TrumpMania: The World's First Kayfabe War
How a cynical scheme by a Putin friendly producer to fake that Trump was a successful businessman led to the rise of clickbait fascism and the world's first made-for-tv war
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“We made him out to be the most important person in the world. It was like making the court jester the king.”—Jonathan Braun, editor, The Apprentice
Before the merger of malignant narcissism and alleged dementia, Trump excelled at marketing. He was a pageant guy, smoke and mirrors was his thing — thumbs up photos with scantily clad women at his beach hotel Mar-a-Lago was his metier. But upon closer examination, in the background you would find light fixtures askew, the kind of crumbling decay producers from “The Apprentice” noted at Trump Tower.
In a 2018 article for the New Yorker, Patrick Radden Keefe wrote:
“The Apprentice portrayed Trump not as a skeezy hustler who huddles with local mobsters but as a plutocrat with impeccable business instincts and unparalleled wealth—a titan who always seemed to be climbing out of helicopters or into limousines. ‘Most of us knew he was a fake,’ (Apprentice editor) Jonathan Braun told me. ‘He had just gone through I don’t know how many bankruptcies. But we made him out to be the most important person in the world. It was like making the court jester the king.’ Bill Pruitt, another producer, recalled, ‘We walked through the offices and saw chipped furniture. We saw a crumbling empire at every turn. Our job was to make it seem otherwise.’”
And they did their job well. They had help from Tony Schwartz, who for a quarter million dollars wrote a book of lies titled Art of the Deal, which people bought and worshipped like a Bible.
They had help from those at the pulpit holding a Bible, preaching that Hillary was the devil and that Trump would make America great again.
I recall TrumpMania sweeping through the land in 2016 — this veteran D-lister and Ponzi schemer, six-time bankrupt, Russian mob bailed-out pageant guy, with a history of sexual assault, was making people I had once respected become total creeps.
It was like he gave them a license to be their worst selves — to be openly racist and greedy — because they’d seen him on TV and read his book of lies.
Schwartz, who calls Trump “the psychopath in chief,” wrote in 2020:
“Even before I agreed to write The Art of the Deal for Donald Trump three decades ago, I sensed his extreme self-absorption and utter lack of conscience. I wrote the book anyway for the money. To do so, I set aside my concerns about the kind of man he was, and more importantly, the kind of man I wanted to be.
“I never imagined that writing a book for a buffoonish real estate developer could eventually help get him elected president of the United States. The fact that it did is a source of shame and regret I will always carry.”
Me too.
Through the fictional character Schwartz created and the fiction created by NBC, Trump, the media creature, was fully formed. He no longer had to pretend to be his own publicist in media calls, he could hire one, like Rubenstein Associates, a Manhattan PR agency which counted Fred and Donald Trump as clients, and where Nancy Haberman — Maggie’s mom — worked as an executive.
I could see through the glitzy facade, because I had interviewed Trump’s victims 20 years ago. One of the pyramid schemes he was involved in for a janky video phone business titled ACN had bled the life savings of people bamboozled by his TV fame. They didn't realize that they were the marks. A decade later, this emperor with no clothes wrapped himself in the American flag, but the vision he pushed was dark and ugly and violent, culminating in Project 2025.
In 2023, I read every page of Project 2025, and wrote:
“Project 2025 is a revenge fantasy and the victim is democracy… It reads like a Soviet-era how-to manual on the total annihilation of the US government and any critics of the regime.”—Heidi Siegmund Cuda, December 16, 2023
The title, ‘A MAGA hat and a Gun,’ was taken from a quote written by Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who noted it was always going to come to that.
I teased my report in Bette, and it eventually received two likes. At the time I posted it, I was under constant death threats, and I had turned off any ability to comment or like my posts.
In that report, I quote Canadian academic Dr. Michael MacKay, our guest for tonight’s Speakeasy, who told Byline Supplement:
“Trump and the MAGA cult intend to end democracy and the American Republic as decisively as Hitler and the Brownshirts finished off democracy and the Weimar Republic.
“Backed by Russian active measures, Trump and his followers attempted a ‘burning of the Reichstag’ moment when they attacked the Capitol in the January 6 2021 insurrection. They were not as successful as Hitler and his followers were on 27 February 1933. But because the seditionists were never punished, anti-democracy and anti-rule-of-law forces have a strong chance of seizing power in the United States again. If that happens, it will be the end of the American Dream. The Spirit of ‘76 will be extinguished.”
That was 2023.
Clearly, we can see now that Trump’s regime is comprised of murderers.
The World’s First Kayfabe War
And what happens when media creatures launch a war? You get the world’s first kayfabe war.
The casualties of the US-Israel war in Iran are real.
But in clickbait fascism, war is run for ratings — the motives are clear to me, because I understand that Trump is Putin’s fixer. Russia — on the brink of economic disaster — is receiving a financial bailout, courtesy of loyal servants to the Russian mob.
And in every stage, Trump behaves like he’s in the ring, following a choreographed kayfabe script. Kayfabe is an old carny term applied to professional wrestling, where staged performances are presented to the audience as authentic. For an example, see this WrestleMania clip from 15 years ago. Trump is sold to the audience not as a six-time bankrupt, Russian mob bailed-out loser, but as a billionaire.
WrestleMania’s then owner, Vince McMahon, trailed by a decades’ long history of sex abuse charges, is the husband of Linda McMahon, his partner in wrestling ventures, who was installed by Trump in 2025 to destroy education as the US Secretary of Education.
As I have written many times before, Trump has treated the presidency like a sitcom — in January of 2017, he told his staff to treat every day like a new episode in a television show where Trump vanquishes perceived enemies.
He doesn’t have an administration — he has a writer’s room, where the world’s biggest losers, like weekend anchor Pete Hegseth, druggy woo freak Robert Kennedy Jr., and punk in drublic Kash Patel, are given mandates to dismantle the departments they lead. They may be clowns, but they’re very dangerous clowns.
“I watched it, literally, like I was watching a television show.”—Donald Trump, on the arrest of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro
Of the war in Iran, Trump asked a reporter: “How do you like the performance?”
Like Putin, he feels nothing for the dead. He doesn’t even pretend to give a shit.
And even in his dementing state, he knows the storyline is getting stale, which is why he now increases the amount of raw meat he throws to his base.
Here’s me as Jesus! Here’s me spewing vulgarities on Easter! Here’s me threatening nuclear annihilation!
Strait of Hormuz! Strait of Hormuz! Strait of Hormuz!
The writers desperately hoped the Strait of Hormuz catchphrase would catch on like Benghazi and Budapest Peace Talks, but alas, Trump’s ratings keep tanking in the much coveted 18 to 49 demo.
The president of ‘peace’ started an illegal war to bailout Putin and to attack Western leaders, and even those who refuse to look at Russia’s role in the American carnage may actually be forced to, as the correlation between the war and the boon for Russia’s economy is obvious — the US now lifting sanctions for Russia helping Putin in his war in Ukraine.
As Dr. MacKay wrote:
“Having led the United States to defeat in the war he started against Iran, Trump is doing his best to delay the defeat of Russia in the war Putin started against Ukraine.”
And the Pope gets it.
On Friday, Pope Leo tweeted:
“When simulation becomes the norm, it weakens the human capacity for discernment. As a result, our social bonds close in upon themselves, forming self-referential circuits that no longer expose us to reality. We thus come to live within bubbles, impermeable to one another. Feeling threatened by anyone who is different, we grow unaccustomed to encounter and dialogue. In this way, polarization, conflict, fear and violence spread. What is at stake is not merely the risk of error, but a transformation in our very relationship with truth.”
… Our very relationship with truth…
Neither Putin nor Trump has a relationship with truth.
They are, after all, psychopaths in chief. Bent media creatures, perpetrators of fakelore.
Reality, as always, is our last best defense.
Stay rooted in it.
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