The bizarre video Trump attached to yet another “modern presidential” tweet showing him wrestling with CNN has a lot more behind it than the press has yet uncovered. The outrage about it being un-presidential, while understandable, ignores something far more fundamental and revealing: this video is just the tip of the iceberg. It is not simply a video of a single event that happened in 2007, it is part of a series of events that Trump was involved in. He’s been interested in wrestling since the 1980s when his Trump Plaza casino held to Wrestlemania events back to back.
With this video, what we see emerging is a whole side of Trump that few people outside the world of Wrestlemania and World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) knew about. It speaks to his experience as a WWE supporter for over three decades – but not only that, there’s more to it as I will explain below, and that is what made him the man he is today. In fact, Trump is a long-time friend of the billionaire WWE founders, Vince and Lisa McMahons, who have lavishly supported his campaign, and he has rewarded them by appointing Lisa McMahon, who is already a member of Congress, as head of the Federal Small Business Administration.
Video note: The above is the twitter video, which first appeared 4 days ago on Reddit – For the original video, see below
This much of the story has come out in a small part of the press, for example, in Metro.co.UK but it hasn’t yet been dissected by the mainstream media, or what conservatives now call “the establishment media”, a term meant to highlight a supposed partiality to “elite” viewpoint and positions.
In particular, the more worrying part of Trump’s past has yet to come to light, though it is known. But it has been dug out by Edward Luce, the Oxfort-trained journalist who is a deep observer of American society. And he writes about what he found in his latest book (out this June), THE RETREAT OF WESTERN LIBERALISM. Hailed as an “Amazon’s best History book of the year so far” dissecting American politics, it is already a best-seller, understandably so. His analysis of Trump is an eye-opener. Not only has Trump participated in WWE activities and invested in them (he bought Monday-night RAW), he has gone a step further. He has supported the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) that has, as Luce notes, overtaken WWE in popularity. And for a short time, according to Luce, he was “even involved in a short-lived franchise”.
This is serious. UFC, unlike WWE, is not scripted, it’s not fake fighting. As Luce describes it, “The contestants fight it out in a large octagonal cage. They really do aim to hurt each other.” And people really do get hurt, blood squirts all over the place, eyes are gouged out, teeth are knocked out, when the loser is down on his back, the winner is allowed to keep hitting. In Luce’s words, this is a “brutal and unforgiving breed of show business. In place of solidarity, it offers the catharsis of revenge”.
This, then is the man, the United States has chosen as a President. World leaders at the upcoming G-20 meeting beware!
There is no doubt that such an experience has shaped him so profoundly that he doesn’t even realize that posting a wrestling video like this is beneath the dignity of the President. It’s not a simple matter of being boorish or a bully or “juvenile” as CNN has asserted. It’s much more than that.
CNN journalists are already experiencing an upsurge in hate mail
Whatever he does has far greater impact than if he were a private citizen. As President of the United States, with a video like this, Trump holds up a model of no-holds-barred fighting that necessarily will have echoes among his fans and will unquestionably incite violence. The White House strenuously denies this, but the facts are there. And CNN journalists are already experiencing an upsurge in hate mail and threats. Not pretty.
But such deep-rooted fighting instincts inevitably make one worry about world safety. This is the man with his finger on the nuclear button. How long will he be able to hold himself back?
