Kayfabe Nation

In 2004, the term “reality-based community” was used derisively for the first time—to refer to people who base judgments on facts—and attributed to a senior official working for US president George W. Bush. Many American liberals adopted the label for themselves, using it to portray themselves as adhering to facts in contrast to conservatives presumed to be disregarding professional and scientific expertise. Journalist Steven Poole contrasted the term with Hannah Arendt's definition of totalitarian thinking, which she described as having "extreme contempt for facts."

In 2025, it seems, roughly one-third of Americans are living in a manufactured reality, where truth is a casualty of relentless manipulation. The confluence of social media’s reality-shaping power, a US foreign policy prioritizing profit and military dominance, and a political culture steeped in deception has created a perfect storm. Rooted in Leo Strauss’s neoconservative theories, Milton Friedman’s economic dogma, George W. Bush’s PATRIOT Act, and Donald Trump’s mastery of performative lies, this crisis is amplified by impending climate change, resource scarcity, and a public overwhelmed by disinformation. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s warnings about the fragility of truth, Claude Lévi-Strauss’s insights into myth, and the concept of kayfabe, we can trace how America became a nation where reality wobbles, and trust erodes.

In “The Public Wants a Reckoning, Not Another Performance”, Evelyn Quartz writes, "Consultants, pollsters, media strategists—many of them earnest—operate within a system that treats public trust not as something to be earned through outcomes, but as something to be engineered through messaging. The internal logic is simple: if the right message is delivered in the right tone, to the right demographic, legitimacy will follow… This kind of technocratic language is, frankly, B.S. It’s the same 'game plan' that has so thoroughly divorced politics from real meaning that it now operates more like a spectator sport."

Kayfabe, a pro-wrestling term, originally described the illusion that scripted matches were real, an unspoken agreement between performers and fans to maintain the fiction. Today, it signifies a broader phenomenon: the deliberate construction of belief systems that prioritize narrative over evidence. Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, in his studies of myth, showed how humans create stories to impose meaning on chaos, while Roland Barthes’s Mythologies explored how cultural narratives shape perception. In America, kayfabe has become a governing principle, weaponizing these tendencies to manipulate public opinion.

The groundwork was laid by intellectual and policy shifts. First, there was the 1980 alliance between the Republican party and the Southern Baptist Convention, which is chock-full of biblical literalists. The same year, the neoconservatives organized in the American Enterprise Institute and The Heritage Foundation to counter the liberal establishment, and endorsed Ronald Reagan for president. They were disciples of Leo Strauss, who argued that elites should use "noble lies" to maintain social order, justifying deception for a supposed greater good. This mindset underpinned US foreign policy, which prioritized military dominance and corporate profit, often at the expense of global stability. Milton Friedman’s free-market economics, embraced during Reagan’s presidency, deregulated industries, slashed taxes for the wealthy, and elevated corporate interests above public welfare. These ideologies created a system where truth was secondary to power and profit.

The 2001 PATRIOT Act, enacted under George W. Bush, expanded government surveillance, eroded civil liberties, and normalized state overreach, creating a chilling effect on dissent. Existential threats—catastrophic climate change, oil and water shortages, and resource scarcity—loomed large, yet US policy doubled down on short-term gains, such as fossil fuel extraction, rather than sustainable solutions. Into this volatile mix stepped Donald Trump, a carnival barker who used kayfabe to construct a persona built on lies.

In her 1973 interview with Roger Errera, philosopher Hannah Arendt warned that a free press is the cornerstone of democracy. "The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen," she said. Without reliable information, people cannot form opinions, think critically, or act. Lies, she argued, don’t need to be believed to succeed; they need only to overwhelm, creating a fog of distrust where "nobody believes anything any longer." In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt described how propaganda thrives on a cynical audience, ready to believe the worst and dismiss contradictions as tactical brilliance. "Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd," she wrote, noting that such cynicism makes people admire leaders for their "superior tactical cleverness" rather than abandon them.

Arendt’s warnings are starkly relevant in 2025. Clare Wardle of First Draft News, based at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, observes that social media has become a battleground for truth. "Whether it’s a sponsored post, an ad, a visual meme, a bot on Twitter, a rumor—people just use it against any information they don’t like," she says. Early Twitter was a "self-cleaning oven," where falsehoods were quickly debunked by the community. But automation and bots have overwhelmed this mechanism, flooding platforms with disinformation faster than corrections can spread. The result is a public that distrusts everything, retreating into apathy or tribalism. As Wardle notes, people now say, "I don’t know who to believe or who to trust, everything’s broken."

Social media, particularly platforms like X, has supercharged kayfabe, turning lies into viral weapons. In 2016, Buzzfeed’s Craig Silverman uncovered a network of fake news sites in Veles, Macedonia, producing fabricated stories like "Pope Francis Endorses Trump" or "FBI Agent Suspected in Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead." These lies, optimized for Facebook’s engagement-driven algorithms, spread because they were profitable, not because they were true. The US presidential election, with Trump as a polarizing figure, was a perfect target. By January 2017, Trump had co-opted the term "fake news," using it to attack critics like CNN’s Jim Acosta. By 2018, a Google News search for "fake news" yielded 5 million results, and the phrase was used 2 million times on Twitter in a single month.

This phenomenon has historical roots. The National Enquirer, a tabloid fixture since the 1960s, mastered sensationalism, placing absurd headlines about UFOs or celebrity scandals at supermarket checkouts. From 1980 to 1991, Trump, using aliases like John Baron or John Miller, fed gossip to the Enquirer to burnish his image, boasting about his wealth or romantic conquests. In 2015, Enquirer publisher David Pecker struck a deal with Trump’s campaign to boost his 2016 candidacy, smear rivals, and suppress damaging stories. Headlines falsely claimed Ted Cruz had five affairs, Marco Rubio had a "cocaine connection," or Ben Carson was a "bungling surgeon." While dismissed by mainstream journalists, the Enquirer shaped perceptions, with 238,000 weekly newsstand sales in 2016 and millions more seeing its headlines in supermarket checkout lines.

Social media scaled this model globally. Algorithms prioritize outrage and fear, amplifying lies that spread faster than truth. Bots and automation ensure disinformation outpaces corrections. By 2017, even left-wing groups were producing anti-Trump fake news, showing how kayfabe transcends ideology. As Alexios Mantzarlis of the Poynter Institute notes, the media’s overuse of "fake news" muddied the waters, contributing to the confusion. The result is a public primed for kayfabe, where narratives trump evidence, and reality becomes a choose-your-own-adventure story.

Donald Trump’s second term, beginning in 2025, is kayfabe governance incarnate. During his 2024 campaign, he repeatedly promised immediate price reductions “on Day One” of his presidency. At rallies, he vowed, "Starting on Day One, we will end inflation and make America affordable again," emphasizing speed: "Wait ’til you see how fast we’re going to get it going." When reminded of this promise on May 1, 2025, Trump claimed he had warned of a tariff "transition period" during his campaign, and dismissed other promises—like ending the Ukraine war "immediately"—as "in jest." This isn’t lying to deceive; it’s lying to disorient, banking on a cynical public that expects contradictions and admires the audacity.

Senator Elizabeth Warren’s April 29, 2025, report detailed 100 corrupt acts in Trump’s first 100 days, painting a picture of governance where personal profit and loyalty eclipse public interest. Key examples include:

• Cronyism and Nepotism: Appointing Jared Kushner’s father as ambassador to France, Tiffany Trump’s father-in-law as an adviser, and oil executives to lead energy policy, prioritizing loyalty over qualifications.

• Self-Enrichment: Launching memecoins for himself and Melania, profiting from their value spikes after executive orders, and accepting $40 million from Jeff Bezos for Melania’s documentary, far above market rates.

• Corporate Favors: Dropping probes into companies like SpaceX after donations, such as a $4 million inauguration contribution tied to an ambassador nomination, and allowing Apple’s CEO to secure iPhone tariff exemptions.

• Ethics Erosion: Firing 18 inspectors general, gutting DOJ units prosecuting misconduct, disbanding the DOJ’s crypto unit after talks with Trump-backed firms, and sidelining whistleblower protections.

• Media Manipulation: Filing a meritless lawsuit against 60 Minutes, launching a baseless FCC investigation, and kicking the Associated Press out of White House briefings for refusing to bend.

Asked for comment, White House Communications Director Steven Cheung responded by email: “Of course Pocahontas will be reading Fake News [emphasis mine] bedtime stories because some political consultant told her this is what will resonate with voters.” Referring to Warren as “Pocahontas,” a term that Trump has used for years as a racial slur to attack Warren (who years ago claimed she had Native American ancestry because she grew up believing so, but later learned she did not) is offensive in a few ways.

Regarding the term “fake news,” Trump is the one who weaponized it, then brought it from print media to social media. Although fake news has existed in the US at least since Mark Twain wrote and published outlandish tales in local newspapers to boost sales, Trump is the one who brought the term from its place in supermarket checkout-counter tabloid newspapers like the National Enquirer into mainstream politics. However its stories danced on the edge of credulity, the Enquirer was a cultural fixture – in large part because of genius marketing. As many Americans moved to the suburbs in the 1960s, the tabloid staked its place on racks at supermarket checkout lines, where people couldn’t miss its absurd, sensationalist headlines about UFO abductions, medical miracles, etc.

For all the ridicule the tabloid received from “serious” journalists, Enquirer reporters did, occasionally, break some genuine news. In 1987, a photo of the married senator Gary Hart, enjoying a tropical holiday alongside a woman he was involved with, destroyed his presidential candidacy and brought politicians into the Enquirer’s celebrity world. The tabloid was considered for a Pulitzer Prize after revealing a sex scandal involving US senator John Edwards in the early 2000s.

In May, 2016, The Washington Post reported that a publicist calling himself John Barron, then John Miller, called journalists from Trump's office during the 1970s, '80s and '90s, to avoid trouble, float ideas, and even spread gossip about himself. In all these cases, he sought to protect and polish the Trump image, or brag in ways that would be unseemly, even for a man who is synonymous with self-promotion. Journalists and several of Trump's top aides told the Post that those calls were in fact made by Trump, but he claimed that the 1991 recording of his voice obtained by Post was not him. “It was not me on the phone,” Trump told NBC’s “Today” show when the recording was played for him during a live interview. In addition to the allegations of the presidential nominee misrepresenting himself, the comments on the call—about women—stand out during a campaign that was struggling to connect with female voters.

In a summer 2015 meeting with Trump and lawyer Michael Cohen, former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker outlined how he would help Trump, boost his presidential candidacy in 2016, tear down his rivals, and silence any revelations that may have damaged him—a deal that included notifying the campaign of women seeking to sell stories about relationships with Trump.

Meanwhile, Bill and Hillary Clinton—Trump’s opponent in 2016—were frequent targets of unflattering stories. Pecker called that a double-win, since it helped Trump, and anti-Clinton stories were popular with Enquirer readers. Among Trump’s other political rivals, Ben Carson was described as a “bungling surgeon” and “brain butcher”. Marco Rubio headlines referenced a “love child” and “cocaine connection.” Ted Cruz was supposedly having five secret affairs, and his father was alleged to have a connection with JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. The stories were wild fabrications, but thousands of voters saw them, and when the rumors hit the mainstream media, the opponents—particularly an angry Cruz—were forced to address them.

The Enquirer averaged 238,000 newsstand sales each week during the last six months of election year 2016. Meanwhile, also in 2016, as BBC reported, “Buzzfeed's media editor, Craig Silverman, noticed a funny stream of completely made-up stories that seemed to originate from one small Eastern European town. ‘We ended up finding a small cluster of news websites all registered in the same town in Macedonia called Veles’, Silverman recalls. He and a colleague started to investigate, and shortly before the US election they identified at least 140 fake news websites which were pulling in huge numbers on Facebook…because of the money to be made via Facebook advertising, they wanted their fiction to travel widely on social media. The US presidential election - and specifically Donald Trump - was a very hot topic on social media.

“And so the Macedonians and other purveyors of fakery wrote stories with headlines such as ‘Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President’ and ‘FBI Agent Suspected in Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead in Apparent Murder-Suicide’. They were completely false. And thus began the modern, internet-friendly life of the phrase ‘fake news’.” On December 8, 2016, Hillary Clinton made a speech in which she mentioned “the epidemic of malicious fake news and false propaganda that flooded social media over the past year." President-elect Trump took up the phrase the following month, in January 2017, just before taking office. In response to a question, he said "you're fake news" to CNN reporter Jim Acosta. Around the same time he started repeating the phrase on Twitter.

Trump’s kayfabe thrives in a policy environment shaped by decades of prioritizing profit and dominance. Neoconservative foreign policy, rooted in Strauss’s ideas, justified wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, enriching defense contractors while destabilizing regions. Friedman’s economics, embraced by Reagan, slashed regulations and taxes, ballooning inequality and empowering corporations. The PATRIOT Act enabled mass surveillance, chilling dissent and normalizing state overreach. These frameworks created a system where truth was subordinated to power, and public trust was eroded by policies favoring elites.

Resource scarcity—oil, water, and arable land—looms as climate change accelerates, with rising temperatures, droughts, and extreme weather threatening global stability. Yet, US policy prioritizes fossil fuels, with Trump appointing oil lobbyists to roles like the Department of Energy and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. These choices exacerbate environmental and geopolitical tensions, fueling conflicts that the administration exploits to justify military spending. The MAGA base, bombarded with lies about "energy independence" or "climate hoaxes," would be unable to parse fact from fiction, even if they wanted to.

Arendt warned that a people unable to believe anything lose their capacity to act or judge. Social media amplifies tribal narratives, with bots and algorithms drowning out reason. As Wardle notes, people now dismiss inconvenient information as "fake," retreating into distrust or tribal loyalty. This cynicism serves power. Warren’s 100 corruption allegations, though meticulously documented, risk being shrugged off as "just politics." The tactics of the Enquirer, once confined to tabloids, now permeate governance, with Trump’s media empire profiting from his lies. Policy failures—on climate, resources, or equity—are buried under spectacle. The PATRIOT Act’s surveillance mandate, combined with social media’s algorithmic manipulation, create a panopticon where disinformation thrives and dissent is monitored.

US foreign policy, driven by profit and dominance, exacerbates resource conflicts, from water disputes in the Middle East to oil rivalries in Africa. Climate-driven migration and economic inequality fuel populist movements worldwide, mirroring America’s own polarization. Trump’s lies about international agreements, like dismissing tariff impacts or Ukraine pledges, undermine alliances, leaving the US isolated in a world it helped destabilize.

Reversing this crisis requires rebuilding trust in information and institutions. Arendt emphasized the free press as democracy’s bulwark, but it must evolve to counter algorithmic lies. Fact-checking, as Mantzarlis suggests, must be proactive, embedded in platforms to catch disinformation at its source. Media literacy programs can equip citizens to navigate the information deluge, teaching them to question sources and verify claims. Policy reforms are critical: regulating social media algorithms to prioritize accuracy over engagement, taxing wealth to fund public goods like education and healthcare, and shifting energy policy toward renewables to address climate and resource crises.

Accountability is paramount. Warren’s corruption allegations demand investigation, not dismissal. Restoring inspectors general, strengthening DOJ ethics units, and protecting whistleblowers can curb abuses. Internationally, the US must pivot from dominance to cooperative diplomacy, addressing climate and resource challenges collaboratively. These steps require political will, which only an engaged public can demand.

The kayfabe nation wasn’t built overnight—it’s the product of decades of ideology, policy, and technology converging to erode truth. Strauss’s noble lies, Friedman’s market worship, Bush’s surveillance state, and Trump’s carnival lies have exploited human tendencies to believe in stories, as Lévi-Strauss and Barthes described. Social media amplified this, turning kayfabe into a national ethos. Trump embodies a symptom and a self-replicating virus. To reclaim reality, Americans must reject cynicism, demand accountability, and rebuild a system where truth can stand firm, and kayfabe be dispelled.