What do a pudgy, orange autocrat, and pumped-up men in tights have in common? The connections, while profound, all rest on specific strategies employed by World Wrestling Entertainment during the early 2000s (known as WWE’s “Attitude Era”) when Donald Trump was centrally involved with the promotion of WWE. These are: (1) universally breaking kayfabe, the code of people in the industry not to reveal or admit fakery; (2) Vince McMahon (WWE’s CEO at that time) playing a fictional version of himself as someone constantly humiliated in storylines; (3) the vicious affirmation of traditional gender roles through parables of male domination; and (4) telling stories that encourage viewers to ignore the actual material conditions of WWE “superstars” in favor of conspiratorial fictions involving powerful individual actors. In Kayfabe Nation: Professional Wrestling, Donald Trump, and the New Cynicism, Hebert and Cogburn present a trenchant analysis of Attitude Era WWE, showing the extent to which MAGA is just is a function, or symptom, of Trump’s internalization of WWE’s most objectionable tropes.
Neal Hebert and Jon Cogburn’s goal is not to use WWE merely to understand Trumpism and the related autocratic turn in countries as diverse as El-Sisi’s Egypt, Putin’s Russia, Erdogan’s Turkey, Modi’s India, Bolsonaro’s Brazil, Orbán’s Hungary, Netanyahu’s Israel, and of course Trump’s own America. Beyond that, Kayfabe Nation is a defense of truth against the lie that culminates in the widespread adoption of self-defeating conspiracy theories among the constituency of the right, as well as against the idea, popular in corrupted center-left parties across the planet that political success comes down to adopting better rhetorical strategies, strategies that exist in part to cover over their abandonment of New Deal and socialist ideologies where the material conditions of their constituencies would actually improve.
About the Authors
Neal Hebert is Assistant Professor of Theatre at Grambling State University’s Department of Visual and Performing Arts. An experienced stage director and dramaturg, Hebert received his MA in Philosophy in 2008 and his PhD in Theatre History from Louisiana State University in 2016. Select shows from his career as a theatre practitioner include: Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive, Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love, John C. Russell’s Stupid Kids for Hebert’s company Bang Bang You’re Dead Theatre, Neal LaBute’s The Shape of Things and Fat Pig, and Naomi Iizuka’s Good Kids. Hebert also directed the Louisiana regional premiere of David Auburn’s Proof in 2005. He taught at Louisiana State University, McNeese State University, and Southern University of Baton Rouge before finding his home at GSU. Hebert’s research has been published in Ecumenica, The Arthur Miller Journal, Theatre Annual, and Oxford University Press’s first Anthology of Dance and Theatre. Hebert has a deep and abiding love for horror movies, roleplaying games, and speculative fiction. He and his wife, Cici, co-parent their blended household of five cats.
Jon Cogburn is chair of the Louisiana State University Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies. He has published extensively in philosophy of logic, metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophy of art and with Mark Ohm and Abigail and Christopher Ray Alexander he has translated four books by Tristan Garcia. His monographs include Garcian Meditations: The Dialectics of Persistence in Form and Object (Edinburgh, 2017) and with Mark Silcox, Philosophy through Video Games (Routledge, 2008). He has edited, with Mark Silcox, Dungeons and Dragons and Philosophy (Open Court, 2012) and with Niki Young, The Graham Harman Reader (Zer0, 2023). With Michael Ardoline, he is currently finishing Weird Atheism: H.P. Lovecraft and the Meaning of Life and making progress on books on panpsychism and Object-Oriented Ontology with Niki Young. Cogburn has been an avid guitarist since junior high school and currently performs with the Baton Rouge area swamp punk bands Captain Paranoid and Down by Law. He paints with watercolors in his spare time. His immediate family includes two teenage children, two unruly, lovable dogs, two intrepid felines, and his fellow band member and wife, writer and philosopher Emily Cogburn.