Trump is the ultimate showman. He’s a master of it, a billionaire Barnum, but with a greed so insatiable it moves him ever further from entertainment into malevolence. If the Democrats had realised this earlier and recognised the strength the man was playing to and the particular voting public weaknesses he was preying upon, instead of sneering with distaste, then maybe we wouldn’t be in this mess.

In fact, if they had done what comedian and satirist Munya Chawawa does in his punchy, passionate and weirdly uplifting documentary Wrestling With Trump, it might be a slightly better world today. Chawawa takes the not-new but certainly underused idea that Trump and his team’s campaigns and style of government use the same playbook as that created by the US pro-wrestling industry’s most famous promoters, World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE). WWE was founded by Vince McMahon and his since-estranged wife, Linda. Vince resigned from various business roles in 2024 in the wake of allegations of sex trafficking and sexual assault (he has vigorously denied these allegations). Linda is now the US secretary of education.

Chawawa has been a fan of wrestling since childhood (we see his box of action figures and the delight on his face as he meets some of his heroes and reminisces with other devotees about the annual WrestleMania competitions held by WWE and other pivotal moments in its history). It makes him a genuinely useful guide to the phenomenon for the likely uninitiated viewer, a convincing explicator of the Trump-wrestlemaniac thesis, and an excellent interviewer of people on both sides of it.

The pages of the playbook most heavily annotated by Trump and his people – if not ripped from it entirely – concern hyperbole, smack talk and kayfabe. The first two are largely self-explanatory and are evident in just about every Trumpian utterance. Everything – including and especially the president himself – is the biggest and the best. Except, of course, if it’s the worst. The world is divided into clear heroes (white Americans) and villains (non-American, non-white Americans), as they are divided into “Babyfaces” (good guys who play by the rules) and “Heels” (who aren’t and don’t) in fights. The rhetoric, whether at a political rally or a wrestling match, is designed to inflame the crowd, rouse the bloodlust, make them commit. Trash talk is catharsis for any number of unspoken frustrations. Perhaps it’s a useful safety valve under the original circumstances. When it leads to the election of a world leader who promises to rid the world of all the people perceived to be the cause of those frustrations – less so.

But it’s kayfabe that is the key to Trump’s success. Kayfabe, in wrestling, is the pretence that everything is real – that the invective is unscripted, that the Heels’ and heroes’ backstories are authentic, that the moves are unchoreographed, and that the bodyslams, hip checks and chokeholds are as dangerous and painful as they look. For as long as the fight lasts, you live the illusion. Nothing is true except what you are told you see.

Even within the world of wrestling, this can have its drawbacks. Chawawa meets one professional wrestler who has for many years fought under the character name “Progressive Liberal” and who has been so relentlessly hated for it that he now looks dead behind the eyes. It is genuinely unsettling.

Take kayfabe and its blurring of the lines between truth and lies out of the wrestling bubble and put it on the political stage, however, and the size and depth of the problems it creates become – have become – terrifying. Chawawa speaks to Maga folk who can call Trump a “blue collar billionaire” without batting an eyelid – a sign of the astonishing power he has to warp the senses, collapse contradictions and reconstruct a reality that suits him better.

Chawawa interviews former Trump campaign adviser Sam Nunberg, who says that they were indeed informed by Trump’s love of the world of wrestling – especially its “combative storylines” – as they prepared his approach. Should politics be entertaining, wonders Chawawa. Yes, says Nunberg with certainty. Is it the best version of politics we’re witnessing now? Nunberg keeps his counsel, though he calls himself “No special pleader for January 6. That was a bad day for America.” Chawawa pushes. Is Trump a Heel now, or a Babyface – who abides by a code of honour. “Trump abides by his own code,” says Nunberg. Expect more slamming of the body politic in the years to come, then. And it’s really, really going to hurt.