Donald Trump as Stone Cold Steve Austin

Donald Trump is a wrestling character. This is now a fact known by all and sundry. But because it was mooted on the unpopular Jumping Nothing podcast six months ago, and because I was the person presenting that podcast, I’m going to write about it.

In June 1996, Steve Austin was a bald white man in plain black tights that elicited almost no response from WWF audiences. He had been the henchman of the cartoonish Million Dollar Man, Ted DiBiase, but DiBiase had left for WCW, so Austin was left without much but a bald head and black tights for a personality.

At the end of the month, in an effort to combat this, Austin received a push: he was given the task of beating up an injured Jake The Snake Roberts in the final of the King of the Ring tournament. Roberts, whose real-life substance abuse issues were drawing some natural sympathy from the crowd, was playing an eschatologically minded preacher type, warning of damnation in grave tones.

Austin put the boot in on the waning Roberts, drawing boos that represented one of his first strong reactions in WWF. Then he (literally) added insult to injury with his victory speech after being crowned King of the Ring.

“You sit there and you thump your Bible and you say your prayers, and it didn’t get you anywhere!” he said, addressing Roberts as he laid visibly hurt in the ring. “Talk about your psalms, talk about John 3:16… Austin 3:16 says I just whipped your ass!”

Now, this storyline is the kind of thing wrestling writers apply to characters pretty much prêt–à–porter. Beat up the vulnerable hero beyond the reasonable bounds of competition, then make clear you did it because you are a bad person. The goal was to net Austin a strong and lasting negative reaction. Which he received. At first.

Society was changing in 1996 and wrestling, tied as closely as it was to the humours of the masses on a nightly basis, was changing with it. What had passed for a hero amid the free world-vs-communist autocracy certainties of the 1980s was no longer a hero in the counterculture-heavy 1990s. WWF had made baby steps towards acknowledging this with the rise of the lounge-lizard lech Shawn Michaels. But it had not anticipated the effect of giving Steve Austin, a sturdy, reliable-looking fella, vituperative stuff to say about a fallen favourite. Cursing at the injured Roberts didn’t make Austin look callous, it made him look cool. And to the WWF’s crowds of working-class Americans at that particular moment in history, coolness was much more important than moral rectitude.

Within 18 months, he was beating up his real-life boss in front of ten million people every Monday night.

*****

Nineteen years after the beginning of Steve Austin’s ascent, Donald Trump cut his own Austin 3:16 promo at his own hotel in New York City. Announcing his presidency, he said that he was going to build a wall between the United States and Mexico, and that he would make Mexico pay for it. Why? The people Mexico was “sending” were undesirables, he claimed. “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

The media locked on to Trump and haven’t let go since. Does he have any evidence? Did he really think the Mexican government was intentionally sending criminals to the United States? How did he plan to make Mexico pay for the wall? Isn’t he racist? Does he even believe what he says?

After a decade of Republicans discussing how best to woo non-white voters in a demographically changing America — and in an election year where the hispanophone Jeb Bush and the Cuban-American Marco Rubio were considered to be favourites because of their ability to appeal to Latinos — Donald Trump shifted the paradigm.

“One thing a babyface has to have is fire,” Stone Cold Steve Austin often tells guests and listeners on his twice-weekly podcast. Trump showed fire, and America had its anti-hero.

Fire is not only Trump’s foundation as a politician, it’s the only content. Making Mexico pay for an enormous wall, before or after receiving 11 million of its citizens who had been living illegally in the United States, is almost guaranteed to require war, never mind the economic collapse that ditching so many workers at once would precipitate. These are not thought-through policies, nor are they dogwhistle with policies attached (a la Ted Cruz). They are wrestling promos, designed to elicit a reaction — any reaction — and demand a response.

Society at large has caught up to late 1990s wrestling in terms of its adoption of “truthiness”. Stephen Colbert recognised that truth was not something you discovered, but something you felt in your gut .This is fuelled partly by partisan news sources that place apparent principles and political goals above the lofty impartiality that the postwar idealists aspired to. It’s also fuelled, lately, by self-curated news diets on Twitter and Facebook.

Truthiness has always been at the core of wrestling. Good guys can cheat and get away with it; bad guys can do the right thing and never get the credit. It’s about the feel of the thing. This has sometimes been the case with politicians (Bill Clinton), but it has usually been in a “yes, but” context. Trump advances America into the “hell yeah” era of doing wrong things.

The polls and focus groups that direct electoral strategy globally insulated Trump from any decent fightback for the first few months of his campaign. “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someone and I wouldn’t lose any voters, okay?” he told a Christian college in Iowa. He was right. Establishment darling Jeb Bush tried to rise above the rhetoric by ignoring it and was bullied into submission. The right-wing press found it impossible to detach itself from its gotta-hear-both-sides methodology, which allowed anti-Trump sentiment to be cast as low-energy weakness. And even Ted Cruz, a combative sort, delayed trying to land direct punches on the guy who stole his lunch money. By then it was too late. Once you’re hot, you’re hot.

When Republicans did begin to directly attack Donald Trump (and by association their own base), they made a mistake that would be obvious to anyone with a passing understanding of wrestling. Calling an anti-hero bad makes people think he’s good. This is a society that treats Heath Ledger’s Joker like Milton’s Satan. The more effective solution is to let him overexpose himself (check) and then start to point out that he’s just a blowhard uncle who’s coming up with new opinions on the fly because he’s so pleased to finally have an audience.

Fighting on Trump’s territory just feeds the character mythos and leads to a situation where he is literally being asked whether or not he denounces the Ku Klux Klan (he doesn’t, even though he used to, because that’s the answer that would gain the biggest reaction). They should have worked on popping the bubble and breaking the suspension of disbelief.

So Donald Trump worked a work so long that he worked himself into a shoot. It looks like he will be the Republican nominee for the office of president of the United States of America. At that point, even the WWE Network won’t hold the wisdom.