, but that is very much happening at an accelerated pace now, where you have these heel turns or face turns that just come out of nowhere and have no real explanation.
Last contradiction.
Yes.
Purity culture.
Okay, so raw power, pure emotion, and a kind of like heterofascism versus high drug use and libertine rape culture.
Okay.
Ah, right.
Well, you mean like in the 80s when they were sort of trying to portray themselves as a family?
Well, there's that, and then that changes, and then that changes.
Right, that certainly changes eventually, yeah.
Yeah, and then we have this sort of almost psychotic split within the Trumpian universe between...
Sure, okay, yes, yes.
You know, social conservatism and evangelical purity cultures.
And then also the nihilistic hedonism.
Exactly, and then Pete Hegseth and...
Is this how somebody like RFK Jr. can be absorbed into the cabinet?
Because he's casting the show and he needs these elements.
He's putting together a recipe.
A little bit of purity.
A little bit of anger.
A little bit of whatever.
I can see that.
It's kind of a wrestling stable in that way where it's a collection of characters who portray different elements and bounce off of each other.
Now, of course, that's not Right.
I say it is a contradiction, but that's that's the broader contradiction in Republican politics that's been around for a long time.
And what the unifying factor in those two things is they're all racist.
Right.
Exactly.
No, I'm serious.
The unifying factor is purity culture and hedonism, nihilism culture within the Republican Party can agree there are certain outgroups who deserve to be destroyed.
Right.
And that's what they agree on.
And that's how you resolve that contradiction, is you find something that everybody wants to do that's destructive so that nobody can talk about how the worlds they're trying to construct are very different from one another.
So that brings me to probably the most cursed racist event of the recent campaign.
Oh, God.
That's hard to pick, but which one?
Well, I think it probably happens during the debate, and it features Trump going off on pure evil.
They're eating the dogs.
They're eating the cows.
Right, the cats.
So he is endangering Haitian immigrants to Springfield, Ohio.
And he's saying this incredible thing.
You see Kamala Harris roll her eyes and kind of chuckle like she can't believe it's happening.
Maybe she can't believe her luck.
And I think a lot of Democrats think, that's it.
It's over.
No one's going to vote for this guy.
But I'm realizing reading your book that I wonder if the opposite isn't true.
Doesn't he actually win with his following because people identify with – they're allowed to identify with the heel in that moment?
Yeah, exactly.
Right.
And isn't this what J.D. Vance is copping to when he says, like, if I have to make up stories, I will to get attention?
Yes.
Well, J.D. Vance in that incident is the real neo-kfabe actor because he said – As they say in The Simpsons, the quiet part out loud, you know?
I mean, he goes, it doesn't matter that those incidents with the Haitian immigrants didn't happen.
They're expressing a deeper truth.
Yeah.
Like, I can't remember exactly how you phrased it, but it was basically, it doesn't matter that it's not true.
I'm expressing an emotional truth.
Right.
Which is what wrestling does all the time.
It shows you stuff that you know is ludicrous, that you know is not based in the way people actually act on a surface level, but on an emotional level, you get what they're talking about.
You get why people get lost in it, because these are big emotions that are usually not supposed to be in the public sphere.
That's the big thing.
The thrill of watching two guys beat each other up For salacious reasons on wrestling is not dissimilar from the urge to go, you know, I really have hated all those Haitians, or I really do hate black people, or I really do hate immigrants, whatever you want to glom on to that story.
And this is expressing my deeper emotional truth that these are bad people who deserve to be killed.
And that's – it's hard to fight because the deeper emotional truth is always going to resonate with people much more than the factual truth.
And there's an additional sort of deception involved in Neo-Kfabe that I think we see embodied in J.D. Vance's fucking face, which is that the heel status also has plausible deniability.
Yeah.
Because, you know, we hear over and over again, oh, he doesn't really mean that.
Oh, they're not really like that.
Oh, that's an act.
He's acting.
Maybe he raped that woman.
Maybe he didn't.
I don't know.
Right.
The heel has plausible deniability.
Absolutely.
Vince McMahon has used that to his great advantage many times because Vince plays this version, or used to at least, play this version of himself called Mr. McMahon.
and Mr. McMahon did a bunch of terrible things that a boss of a multi-billion dollar company might do.
Sexual harassment, intimidation, violence, all that stuff, exploitation.
And over and over again, Vince would say, well, that's not me.
That's the character, despite the fact that he was doing all the same things behind the scenes.
And the reason that works is because humans tend to assume, well, if he's playing a heel, if he's playing a bad guy, that means he's, even if people aren't consciously thinking this, they're doing this math.
He's a bad, he's playing a bad guy and he knows he's playing somebody who's bad and he's doing these things to show that that character is bad.
And no one would ever truly do bad things in their private life if they knew they were bad.
That's what it relies on, is this man clearly knows the difference between good and evil since he's choosing to portray evil.
And that must mean that if he knows the difference, he'll choose good when he's alone.
And that's one of the great misconceptions about human nature that people make, is that all humans decide to do the morally right things.
At any given moment.
Well, there's something even so incredibly twisted about how in this recent documentary, he's able to neo-kayfabe the neo-kayfabe in a way by saying...
Go on.
Well, he says, yes, there are...
two of me.
I don't know which one there is, you know, is active at any given time.
And then sometimes there's even a third one going on silently.
And I can flip into that one as well.
He's almost appearing as though he is vulnerably disclosing his internal mental state to a sympathetic interviewer, creating this sort of feeling of transparency.
Yeah.
And winning the interviewer over and I think a portion of the audience as well.
Yeah.
But that too can be a character.
Of course.
Like that can be a Mr. McMahon on top of the Mr. McMahon.
Look, let me put it this way.
I hate to give credit to David Mamet, but he had some great lines.
And Mamet in Glen Gary Glen Ross has this part where after the break-in, two characters are talking.
One character did the break-in.
The other character doesn't know anything about it.
And the character who's feeling really guilty says, well, what am I going to tell the cops?
And the innocent guy says, just tell them the truth.
It's the easiest thing to remember.
And that's Vince.
Right.
When Vince goes up and performs as Mr. McMahon, he's telling the truth because it's the easiest thing to remember.
He's doing what he does anyway on a public stage.
It's not a polarity reversal.
It's not.
I think that on some level it's a character, but not really.
Not in any meaningful way.
Not in any way where you'd go, oh, that's a separate thing from Vince McMahon.
It's a mask he puts on, but he made the mask.
One strategy question and then a thought experiment.
Please, I love it.
It seems that it would be impossible to shame or debunk the practitioner of neo-kayfabe.
Sure.
Maybe worse than impossible because actually the shamer and the debunker will be rolled into the storyline as a kind of heat.
So how would you advise journalists cover the Trump cabinet and Trump himself?
Oh, geez.
I mean, I think about this a lot.
I think...
I'm going to toss out some advice that no one's going to take.
I'm serious, but I would say if you're going to cover Trump 2, the Trump administration that is coming...
I mean, A, stick rigorously to the facts, which is, I wish I didn't have to say that, but a lot of people don't seem to care anymore.
But also, if there's one thing that threatens the practitioners of neo-kayfabe, it's, well, two things, really.
One, appearing to be pathetic or disgusting, and the other is appearing to be out of control.
Because as long as you can seem like you are the one who manipulates everything and can't lose, it's all good.
And it doesn't work to try and attack a neo-KFA practitioner by saying they're evil or they're deceptive or they're a liar because that's the appeal.
No, I'm serious.
That's what they've sold.
That's what they've sold the public.
The thing that took down Vince McMahon to the extent that he's been taken down, which I don't think will last long because Trump's probably going to end the Department of Justice investigation against him.
But what really took Trump – took Vince down a lot of pegs that he'd never been taken down before was this recent lawsuit by Janelle Grant in which it was alleged that – I'm not going to say the details, but that there was a very particular embarrassingly disgusting sex act that he committed during a rape.
Now, if it had just been a series of accounts of rapes where Vince was not embarrassed, then I think the lawsuit would have not had the same impact that it had.
But this act that everyone talks about, which involves defecation, it turned into something where people were like, well, that's just gross and pathetic.
Like that's not a dictator.
That's not somebody I need to be scared of.
That's somebody who's either got sick, weird perversions that I don't even want to think about or they're incontinent.
And either way, they are not controlling this narrative.
So I don't want anything to do with that.
So that still might get reversed through outside actions.
But I think all things being equal, which they aren't, that really could have been the end of Vince McMahon.
And I think that as reporters approach the Trump administration, always remember – The audience is not moved by Trump as a threat or such and such cabinet member as a threat.
They're only moved when you point out how pathetic these people are or how gross they are or, in the case of some of the underlings, how not in control they are.
And especially Trump.
that makes Trump look totally destabilized, which I have yet to really see.
Like you see him sometimes be upset or maybe frustrated, but you never see him going, I've lost control of the entire operation.
Right.
You know, he looks like he's mostly in control most of the time, even if he's not.
And that perception has done a lot to make him seem invincible.
So Josie, it's December 20th that we're recording this.
Yes, the winter solstice.
In a few days off from Christmas.
And this is such an incredibly dark and depressing topic that you have uncovered.
And I'm really grateful for it.
But I wanted to run a possible redemptive thought experiment by you.
I'm listening.
I'm listening.
As per the season.
The story of Santa Claus requires kayfabe for it to work on the child.
But when the child figures out the secret, they can then...
Begin to participate in a kind of neo kayfabe Santa.
Right.
Where they know that Santa doesn't exist.
The parents know Santa doesn't exist.
Yes, but they're all doing it anyway.
And so they're going to participate in the fiction by which the family makes, ideally, a kind of unconditional love and generosity a real thing in the world.
Does that sound okay?
That's more like old kayfabe.
That's what wrestling used to be.
You're remembering your childhood.
Yeah.
We don't have that world anymore.
I wish we did.
But you're describing the way old kayfabe used to be, which was the fans knew it was pretty much fake.
The wrestlers certainly knew it was fake.
They knew there was no such thing as these characters, and yet it kept people together.
It kept people coming to this communal event and participating and being happy, whereas now...
It's not like people aren't happy at wrestling, but there's just – there isn't that – if we're going to use the Santa metaphor, I guess it would be more like if the parents started telling the kids that Santa was like their three-nores-down neighbor.
Right.
And they had to start mixing reality and fantasy and like getting the neighbor to do weird stuff so they could convince the kids.
Oh, okay.
It becomes this rabbit hole.
I'm not trying to mess with your thought experiment too much, but I think that we don't...
Kayfabe can be redemptive, but I think that we have passed the old Kayfabe world.
We are in a terrible neo-Kayfabe world, and I'm hoping for a post-Kayfabe world someday.
