Trump’s Kayfabe Assault on the Deep State

Reality TV moves aren’t sufficient to reform the U.S. Intelligence Community, where serious change is needed urgently

The decisive aspect about understanding Donald Trump’s presidency, now in its non-sequential second term, is that the spectacle we’re watching isn’t the Oval Office and associated West Wing activities in any conventional sense. Trump isn’t just another president, but with a flair for the boisterously dramatic and quixotic.

Instead, we’re watching Season Five of The Apprentice: White House.

Trump’s acumen, aside from driving liberals mad with rage, is creating problems in order to solve them – sometimes an episode or two later to increase ratings. Some of these challenges never occurred to anyone but Trump. Tarriffing the planet, annexing Greenland, absorbing Canada, protecting Hollywood from foreign competition: such things are deemed important by Donald Trump and nobody else. None of these “big ticket” items in his second term featured prominently in his 2024 campaign, and we can rest assured that nobody voted for Trump to plant Old Glory over Nuuk.

Yet here we are. Trump’s TV presidency owes something to professional wrestling too, a pseudo-sport in which he once played a prominent role, as a host and commentator, before entering politics. Trump was such a star that he made the World Wrestling Entertainment’s Hall of Fame, and his current Secretary of Education is Linda McMahon, wife of the WWE’s founder, who ran their TV wrestling empire with her husband for decades. A key concept in pro wrestling is kayfabe, which boils down to maintaining the image that the obviously fake and staged “sport” is somehow real.