Working Loose: A Response to “Donald Trump Shoots the Match” by Sharon Mazer

In her TDR article, “Donald Trump Shoots the Match,” Sharon Mazer examines the current state of US presidential politics by drawing connections between Donald Trump and professional wrestling. As she notes, Donald Trump has a relationship with professional wrestling and WWE that goes back to the 1980s. The hyperbole, the spectacle, the violence, the history of troubling representations and storylines, and the often intentional muddying of truth and fiction are all key facets of professional wrestling; Mazer notes each in turn, even reading the recent nuclear tensions between the US and North Korea through the 1989 Hulk Hogan vs. “Macho Man” Randy Savage storyline, “The Mega Powers Explode.” This leads Mazer to make a number of pithy and pertinent remarks, including the no-doubt-accurate postulation that “the 2016 election might best be viewed as a kind of grudge match [between prominent personalities], part of a long-running cycle in which the heat generated by the campaign, played to enrage, trumped any more rational debate” (2017b:10 [2018:184–85]). No one who witnessed the epoch-defining events of Winter 2016/17 could question Mazer’s conclusion here.

Mazer also reads Trump’s campaign and presidency through events such as the Wrestlemania XXIII “Battle of the Billionaires,” where Donald Trump participated in a match with his storyline rival and WWE owner, Vince McMahon. Since Trump first entered the presidential race in June 2015, such readings have littered the editorial and opinion sections of newspapers large and small, including Oliver Lee Bateman’s December 2016 “Wrestling, Politics, and the Violent Realities of 2016” to which the current three authors contributed. Jeremy Gordon’s New York Times article, for instance, “Is Everything Wrestling?” asserts that Trump’s election represents a sea change in US, and indeed, global culture. “With each passing year,” he writes, “more and more facets of popular culture become something like wrestling: a stage-managed ‘reality’ in which scripted stories bleed freely into real events, with the blurry line between truth and untruth seeming to heighten, not lessen, the audience’s addiction to the melodrama” (2016). While not necessarily wrong, Gordon’s article is indicative of news commentary from the past year that reasserts the unhidden connection between Trump and professional wrestling—the association between the two is little secret, even as many articles on the topic present it as somehow revelatory. Trump is, after all, and as the WWE website points out, the first “WWE Hall of Famer [to] ever hold the distinguished title of U.S. Commander-in-Chief” (WWE 2017). In the view of such evidence, wrestling is certainly and strikingly representative of the current post-truth era, but it is also representative of politics more broadly and Trump is certainly not the first wrestler to intervene in politics (or vice versa). Wrestling, these pieces argue, is so obviously fake, so staged, so phony, that it perfectly represents the condition of modern politics—we contend this is true in some ways regardless of who won the election. However, what many writers seem to miss (Bateman excepted) is the understanding that professional wrestling is a performance form in which players and spectators together “keep kayfabe,” which is to say, they maintain the pretense that the staged event is real and, importantly, also thus understand that it can be radically changed.

Unfortunately, and surprisingly, Mazer—who in 1998 published the seminal Professional Wrestling: Sport and Spectacle—seems to make a similar mistake in “Donald Trump Shoots the Match.” Her analysis of wrestling and politics concludes that fans/voters were “duped” by Trump, that he has “converted his fans into voters” (2017b:1 [2018:175]). While it is problematic that Mazer does not provide verifiable evidence for her claim (and indeed, some evidence we present below demonstrates that such assertions are untrue), a larger problem is her claim to ownership over academic studies of professional wrestling, and the way that her critical position precludes any knowledge beyond a traditionally academic knowledge (and, it seems, any knowledge beyond her own).¹ Mazer does not...