The entertainer: How Trump learned from the best

Vince McMahon is one reason why America suddenly is a squared circle.

Vince McMahon

He admitted his whole enterprise was phony. He ducked and dodged his way through courtrooms without a scratch. He was unfaithful in his marriage and kept it together. He alienated and abused his employees and yet they kept returning to his harbor. In the end he vanquished his competitors and took their properties.

Yes, Vince McMahon did all that. As chronicled by Abraham Riesman in the book “Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America,” the world’s premier wrestling promoter understood that the only mortal sin in public American life was the failure to entertain. He never fell into that trap, lining up his heels and babyfaces, playing them off each other, eventually becoming one of each. Not so coincidentally, he became the closest confidante of Donald J. Trump. His wife Linda became Trump’s administrator of the Small Business Administration, although there was nothing small about the empire Vince ran. And his calls were always taken by The Former and now Future Guy.

It isn’t widely known if McMahon advised Trump on the campaign that ended Tuesday night with Trump’s runaway election, as he became the first Republican in 20 years to win the popular vote, and painted the Democrats’ Blue Wall red in the process. Trump had professionals in charge this time, and even though he didn’t always listen to them, they mixed real organization and acute messaging in and around Trump’s polluted streams of consciousness.

But McMahon had to be proud of the way Trump made sure the light was always shining on him. One garbageman’s vest was worth 10 times the attention of any economic policy statement Kamala Harris could summon. Trump only shared the stage once, at his debate with Harris, and that was such a nightmare that he risked looking weak by steadfastly refusing a rematch. No, far better to stick to dumb-as-a-rock and other schoolyard barbs, and Hannibal Lecter and Arnold Palmer’s 15th club and immigrants cutting your throat in your kitchen. Let everyone else cluck-cluck. Trump instinctively knew that real power lies in the sound bites, and nobody will dwell, indignantly, on what you said Thursday if you say something at least as outrageous on Friday. It’s a gift, and it isn’t transferrable. Ron DeSantis thought he would be a younger, more efficient Trump in white boots and he crashed. Kari Lake wanted to be a sassier, less irrational Trump and, apparently has been left at the dock as the Red Wave crested.

One can’t categorize a nation as vast as ours, nor should one try, but it’s obvious that America’s temporal lobe cries out for constant stimulation. That’s why we have 300 channels and a remote control; that’s why that phone never stays in our pocket for more than 60 seconds. Among political candidates, Trump has never had a peer in marketing and branding, either himself or his opponents. The red MAGA hat will go into the Smithsonian someday. It might have meant different things to different people, but his followers knew exactly what it meant to them.

This puts his opponents in an untenable position. If they try to out-nasty Trump, they’re playing his game on his field. If they ignore him, they find themselves covered in slime. More importantly, they’re allowing themselves to get defined. Harris had a good approach in the beginning, dismissing his rants as “same old, same old,” but when Trump began pounding on her acceptance of health care for transexuals in prison, she briefly pointed out that they had won those rights in court. She rarely mentioned it again. He kept pounding.

Let’s put it this way. If Trump had supervised the type of job growth and unemployment rate and stock market boom that the Biden-Harris administration helped foster, he would never have stopped bragging about it. Harris, careful to take everyone’s inflation pain under consideration, said relatively little about Biden’s legislative breakthroughs. That might be why only five percent of exit-polled voters said the economy was “excellent,” which it is. Sixty-seven percent of them said it was either not so good or poor, which is exactly what Trump was saying.

“Strength” always comes up. In this case strength is loud and predatory, not quiet or thoughtful. Apology is not in the vocabulary of either Trump, McMahon or any WWE star. Trump might have seemed feeble and addled during much of the campaign, but when he gets behind the podium and free-associates in the hot sun for two hours, he brings no ambiguity. If you want to hate immigrants, he’s telling you in many specific and subliminal ways that you are permitted to. 

People like to say that they always know where Trump stands, when actually his views on abortion and the economy and world affairs have been all over the map. But he has never turned down the volume or retreated from anything, not from the moment he impugned the war heroics of John McCain and realized he would survive it.

This victory, like Trump’s whole political career, put the torch to conventional wisdom. Angry pro-choice women were supposed to flock to the polls as they did in 2022 and 2023. The Harris ground operation was the Eighth Wonder of the political world. Harris’ considerable money edge would make a difference. Springsteen and Beyonce and Gaga would lure the casual voter. The full houses at Harris’ events proved she’d stolen the charisma edge. The Nikki Haley voters – were they on vacation this week? – would line up for Harris. Liz Cheney would give skeptical Republicans a reason to defect. Ann Selzer, the Outlier Queen of polling who whispered that Trump was trailing by four points in Iowa Saturday night and shot large quantities of Hopium into every Democratic bloodstream, was never wrong. Trump Fatigue was widespread and deadly. The plummeting crime rate would help Democrats. Tim Walz, the coach next door, would boost Harris in the upper Midwest. You could hear someone saying one or all of those things, with full authority, every day from the middle of July until Tuesday morning. None of them came true.

And so we awaken, if we ever slept, to greet the return of a 34-time convicted felon, a sexual assaulter, the catalyst of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, a twice-impeached blackmailer of Ukrainians, a grifter who sells $100,000 watches, a tax cheat, an election denier and manipulator, and a leader so weak-kneed during his only White House crisis that he suggested bootleg remedies for Covid-19 and predicted it would go from 15 cases to zero, “like a miracle.”

Some of that was the reason he lost in 2020, but by 2023 many Americans grew nostalgic for his reign. The “were you better off” question should have been a layup for Democrats, but Trump gave them too many targets to attack. One of them, the infamous Project 2025 that listed MAGA ambitions that most of the electorate scorned, was never mentioned enough. Walz brought it up just once in his touchy-feely debate performance against J.D. Vance.

But if it were easy to put the submission hold on Trump it would have been done by now. As I write this, he will have the White House and the Senate, may keep the House, and has a compliant Supreme Court that he might try to expand. It rivals the political comeback that Richard Nixon pulled off in 1968, after he’d lost to JFK in 1960 and then lost the California governor’s race, announcing that “you won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.” Trump wouldn’t have shown such weakness. Instead, he promised the voters that he would be their “retribution.” That doesn’t just fit the DNA of his audience. It comes right out of the Book of McMahon.

You never run out of scores to settle. It’s a regularly-scheduled program. In that way, Trump was McMahon’s apprentice.