The blustering, pro-wrestling-loving Trump administration is dedicated to the appearance of being strong and effective in the eyes of a credulous MAGA base, all while grifting from and destroying the nation right before our eyes.
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Kayfabe is a term used in professional wrestling to describe the act of presenting something staged or fake as authentic. It seems all too fitting then that Donald Trump, who has long been associated with professional wrestling, has brought that aesthetic to governance. Indeed, his Secretary of Education is Linda McMahon, who was president and CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment.
Trump has always been more about appearances than effect. His business model was to slap his name and some gold leaf on an inferior product, whether it was steaks, sneakers, casinos, hotels, or even Bibles, and sell it at a premium to the rubes. Eventually, people caught on and the pool of exploitable suckers dried up. Most of these ventures went belly up, resulting in six bankruptcies.
Nothing has changed with his time in office. His interior decoration of the White House leans toward gilded moldings, cherubs, trophies, coasters, and urns, much of which was cheaply sourced from Home Depot. He bulldozed the East Wing to make way for a ballroom of such size that it will likely dwarf the White House itself. The architectural style of the drawings provided to the public look like something that earned the 18th-century French kings a trip to the guillotine.
Yet Trump tries to present himself as a generous man of the people by constantly reminding the public (through his press secretary) that he promised to donate his presidential salary, and claiming that he’s giving up money by being president. It is unclear whether he actually donated that $400k a year, but it’s a paltry sum compared to what he is raking in by abusing the power of his office, whether by using his crypto meme-coins to launder money into his family, demanding that the DOJ pay him hundreds of millions of dollars, or taking expensive gifts from foreign leaders, like the Qatari 747. He clearly is using the federal government to shake down law firms, corporations, and media outlets.
Similarly, Trump’s attempt at portraying himself as a “tough guy” negotiator is all bluster and posturing that withers once he’s behind closed doors, particularly with Vladimir Putin. Every time Trump runs out of patience with Putin the same Kabuki dance happens: Trump threatens more support for Ukraine, Putin talks with Trump behind closed doors, and Trump backtracks and sets a new deadline for compliance. This cycle has continued for a year, reinforcing reports that Trump is weak-willed, and ends up agreeing with whoever spoke with him last.
Similarly, Trump’s drunken, rapist, terminal-major Secretary of Defense is incapable of understanding the difference between appearances and reality. Hegseth is utterly unqualified for the job and does not have the respect of the men head leads. He genuinely believes that the key to a top military is clean shaves (even if it means kicking out all the Black men with pseudofolliculitis), lots of push-ups, no transgender people, and no women in combat arms.
Absolutely none of these things detracts from combat effectiveness, but Hegseth is more interested in the kayfabe than in actually doing the things necessary to fight and win wars against a peer adversary (and no, motorboats in the Caribbean don’t count). I can say with absolute certainty that the most lethal soldier I ever met was a trans woman drone operator who spent the better part of a decade in Afghanistan making the “kill call” for SOF units on the ground and putting warheads on foreheads of high value targets.
Ukraine has a military one-third the size of Russia’s, and has fought a much larger, better equipped military to a standstill in which they have inflicted casualties at a ratio of 3 or 4 to 1. Twenty percent of its force was female in 2022. They have continued to use women extensively in air defense artillery roles, much as Britain did during the Battle of Britain with the Dowding System (the world’s first integrated air defense system).
Ukraine is also actively and successfully recruiting women as drone operators, both for strike missions and for first person air defense against Shahed-type drones. This is significant: Somewhere around two-thirds of all Russian casualties in Ukraine are caused by drones. Conversely, the primary Russian line of effort today is the hundreds of Shahed drones they are launching at Ukrainian infrastructure every day. It speaks volumes that Ukraine is entrusting some of its most important offensive and defensive efforts to women and has no issue with transgender people serving.
Comparatively, Russia’s military has very few women in it (4%). They are not allowed anywhere near combat roles. They are also frequently sexually abused, or handed out to senior officers as “field wives” away from home. To say that the Russian military has underperformed in Ukraine is a massive understatement. However, Hegseth would be the first to praise Russia for its policies on women and transgender people, while ignoring the fact that it doesn’t seem to have helped them achieve victory against a nation many Western analysts predicted would fall within a few weeks.
Hegseth’s obsession with appearances reminds me of stories about Army lieutenants in Vietnam who wrote up their troops for muddy, unshined boots in the middle of a jungle war, and subsequently and unexpectedly ended up with a grenade (sans pin) in their laps, courtesy of their own troops. Hegseth never rose above the rank of major, was considered untrustworthy by his own National Guard unit, and demonstrated this in his speech to senior leaders, who described him as operating with a “junior officer’s mentality.”
To the MAGA faithful who have no concept of how the military or modern warfare look, more push-ups, less women and LGBTQ people, and more clean shaves seems to them like what the military should be. In reality, 70% of the casualties Ukraine is causing are by operators who could easily be someone Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth would ban because they’re “too woke.”
Another example of Trumpian optics over effects is the entire Make America Healthy Again movement. A great deal of attention has been paid to the anti-vaccine beliefs of the MAHA movement and Robert Kennedy Jr. To be sure, destroying faith in vaccines will eventually have catastrophic public health consequences as diseases that had nearly been eradicated, like polio and measles, come roaring back as herd immunity drops below the critical R-nought threshold. However, many of the other health initiatives by the Trump administration are also completely performative in nature.
One example is the belief that diet and exercise are a near-panacea for everything, including cancer. This has manifested itself in the form of a war on synthetic food dyes by HHS. To be clear: There is no proven link between petroleum-based food dyes and cancer, but this hasn’t stopped RFK Jr. from making a big deal over phasing some of them out and spreading nonsense about them, claiming, “So the loneliness, the dispossession, the crisis that we have in mental health, in suicide, in ADD, ADHD, all of these are linked — and particularly to the dyes.”
This has led to some moments where the kayfabe has shown through clearly. When the dairy industry agreed to phase out dyes, RFK Jr., with Agriculture Secretary Brook Rollins, Food and Drug Commissioner Martin A. Makary, and dairy industry leaders, did a joint press conference where they ate scoops of ice cream and promised to make it a healthier confection. RFK Jr. went a step further, calling to “improve the health of children” by ending “a 70-year demonization of natural saturated fat.” Headlines touted “churning up healthier ice cream.” The implication is that high-fat ice cream without synthetic dyes is now a health food.
The reality is that ice cream is mostly sugar and fat. It’s a high-calorie dessert with very limited nutritional value that contributes to obesity and diabetes. In MAHA world though, removing dyes suddenly makes it a health food. In the process of addressing a mostly made-up problem, they are actively making real problems worse. It only appears to make food healthier.
A similar issue is Kennedy’s war on high fructose corn syrup. The administration has pressured soft drink makers into replacing corn syrup (fructose) in their drinks with cane sugar (sucrose, which is about 50% fructose and 50% glucose). Kennedy touts this as a healthy change, while in reality there is little metabolic difference between these types of sugars. They’re both equally liable to cause diabetes and obesity. Kennedy also touted Steak ‘n Shake switching their fries from vegetable oil to beef tallow as a “health win.” (Hint: It’s not).
The same pattern repeatedly appears: fringe theories about unhealthy foods lead to trivial changes, with people being told that these foods are healthy, when in fact they’re just as bad for you as they always were. People who believe this government-sponsored nonsense are now more likely to increase their consumption of things that are bad for them, in the mistaken belief that they’re now healthy. It’s basically the plotline from a Beavis and Butthead episode.
One of the trademarks of professional wrestling is the over-the-top, convoluted storylines that make little to no sense. This accurately describes how the MAHA movement, and Trump’s cabinet, buys into so many conspiracy theories about health. Fluoride in the water causes arthritis, bone fractures, thyroid disease, and cancer. Chemtrails cause dementia, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, asthma and other chronic illnesses. Vaccines and Tylenol cause autism. AIDS is caused by doing “poppers”, not by the HIV virus. Wi-Fi causes cancer. Antidepressants are responsible for mass shootings. Hormone replacement therapy for transgender people causes gun deaths. Pesticides make people gay or transgender.
These conspiracy theories lead to flurries of activity: badly written white papers on autism branded as studies, committees stacked with cranks, kooks, and true believers to investigate conspiracy theories, and finding easier ways for people to obtain drugs for off-label uses (like Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine) that don’t actually work. It looks like a flurry of activity to address a host of problems: but in reality it solves none.
Like wrestling, anyone who looks past the veneer rapidly comes to understand that this is all fake. It’s people frantically running around trying to convince the world that they’re really solving problems while solving nothing. This activity is meant as entertainment for a very specific subsection of the U.S. that already believed this stuff to begin with. For the rest of the U.S., it sows confusion by injecting medical misinformation directly into the public consciousness.
The same can be said for virtually any of the high-profile actions taken by the Trump administration. Sending National Guard Troops into major cities doesn’t reduce crime, but it does cost a lot and kills local business traffic. Putting missiles into Venezuelan boats has little impact on the amount of drugs flowing into the US, and especially on fentanyl (96% of which is smuggled in at legal ports of entry along the U.S.-Mexico border). Tariffs don’t reduce trade deficits, bring back American jobs, or lower prices. ICE arresting immigrants who show up for their appointments doesn’t reduce crime, decrease the budget deficit, lower prices, or free up jobs for “real Americans.” Windmills don’t cause cancer, kill whales, or massacre billions of birds (that would be domestic cats). Excess energy from solar power can be used to charge batteries that provide power at night.
In most of these cases, the actions of the Trump administration have the opposite effect of what the administration claims. Blowing up small boats reduces cooperation with partner nations. Tariffs hurt the economy, affecting the poorest and small business owners first. Deporting immigrants the way ICE is doing now does nothing but provide xenophobes with torture porn. Promoting the ludicrous idea of “clean coal” doesn’t reduce energy prices, and means higher prices later as the U.S. relies on more fossil fuels relative to the rest of the world while the cost of extracting fossil fuels keeps increasing.
The most visible elements of this administration are all a political form of kayfabe; they’re putting on a show for the low-information people who voted for them and continue to support the regime. Other autocratic regimes have done similar things to boost domestic support. In Germany, they occasionally provided cruises to selected workers to give the impression the regime took care of those who worked hard. North Korea has its model villages along the DMV. What we are witnessing is modern bread and circuses, or Potemkin villages with a WWE twist. In the end, these actions serve to appease the worst instincts of the MAGA base, while actively damaging the economy, health, and security of the U.S. in the long run.