“WWE is real and it’s mainstream political news that’s fake.” Dominic Cummings is fond of this quotation, originally from the music producer Rick Rubin. Typically for Cummings, it isn’t exactly a quotation, but his own simplification of a rambling interview clip. And, typically again, it’s quite slippery: Cummings uses it to describe how politics appears to average voters, whom he probably rightly thinks see cabinet media rounds as more of a showboat than Wrestlemania. But it’s less clear if he is also endorsing this discursive reality, in which substance has dissolved beneath the stage lights, argument replaced by strobe and display.
One master of the new reality is Donald Trump, whose familiarity with these formats has been widely acknowledged. But this new documentary – Wrestling with Trump, presented by the likeable, impish comedian Munya Chawawa – goes further. It comprises a roadshow through American wrestling, interviewing its local and national stars, and probing the alliance between the sport and politics. It concludes that Trump exists in a symbiotic relationship with WWE culture, a direct product of its carnival postmodernism, as well as its proud showbiz machismo.
Certain things about the hyper-masculine Trump make little sense: that he abstains from alcohol and tobacco and sustained himself through the Wall Street Eighties with cans of tomato juice over lunch is, frankly, baffling. But other things make perfect sense. There’s his obvious and possibly compensatory predilection for blonde and buxom supermodels. Then there’s wrestling, play-fighting for grown men, complete with a childlike glossary of special moves. Of course he loves that.
WWE is big – one billion households, 180 countries – but in my few encounters with it on-screen, I’ve always felt like Clive James watching some strange Japanese game show. It seems very foreign, and specifically very American, the men dressed as pantomime superheroes with their leotards and tights. Trump has always seemed very American too, and he was there from the very beginning, appearing ringside from the late Eighties, when wrestling found its modern form. This was the heyday of “Brutus Beefcake”, Chawawa’s first interviewee in Wrestling with Trump. Stooped and old, his mullet tangled like a wet rope, he limps out to meet us on a Floridian beach. But he comes to life describing steak dinners with Trump. “He’s a winner,” he says.
This is a sentiment restated ad nauseam by everyone Chawawa comes across. Wrestling mirrors politics in its decisive and humiliating sense of winner-takes-all. And Trump has consciously borrowed the pageantry of wrestling to support his project, from the nicknames and the sledging to his neon Nuremberg rallies. “We’re the most political business that’s ever been,” says a Kentucky wrestling impresario. “The basis of everything [Trump] does is the psychology of pro wrestling,” says one coach. Sam Nunberg, a former Trump adviser who first met the president at a Wrestlemania event, compares managing his campaign to the writers’ rooms of WWE. “Fight like hell,” Trump told his supporters before the 6 January insurrection. “Fight, fight, fight,” he told them after he was shot.
At times, the programme is a little too pleased with its conclusions, especially since they’re hardly original (people have been writing about Trump and WWE for a decade). And it rather scrimps on the darker side of wrestling, and the dynasty behind it. Trump had a close relationship with Vince McMahon, the former boss of WWE. The pair starred in the contrived “Battle of the Billionaires” feud in 2007, which resulted in the viral clip of Trump tackling McMahon to the ground and beating him around the head. The video reappears here.
But Wrestling with Trump neglects to mention the multiple sexual misconduct allegations against McMahon, including of rape (something else he and Trump share), which preceded his resignation from WWE. McMahon’s estranged wife Linda is another missing part of the story. She worked on WWE for years alongside her husband and participated in some of its most puerile storylines. Linda McMahon now serves as Trump’s secretary for education. Life imitating art, I suppose. But it can make you feel that the truth is that wrestling and politics are both fake – and, unfortunately, no one in America cares.
[Further reading: Miranda Priestly is still my hero]
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This article appears in the 13 May 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Never-Ending Chaos
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