In Virginia in early 2015, a then-35 year-old pro wrestler who goes by the name Daniel Richards followed Donald Trump in amazement. In a creepy way, he understood he was watching a kindred spirit.
“He was doing what I do,” he said.
Richards would later capture fame with a wrestling persona called “The Progressive Liberal.” He enters small arenas, largely across Appalachia, wearing a shirt emblazoned with Hillary-Clinton-faces, screaming things to fans like, “You vote against your economic interests!”
The hardcore country crowds go nuts. Richards was and is a heel act. Pro wrestling depends on a core format of a villain versus a hero, in industry terms a heel versus a “babyface,” or “face.”
Out of this format springs an infinite number of storylines – partner betrays partner, hero “turns” heel, adversaries unite to fight for the flag or a woman. But it all starts with a bad guy, entering the ring with a swagger, shouting vile stuff at the crowd to get things nice and warm in the arena.
“A heel’s job is to bring heat,” says Richards.
When Richards saw Trump on TV, he recognized right away what he was watching.
“He was a vintage WWE entertainer,” he said.
One thing was different, though. “A pure heel wants to be booed by everybody,” says Richards. “Trump is unique in that he said things that would trigger the left, but there are people on the right who will love him for what he says.”
He pauses. “So he’s a heel, but he gets the babyface pop from his base.”
A heel’s taunts are designed inspire a prudish reaction. The babyface sometimes responds to provocations with naïve dignity, not expecting the surprise kick to the face the whole audience knows is coming.
Trump, always the instigator, taunted Jeb Bush and his Mexico-born spouse, Columba, early in the race. He suggested the Florida governor “likes Mexican illegals because of his wife.”
Jeb not only refused to engage directly. He said only that he was “proud of his wife” and Trump was “totally inappropriate and not reflective of the Republican Party views.”
Politico compared Jeb’s tepid response to Trump to Mike Dukakis’s infamous failure to lash out at CNN’s Bernard Shaw for a 1988 debate question that began, “If Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered…”
Comparisons to Dukakis are deadly enough in American politics. But it got worse. Around that time Jeb appeared on a show with his mother, Barbara Bush. Trump, playing textbook heel, ripped Jeb for needing his “mommy.”
Bush again reacted like an aggrieved aristocrat. “I won the lottery when I was born 63 years ago and looked up and I saw my mom,” he said, in a debate. “My mom is the strongest woman I know.”
“She should be running,” Trump quipped.
This was crude, but from a pure wrestling standpoint, Richards recognized the move. “I totally dislike Trump,” he says, “but you had to laugh at that. [Bush] was not equipped to deal with that situation.”
There’s a convention in wrestling where the heel breaks the rules, but the crowd expects the face to fight back. For ages, hitting with a closed fist was “illegal” in WWE, but heels were always punching people.
“The babyface will never throw a punch until the heel does it,” Richards says. “But when a babyface doesn’t fight back, no one is going to get behind him.”
This happened to Jeb, and Trump danced on his grave by going on Morning Joe and declaring, “I thought he was going to push me harder to apologize.” Translation: What a wuss!
There’s real drama in wrestling, but it’s literary drama, not the sporting kind. It’s never clear how audiences will respond to any script. The roles of good guy/bad guy may be pre-determined, but audiences may respond more to one performer or the other, based upon who acts his or her role better.
As such there’s a gray area with heels and faces. “Sometimes boos are cheers,” Richards explains.
Richards cites Steve “Stone Cold” Austin, a classic heel. In 1996, Stone Cold defeated Jake “The Snake” Roberts, a Bible-thumping face. After Austin whipped him, he gave a speech as Roberts was being carried out of the ring. “You sit there and you thump your Bible,” he said. “Talk about your psalms, talk about John 3:16 – Well, Austin 3:16 says I just whooped your ass.”
“’Austin 3:16’ became the biggest-selling t-shirt in wrestling,” Richards says. “Austin got so popular, he had to turn face.”
Audiences love a good heel. They go wild when when king-douchebag types like Randy Orton stand flexing their pecs and preening in the middle of the ring, another Trump specialty (the preening, not the pecs). Trump’s incessant bragging about his money is the political equivalent of doing a “crotch chop” (look it up) in the ring.
Richards saw the parallels right away. But almost no one in blue America spotted this, least of all the press corps. This was malpractice on one level – to be that out of touch with so popular a phenomenon was inexcusable – but it proved dangerous also, as reporters didn’t recognize that they were sliding into a known business model.
As far back as 1987, Wrestlemania was attracting 93,173 customers to one Silverdome show in Detroit. The genre has been massively popular for decades. But few political reporters have ever watched wrestling. They didn’t get Trump in the same way they don’t get WWE.
In the late fall of 2015, when Trump started to rise again in the polls, I started to see reporters on the trail carrying around Mein Kampf or The Paranoid Style in American Politics. They were looking for political parallels in the past.
The book they should have been reading was Controversy Creates Cash, by former wrestler/wrestling producer Eric Bischoff, of now-defunct World Championship Wrestling (which was put out of business by Vince McMahon’s WWE). Bischoff was himself a famed heel act. His book is a field guide to how wrestling uses provocation and fake narratives to drum up fan interest and make money.
He wrote:
When you watch wrestling, what you see looks fairly simple. It looks like a staged, choreographed fight between two people who supposedly have an issue, something that they’re fighting over… What you really don’t see is the skill and the art that’s required to engage the third person in that ring. The third person in the ring is the audience.
Without crowd engagement, you’ve got a bunch of goons in underpants flipping each other, a meaningless story. The presence of a big howling crowd confers legitimacy and power to the event. Everything therefore becomes about building crowd energy. Without that, there are neither villains nor heroes.
There’s a fine art to deciding when to have a champ lose, or be humiliated, or turn heel, or whatever. Managing that dynamic is a privilege of the promoters, a carefully-guarded trade secret called kayfabe. It’s considered a major sin in wrestling to “break kayfabe,” i.e. slip out of character, admit to the fakery.
The problem, as Bischoff explains, is the business always wants for real heels. You can’t have crowds without heroes, and you can’t have heroes without great bad guys. But nobody wants to be the villain forever:
Sometimes I see it in guys who are really experienced—they don’t want to be the bad guy. They don’t want to be booed. But for a story to be successful, there has to be a villain. You have to have the characteristics that people truly hate. You have to be a liar, a cheat, a sneak, a coward—and the fans need to believe it.
Trump is a born heel. These exact words are now used in headlines to describe him: liar, cheat, coward and, most recently, traitor.
When Trump performed Wrestlemania in 2007, in an event tabbed “The battle of the billionaires,” he played the face, in a “bout” against WWE founder Vince McMahon (they both had partner fighters for the match).
In the match, you could see the heel urge coming through. Trump got tired of McMahon’s rap and sucker-tackled him, “winning” the fight with shots to the back of the head and face. He was perfect in the role and Wrestlemania fans – who are a pretty decent sample of what America is like “out there” – loved him.
Throw an attention magnet like Trump into a political journalism business that feeds financially off conflict, and what you get is the ultimate WWE event. It’s a cross of Ali G and Wrestlemania, a heel act using real credulous reporters as props. The drama was fake – sort of – but the profits and the political consequences were real…
This is an excerpt from the latest installment of Hate Inc.: How, and Why, the Press Makes us Hate One Another. To receive every chapter as it’s published, as well as full access to the already-published The Business Secrets of Drug Dealing, subscribe now for $5 a month or $40 a year.