The Psychology of the Kayfabe Era

Since January 20, 2025, I’ve been having the same sense of surreality that I had from September 11, 2001 until George W. Bush launched his ill-advised invasion of Iraq in early 2003. Nationalist & authoritarian movements have symmetries, echoes. Instead of Neo-Nazi Stormtroopers—so far, at least—we have the takeover of institutions, erasure of non-whites from official history, and death threats against judges & officials, and their families, who in any way oppose the current administration.

As Hollywood produced President Reagan, and television produced President JFK, the world of fast-takes and video-clips produced President Trump, who succeeds in a world where no one’s sure what’s actually true and what’s not, what’s AI and what’s not, what’s staged and what’s not. Trump’s hostility to the media is a kind of sociological strategy, but it’s also deeper, giving the people who represent knowledge and facts—the traditional, legacy media—the middle finger. It’s part of a bigger rebellion, attacking the idea of truth. Meanwhile, like Emperor Nero, Trump synergizes the powers of entertainment and politics. Btw, Nero’s sinister character and self-promotion did result in a huge rebellion in 66AD, the first Jewish-Roman War, after years of oppressive governors, socioeconomic divides, nationalist aspirations, and rising religious & ethnic tensions.

Trump started his political career attacking truth, as a Birther. The fact that he could build a community of trust around the idea that President Obama was not a US citizen was a break for many people with the idea that facts matter, that Truth matters. That Trump could hack into the collective consciousness… It’s shocking when you see people openly choosing to live in an alternate reality—it’s not like they were duped—and make it part of their new political identity, online and in public. The identity, though, is “thin” enough to remove so that, in their personal lives, they remain quite rational. (see Dr. Justin Frank’s Trump on the Couch)

As Thom Hartmann said before the 2024 election, “These MAGA crowds, like the 20,000 at Madison Square Garden, have a tremendous capacity to suspend disbelief and engage in magical thinking. There’s a deep attraction to non-thought, which has to do with not having to do the work of thinking. The other thing that Trump does that taps into large groups is a ‘defensive use of contempt’ so that dehumanizing ‘illegals’, Democrats, Kamala Harris, etc. doesn’t result in feelings of guilt. One can simply maintain contempt for them, which also functions as a defense against self-examination.

As Chris Hedges says, “Pro-wrestling is the template for our social & political life, but we didn’t know that it would produce a president. Bouts are public expressions of pain, and a fervent longing for revenge…It’s not going to get better…We are in the grip of the numbing of the Soul by despair, that leads to moral & physical debasement. All Trump has to do to establish a naked police state is to flip a switch, and he will.”

Alex Byron: “Kayfabe, from the pig latin for fake, is the narrative constructed around pro-wrestling that includes storylines, characters, and scripted fights. It was developed over time as promoters realized they could attract more fans if wrestling was turned into a drama. In a similar vein, media, business, and politicians all work together to build and mould and grow a narrative that creates a permissive environment. I don’t think they do this in an organized way but, as George Carlin says: you don’t need a formal conspiracy when powerful interests align…They don’t control you, but they create a world that nudges you in a certain direction that serves their purpose. Kayfabe manufactures good & evil and signals to you which is which.”

Chris Hedges has written and spoken about the “pseudo-events” that are managed by PR firms and focus groups. As Byron writes, Trump creates pseudo-events that are regarded as true. You could say that President Trump was born from a pseudo-event: Mark Burnett’s production of The Apprentice (reality-TV show), which portrayed him as a successful businessman, not a joke who had declared bankruptcy multiple times. “The show didn’t change any of his skills or his business acumen. What Burnett did was create a character that now has a gravitational pull in the kayfabe of political narrative, shaping it to his will. Trump, as a public figure, is as fake as any WWE character. He signals good and evil in a similar way. He is a pseudo-person. Burnett made him the ultimate kayfabe star, so real he shapes reality.” medium.com/@abyron267/kayfabe-and-the-american-political-establishment-9cc14a9ca3d1

Hedges: “The worse a reality becomes, the less a beleagured population wants to hear about it, and the more it distracts itself with squalid pseudo-events, of celebrity breakdowns, gossip & trivia. These are the debauched revels of a dying civilization… Deregulation, austerity, predatory corporations including the healthcare industry, wholesale surveillance, social inequality, and an electoral system plagued by legalized bribery, endless and futile wars, the world’s largest prison population and, most of all, feelings of betrayal, stagnation and despair are a toxic brew that culminate in a hatred of the ruling class and the institutions they support.”

In 2024, Trump reached 24 million people a week through online podcasts and shows, four times Harris’ audience. Increasingly, creating and controlling content is how politics is done, and the Right has built an empire—82% of the online media audience belongs to right-wing shows. Musk & Zuckerberg own the platforms on which most of this is happening. Watch the world burning—down the street—while Trump blames the LA fires on the city’s mayor and state’s governor, who happen to be Democrats, and the event is branded political.

Ask people who’ve experienced it. A populace bombarded with kayfabe good & evil narratives with signals as to which is which, public expressions of pain, fervent longings for revenge and, under it all, soul-numbing despair, tends to respond in one of two ways: by losing their minds, or trying to stay distracted.

Future anthropologists, if there are any, will view the 2020s as a time when the future of mankind depended on what one generation did, but who didn’t realize that (collectively, anyway) and were instead caught in the struggle of nationalism, ideologies that appeared incompatible, intoxication with new gadgets, looking better and living longer, preoccupied by a whole series of issues that evaded the major issue of the survival of life on Earth.