A Trumped-Up Spectacle

James Chandler considers what Roland Barthes’s famous essay about wrestling can tell us about reality and shared illusion in Donald Trump’s Washington.

By James ChandlerJuly 9, 2025

• Politics

• Education

IN A NEW escalation of both its attack on higher education and its crackdown on dissenting opinion in this country, the Trump administration announced in May that it was suspending interviews for international student visas until it had the capacity to screen applicants’ social media for content it considers politically objectionable. The process of reviewing visa applications has now been restarted. Applicants are required to make their social media accounts public, and consular officers have been instructed in the broadest of terms to look for “any indications of hostility toward the citizens, culture, government, institutions or founding principles of the United States.” So if you are, for example, one of the many foreign students who have expressed concerns about US support for Israel’s war in Gaza, you might well be out of luck.

Like so many such items in the news these days, this development is deeply troubling and yet sadly predictable. It is entirely in line not only with the administration’s recent power moves but also with its not-so-subtle signals of what we should be expecting next. Some of the power moves have been made in the high-profile fight the administration has picked with Harvard University—moves that may well be in violation of Title IX rules and of the broader First Amendment principles it claims to be defending. Likewise, some of the signals have also been generated in the course of the same public campaign against Harvard.

Consider the letter that Secretary of Education Linda McMahon sent to Harvard president Alan Garber on May 5, which begins as follows:

The Federal Government has a sacred responsibility to be a wise and important steward of American taxpayer dollars. Harvard University, despite amassing a largely tax-free $53.2 billion dollar endowment (larger than the GDP of 100 countries), receives billions of dollars of taxpayer largess each year. Receiving such taxpayer funds is a privilege, not a right. Yet instead of using these funds to advance the education of its students, Harvard is engaging in a systemic pattern of violating federal law. Where do many of these “students” come from, who are they, how do they get into Harvard, or even into our country—and why is there so much HATE? These are questions that must be answered, among many more, but the biggest question of all is, why will Harvard not give straightforward answers to the American public?

McMahon’s opening salvo reveals both a pivot away and a broadening out from the line of attack that the administration had taken against Harvard and other universities in previous weeks. That line of attack had, with an appalling irony, mobilized charges of antisemitism on behalf of its quasi-fascist effort to intimidate and control institutions of higher learning. Partly because of the rise of Jewish voices against this tactic, the administration evidently saw fit to reframe the charge against Harvard for purposes of McMahon’s May 5 letter. The charge now became nothing less than “a systemic pattern of violating federal law.”

And yet, rather than spelling out the meaning of this grave and sweeping allegation, McMahon instead raises a series of insinuating “questions” that suggest that something must be rotten in Harvard’s attractiveness to foreign students. And these questions portended that shocking but predictable new measure to suspend all visa interviews until the thought police could ramp up their surveillance capacities.

Most remarkable of all about McMahon’s opening paragraph, however, is the question that comes last, after all the sanctimony (“sacred responsibility”) and all the insinuations. This question comes after a dash, and almost as an afterthought: “and why is there so much HATE?” There is much to say about this big little question and how it functions in McMahon’s machinations against Harvard. The use of all-caps in this question is a gesture to the typographical style of President Trump, but more to the point, what is this question’s sphere of reference? It seems to imply something like: “why is there so much HATE there,” at Harvard? But the question as posed seems to sound a more general and open kind of concern, more like the puzzlement of someone for whom hostility and animus are mysterious, alien forces in the world. Why can’t we all just get along? What the world needs now is love and understanding. Why can’t the hateful people at Harvard understand that? And why don’t they answer a simple question when it is put to them? What are they hiding?

But while the question about hate may seem to be addressed to Harvard, it is really—like the information that Harvard’s endowment exceeds the GDP of 100 countries—intended for another audience, the realm of social media where McMahon’s letter was posted and reposted by the likes of Daniel Scavino, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, to cheering responses in the MAGA world. McMahon’s “critique” of Harvard in these circles is called scathing, blistering, and, above all, well deserved. Harvard, says the MAGA world, has had this coming for a long time. As for the Pollyanna-sounding “why is there so much HATE?,” some of the more tuned-in MAGA observers world certainly relish the delicious irony of such sanctimonious posturing, and indeed such false naivete, coming from, of all people, one of the founders and leading executives of World Wrestling Entertainment (formerly World Wrestling Federation, or WWF), an enterprise that supplies multiple frames of reference for the work of the McMahons and their friend Donald Trump. These connections are worth tracing for what they can show about our strange and dangerous times.

In 2013, Donald Trump was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame. Trump was introduced that evening by Linda McMahon’s husband Vince, with whom Trump had had what he described in his acceptance speech as “an amazing relationship for many years”—one that, as he recalled wistfully, went back to WrestleMania IV in Atlantic City in 1988. Trump also pointed out that, for WrestleMania 23 in Detroit in 2007, he and McMahon had staged the “Battle of the Billionaires.” This event turned on a “bet” about the outcome of a staged wrestling match, with the loser, in this case McMahon, getting his head shaved in the ring by the winner. A “struggling” McMahon was pinned down by a “referee,” then covered with shaving cream and shorn by Trump with an electric razor. In claiming his place in the WWE Hall of Fame, Trump boasted, unsurprisingly, that WrestleMania 23 had the largest pay-per-view audience in wrestling history. The video of the bizarre episode, the billionaires scuffling awkwardly in expensive Italian suits, was in circulation before the 2016 election, and I remember thinking, foolishly, that if only more people saw it, Trump would be unelectable. If anything, it probably helped his cause.

In advance of WrestleMania VII, held at the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena in 1991, Sports Illustrated produced a feature-length article about McMahon’s transformative effect on professional wrestling. The article began with a long verbatim quotation from the opening of what it called a “famous essay” by the great French critic Roland Barthes. That essay, “The World of Wrestling,” is the first piece in his 1957 collection Mythologies, probably the most widely read of his many books. Here is the quoted opening from Barthes:

The virtue of wrestling is that it is the spectacle of excess. Here we find a grandiloquence which must have been that of ancient theaters … Even hidden in the most squalid Parisian halls, wrestling partakes of the nature of the great solar spectacles, Greek drama and bullfights: In both, a light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.

And this, as Sports Illustrated staff writers put it, “brings us directly to WrestleMania VII. For in the latest of the World Wrestling Federation’s annual editions of mad, mad, mad myths-on-a-mat, we will indeed experience another spectacle of excess.” When the staff writers close their piece with a final tribute to McMahon by way of Barthes’s suggestion that professional wrestling briefly “unveils the form of a justice which is at last intelligible,” they missed or suppressed the irony laced into Barthes’s point about the kind of justice that stands thus revealed.

There is, however, a further connection between Barthes and Vince McMahon that the Sports Illustrated article does not spell out. For one of Barthes’s claims in “The World of Wrestling” was effectively the same one that the McMahons used in their 1989 effort to reduce their tax burden by redefining the WWF as promoting a nonsport. They would later change the name of the WWF to “World Wrestling Entertainment” to reflect this act of redefinition. Back in 1957, Barthes had been forceful in making what was for him a key distinction: “There are people who think that wrestling is an ignoble sport. Wrestling is not a sport, it is a spectacle.” The French critic had, in effect, provided an analysis of what is known in the WWE as “kayfabe,” and he did so long before the term was coined in the 1980s to name the governing convention of an openly shared illusion that makes professional wrestling the kind of show it is.

One of the other inductees into the WWE Hall of Fame along with Trump that evening in 2013 was Trish Stratus, who had played her own part in the Linda McMahon story. Stratus, born Patricia Anne Stratigeas, is a glamorous Canadian wrestler who was enlisted in a series of episodes in the ring with “Mr. McMahon” during her first year with the WWE. Perhaps the most notorious of these episodes took place on May 3, 2001, when, having ostensibly returned to the ring to seek a public apology from Vince McMahon for a prior humiliation (getting dunked in a tub of foul-smelling slop one week earlier), she was further humiliated when he, as the man who paid her salary, ordered her to crawl on all fours, bark like a dog, and then strip off her clothes. Further, the “angle” (WWE talk for storyline) for this episode included the insinuation of an affair between McMahon and Stratus, a suggestion planted two months earlier in an episode involving Linda McMahon herself. “Mr. McMahon,” as he is called by the excited PPV commentators, enters the ring to explain to the crowd that he had recently attempted to divorce his wife. His declaration, however, had given her a nervous breakdown, leaving her in a wheelchair, and him feeling trapped in the marriage. He tells the crowd that he is resentful about this situation, and thirsty for revenge. A seemingly catatonic Linda McMahon is then wheeled out by none other than Trish Stratus, and after some further taunting remarks, McMahon takes Stratus by the hand, leads her out from behind the wheelchair, and begins kissing and groping her in front of his wife.

Linda McMahon later separated from her husband, who would himself have to step down from his role running the WWE due to various scandals. (In the same week the Trump administration suspended interviews for student visas, the husband and former business partner of the woman who interrogated Harvard about hate suffered a legal setback: Vince McMahon’s co-defendant in a lawsuit accusing the couple of sex trafficking settled with the plaintiff in exchange for an agreement to offer evidence against her husband.) Linda McMahon, for her part, eventually found herself back in the national spotlight at last summer’s GOP convention. And then, of course, Trump appointed her his secretary of education. From that lofty post, after decades of orchestrating—and, indeed, participating in—the hate-filled scenarios of the WWE, she took it upon herself to pose the question—as if naively, as if to Harvard—about “why there is so much HATE.”

As a boy of 12 or so, I went to some wrestling matches in Asbury Park, New Jersey. One match involved one of the greats of that era, Antonino Rocca, famous for having invented the flying dropkick. He autographed my program that night, a souvenir I kept for years. Rocca’s tag-team partner was Bruno Sammartino, and these good guys (“faces”) won their match against a couple of bad guys (“heels”), according to the records I have checked. But what might I have understood by that victory? What did the 12-year-old me make of it all? I know that I thought Rocco and Sammartino were on the side of right. I know that I thought the flying dropkick was a thing of beauty. But I also remember a question being raised by the older friend I was with about the legitimacy of the contest’s outcome—something he had heard from one of his even older friends. He was himself uncertain about the question, and so, I believe, was I. When I encountered Barthes’s “The World of Wrestling” some 15 years later in graduate school, I remember thinking that it all made sense, except for the part about the spectators never wondering if the contest was real or fake. We did wonder, but then we put that doubt behind us.

That is how I had recalled my experience of kayfabe in the moment, but these days I wonder more about how far kayfabe extends beyond the professional wrestling match. Was it kayfabe when Vince McMahon had Trish Stratus crawl and bark like a dog and strip off her clothes? Was it kayfabe when he and Trish Stratus made out in front of Linda McMahon in her wheelchair? Was it kayfabe when Linda McMahon asked the president of Harvard, “why is there so much HATE?”

Kayfabe blurs the boundary between the spontaneous and the staged because of the way it governs the rules of a game played on the border between the real and the fake: real and fake enmity, real and fake passion, real and fake violence, real and fake harm. The border is never certain, and it tends to shift as the game is played. When a wrestler named Rikishi sat on Trish Stratus to give her a “stinkface” during her early days in the ring, the move may have been agreed upon in advance but—how can I put this delicately?—the contact was real enough. The episode in which she was humiliated by Vince McMahon was obviously scripted. But, when ordered to do so, Stratus really did crawl on all fours and bark and strip, and she did it for money. Linda McMahon herself may only have been playing the part of a traumatized wife when she was wheeled into the ring, but Vince was actually kissing and groping Stratus before her very eyes.

Linda McMahon sermonizing Harvard about trading in hate, like the Trump-supporting Christians of Project Esther accusing Jews of antisemitism, seems likewise to offer a troubling public spectacle made possible by dint of shared illusion. Indeed, the practice of kayfabe has become something of a distinguishing feature of Trumpian political spectacle more broadly. Proposals to seize Greenland, annex Canada, reopen Alcatraz, investigate Bruce Springsteen and Beyoncé, run for a third term in office, introduce “permanent” tariffs, threaten to end habeas corpus, throw a military parade for one’s birthday—are these moves real or fake, silly distractions or genuine causes for concern? The question is posed on a daily basis in the broadcast, print, and net-based media.

Trump and his people also reinforce kayfabe with reality-defying spin that recodes events after the fact. Thus, when Trump said he would end the war in Ukraine “on day one,” it turns out he was just exaggerating. Back in his first term, when he wholeheartedly assured reporters at a news conference that he could see no reason why Putin would be lying about intelligence reports, he would explain the next day that he intended the opposite of what he said, that he simply misspoke. Or consider what he later labeled the “perfect phone call” he made to Volodymyr Zelensky offering arms for dirt on Hunter Biden, or the “perfect phone call” he made to Georgia’s secretary of state Brad Raffensperger requesting exactly 11,780 votes to reverse the outcome of the election in that state. It has long been recognized that the man who speaks of fake news trades in frauds and falsehoods to a degree unprecedented in the memory of any living American.

Others before me have commented on the Trump administration’s relation to the WWE and to the practices of kayfabe. But the stakes have gone up now that Linda McMahon has become the point person for the Trump administration’s efforts to bring universities into conformity with the agenda of the Heritage Foundation and Christopher Rufo. It is time to return to Roland Barthes. Since the surprising invocation of Barthes in that old Sports Illustrated piece on Vince McMahon, there has not, alas, seemed to be much interest in “The World of Wrestling,” yet two of Barthes’s most salient points help to explain the world of Trumpism. The first has to do with his understanding of the disposition that wrestling cultivates in its spectators: “The public is completely uninterested in knowing whether the contest is rigged or not, and rightly so; it abandons itself to the primary virtue of the spectacle, which is to abolish all motives and all consequences: what matters is not what [the public] thinks but what it sees.”

The light without shadow generates emotion without reserve, and together this produces a spectacle without thought. This is the principle of kayfabe. There can be charges of foul play within the scenario of the wrestling match—just as there are charges of election fraud within the world of Trumpian politics—but these charges do not add up to the settled conclusion that the entire enterprise is trumped-up.

A second point made by Barthes, one that helps to clarify this first one, turns on the relationship in wrestling between payback, rule-breaking, and a primordial idea of justice:

But what wrestling is above all meant to portray is a purely moral concept: that of justice. The idea of “paying” is essential to wrestling, and the crowd’s “Give it to him” means above all else “Make him pay.” This is therefore, needless to say, an immanent justice. The baser the action of the “bastard,” the more delighted the public is by the blow which he justly receives in return. If the villain—who is of course a coward—takes refuge behind the ropes, claiming unfairly to have a right to do so by a brazen mimicry, he is inexorably pursued there and caught, and the crowd is jubilant at seeing the rules broken for the sake of a deserved punishment. […] Naturally, it is the pattern of Justice which matters here, much more than its content: wrestling is above all a quantitative sequence of compensations (an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth).

As in the world of wrestling, the trumped-up spectacle of justice on display in Washington, DC, today is a stage-managed show of retribution and retaliation. In foreign and domestic affairs alike—from trade policy to the legitimacy of the 2020 election outcome—it is all about who has done what to whom, who has to be made to pay for it, and with what level of pain and suffering. And as for going beyond the actual rules governing the situation—the rule of law itself in this case, brazenly, shamelessly—this need not be thought of as a problem so long as the retaliation is successful and the “intelligible” spectacle of retributive justice is maintained.

The most irrelevant rule imaginable both in the MAGA world and that of the WWE would be a prohibition on retaliation as such. Unlike the world of wrestling, of course, the American legal system has rules prohibiting retaliation, though the Trump administration has flouted them in its vindictive attacks on institutions and persons alike. It has now, moreover, gotten a major boost from a recent Supreme Court decision limiting the power of the federal judiciary to restrain executive orders deemed to be illegal or unconstitutional.

Barthes concludes his 1957 essay with a reflection on what happens when the show is over:

When the hero or the villain of the drama, the man who was seen a few minutes earlier possessed by moral rage, magnified into a sort of metaphysical sign, leaves the wrestling hall, impassive, anonymous, carrying a small suitcase and arm-in-arm with his wife, no one can doubt that wrestling holds that power of transmutation which is common to the Spectacle and to Religious Worship.

This power of transmutation extends to our very understanding of how the world works. In the wrestler’s grandiloquent gestures, Barthes suggests, causal relations achieve the timelessness of a mathematical equation: “Each moment in wrestling is therefore like an algebra which instantaneously unveils the relation between a cause and its represented effect.” But what of the effects of this “transmutation” itself? Do they end at the walls of the arena? Do they conclude when the show is over?

The various non-wrestling scenarios I began with—Vince McMahon humiliating Trish Stratus and then his wife Linda, Trump and Vince McMahon’s battle of the billionaires—all represent McMahon’s effort to make good, as it were, on his claim that his enterprise is not a sport but a form of entertainment. What further blurring of boundaries is involved when this expansive redefinition makes it possible for Linda and Vince McMahon to play, as it were, themselves? How far can the magic algebra of cause and effect in Barthes’s “World of Wrestling” be made to stretch? And what about the consequences beyond the even larger spell of the MAGA circus—beyond the thrill of a Trump rally and the spin of Fox News? Might realities start to clarify about who gains from Trump’s tax bill or who suffers from the cuts to programs that benefit veterans and seniors, the rural and urban poor? About who eventually pays for Trump’s politics of retaliation in everyday life?

Barthes! thou shouldst be living at this hour …