You've probably seen images of Donald Trump cavorting around a professional wrestling ring.
If not, you’ve almost certainly seen a video he tweeted back in 2017 showing him body slamming a figure with a CNN logo as a head.
#FraudNewsCNN #FNN pic.twitter.com/WYUnHjjUjg
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 2, 2017
The footage is from a real professional wrestling match Trump had against the now disgraced former owner of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) Vince McMahon in 2007.
McMahon is now facing numerous sexual assault charges and has stepped away from the business, however his wife Linda McMahon, founder and former CEO of WWE, is the co-chair of his transition team and has just been announced as Trump's nomination as Secretary of Education for the incoming administration.
The WWE helped revitalise the celebrity image of the 80s business mogul to a new generation alongside his own reality TV show 'The Apprentice’.
But some of the skills, and tricks of the trade he learned from pro-wrestling helped turn him into a successful politician, according to journalist and author Abraham Josephine Riesman.
Riesman, who goes by 'Josie', is the author of 'Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America', which details how she sees aspects of professional wrestling mirrored in modern American politics.
"It’s where he learned to work a crowd," Riesman told RTÉ News. "I've seen footage of Trump delivering addresses in the 80s and it's just the usual corporate, thank you ladies and gentlemen, genteel sort of fakey thing," she said.
"But when you see him interacting with the wrestling crowd in 2007, he feeds off their energy so easily - it’s scripted, so he was told what to say - but he delivers everything with such a perfect kind of theatrical contempt that the audience can't help but get riled up about it."
That kind of performance and interaction is evident today, during Trump's rallies that he enjoys so much, but Riesman believes the real trick he learned was the art of what the author has coined "neo-kayfabe".
To understand that term you need to start with "kayfabe", which is an old American carnival term.
Professional wrestling emerged from athletic carnival shows in the late 19th Century that were more performance than sport.
The linguistic origin of the term is unclear, though it may be pig Latin for the term "be fake", but it became code for the big secret of professional wrestling - that it’s fake.
Kayfabe was the mafia code of pro-wrestling, where you had to portray your scripted character as real to the public at all times, and inhabit that persona so that nobody could figure out that professional wrestling was staged.
However, by the late 90s and early 2000s that veil of mystery around the WWF (as it was called then) had been well and truly lifted, as the public realised it was all theatre.
In order to maintain and grow its popularity, owner Vince McMahon introduced more behind the scenes storylines, some of which had a basis in truth.
For example, the wrestling character ‘Triple H’ married female wrestler ‘Stephanie McMahon’ and the pair were also married in real life.
It’s this that Riesman terms "neo-kayfabe", the stories are still manufactured, but there are elements of truth, so the audience is kept guessing, is this bit real or faked?
"All of a sudden the audience become conspiracy theorists, where they can’t tell truth from lies," says Reisman.
The Trump WWE storyline, called 'Battle of the Billionaires' was very much neo-kayfabe. Trump and Vince McMahon were both real life billionaires, but they played inflated caricatures of themselves.
There’s a similarity between this neo-kayfabe and the kind of disinformation we see proliferate on social media today and has been used to great effect by Donald Trump.
According to The Washington Post, Donald Trump made 30,573 false or misleading claims during his first term as president.
He learned a key lesson, says Riesman. "If you take a lie, and you bury it in the dirt of other lies you can tell people, 'hey, you see that dirt? It's a lie'. But if you dig something, if you dig there, you might find some truth."
You’ll often hear conspiracy theorists saying they "did their own research" but really, they’ve just found the lies that were buried for them.
The most obvious example in Trump's election campaign, according to Reisman, was the false statement his running mate JD Vance made about immigrants in Ohio eating cats and dogs.
"He was confronted about the fact that this just wasn't happening, his response was essentially, yeah, it was a lie. But it exposed a deeper emotional truth."
We saw a similar example of neo-kayfabe cum disinformation during the recent Hurricane Helene in Florida.
RNC national committee member Amy Kremer posted an image of a small crying girl holding a puppy in the floodwaters on social media platform X.
The image was quickly outed as a fake AI generated picture, but she replied saying: "I don’t care where this photo came from, it doesn’t matter. It is seared into my mind forever. There are people going through much worse than what is shown in this pic."
Y'all, I don’t know where this photo came from and honestly, it doesn’t matter.
— Amy Kremer (@AmyKremer) October 3, 2024
It is seared into my mind forever.
There are people going through much worse than what is shown in this pic.
So I’m leaving it because it is emblematic of the trauma and pain people are living…
In other words, it doesn’t matter that it’s fake because the way it made me feel is real. This is the key to how neo-kayfabe and disinformation works.
"The sizzle is more important than the steak," as Riesman puts it. "The sizzle gets someone to buy the steak. If the steak tastes like crap, who cares, you already sold it."
Whether it’s selling actual Trump steaks or selling an idea of ‘Making America Great’, Trump certainly employs these reality bending techniques that have similarities to wrestling’s kayfabe.
Can we put this down to Trump’s relationship with Vince McMahon and pro-wrestling? I’m not so sure.
He has definitely been hugely influenced by the likes of Steve Bannon, his 2016 campaign manager who has been speaking openly about disinformation techniques for years.
But did pro-wrestling help Trump hone his techniques? That’s certainly possible.
