Many Americans give up on politics until the end of an election year and then “just move on to the last thing they remember,” said Abraham Josephine Riesman, a freelance journalist and author of “Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America.”
Commenting on Trump’s latest media strategy, Ms Riesman told the BBC: “There are a lot of people who listen to wrestling podcasts and you’re going to get a lot of people who consider themselves apolitical or unorthodox.”
Young people are among the key groups Trump’s camp hopes to woo with podcasts and social media, as well as the wrestling world. These avenues have become important for Trump’s demonstration, his advisers said in a recent interview with Semafor. Trump was “a star,” senior communications adviser Alex Brusewitz told the site.
“I think what we’re doing better now than he’s ever done before is using Trump as a person: Donald Trump’s celebrity, Donald Trump’s unsurpassed aura, which is a very popular word on TikTok, by the way,” he said.
In her book, “Ringmaster,” Ms. Riesman argues that to understand the 78-year-old’s rise, fall and return to American politics, one must look at it through the lens of professional wrestling — its art of mixing fiction and reality, the psychology of elevating emotions through hyperbole. , and her ability to turn the wronged into the righteous.
“In short, you tell the truth, outright lies and half-truths in between, always with the same enthusiasm and sincerity,” Ms Riesman said.
But, she warns, the danger of politics becoming like a struggle is that it becomes “about thrills, about self-identification” rather than politics and principles.
Long before he entered politics, Trump watched wrestling as a child in Queens, New York, and always had a deep respect for its great performers.
His rise as a businessman has many parallels with WWE’s rise under former CEO Vincent Kennedy McMahon from a regional promotion to the biggest in the world. Both took over family companies and built empires.
Thriving under deregulated capitalism in post-Reagan America, they too escaped notice: Trump was later accused of suppressing workers and Mr. McMahon stripped his athletes of health care benefits.
In the late 1980s, the pair crossed paths when Trump hosted WWE’s WrestleMania marquee event several years in advance at his hotel in Atlantic City, New Jersey.
In 2007, the two men engaged in a storyline rivalry in which Trump challenged the WWE chairman’s authority and even once showered fans with dollar bills from the rafters.
“These were the first times that Trump had given speeches to large, boisterous crowds who wanted red meat,” says Ms. Riesman.
The feud culminated in the “Battle of the Billionaires” at WrestleMania 23, in which the wrestlers battled on behalf of the two men, with the stipulation that the losing billionaire would have their heads shaved bald.
According to Brian Alvarez, a longtime journalist and podcaster, the show generated more pay-per-view buys than any program the company had produced to that point.
“There were a lot of matches on that show,” he said, “but people really liked the idea of one of those guys getting their heads shaved.”