Traveling makes you think

We took a road trip to Monticello. My grandson bought an oversized nickel as a memento. The preservationists who maintain Thomas Jefferson’s lifelong rehab project posted a sign on the way up the mount to remind us we were entering a “sacred” space. Jefferson’s star-studded, science-driven plantation is an altar for the religion of America.

The mansion overlooks Charlottesville. That’s the city lately famous for a torch parade, the white supremacist march on August 11, 2017. Hundreds of white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and alt-right activists stormed through the University of Virginia campus. They chanted antisemitic and racist slogans as they marched around Jefferson’s statue. The spectacle served as a prelude to the violent “Unite the Right” rally the following day.

Not long after we left Charlottesville, we approached Lynchburg, VA, home of Jerry Falwell Airport and Liberty University, where the Moral Majority was born in the 80’s — that movement mobilized millions of politicized Evangelicals to combat what it viewed as the moral decline of the United States, championing traditional family values and heavily influencing postmodern American politics. (Falwell Jr., above, played the champion when dad died, but missed the morality). On the way there, I shouted as we turned a corner, “Look at that Confederate flag!” It was huge. Someone bought a gigantic flagpole and some company made an enormous flag to threaten me. The Christian radio station nearby had just aired a serious news story featuring Mike Johnson saying the Congress needed to pass the SAVE Act and he intended to attach it to a budget reconciliation bill soon.

The Thomas Jefferson impersonator at the Monticello Theater, had pointed out that in 1824 only 6% of the population was eligible to vote (white male landowners) and only 3% voted. Trump is now trying to get voting back to white people, at least. I think he can find many supporters in western Virginia.

Monticello took some Kayfabe

Yes, traveling makes you think. I started connecting dots, like Jefferson and UFC.

Trump’s birthday fight on the White House lawn was a lesson in performative domination with the goal of ginning up support for his white-centered dictatorship [see Stephen Miller last week]. I learned a new word when I was wondering what he was trying to do by tearing up the White House grounds for a mixed martial arts arena. A.I. took the spectacle seriously, and even called it “historic” when I looked it up:

UFC Freedom 250, a historic mixed martial arts event held on the South Lawn of the White House on June 14, 2026. The unprecedented spectacle celebrated both the United States’ 250th anniversary and President Donald Trump’s birthday, and drew national headlines as a major, high-stakes sporting event.

A.I. sounds like a publicist for UFC. The Ultimate Fighting Championship is an American MMA promotion company based in the Las Vegas metro. It is owned and operated by TKO Group Holdings, a “premium sports” and entertainment company formed in 2023 by the merger of the UFC and WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment). WWE is a majority-owned subsidiary of The WME Group (William Morris Endeavor), the world’s longest-running talent agency. Ponder that.

Swallowing Jefferson’s Frenchified Monticello as a sacred space, was a bit like rolling over for what WWE/Trump does, and maybe it’s like what most Evangelical church members are doing most of the time. They all take some “kayfabe.” [Check out this scholarly article].

Kayfabe is the tacit agreement/code professional wrestlers keep as they present staged matches, scripted rivalries, and predetermined characters as completely genuine even though they are fake. The term originating as secret carny slang to keep audiences in the dark, as in “Keep the kayfabe.” Postmodern kayfabe is used to maintain emotional immersion in the fiction rather than strict deception. Maybe you know all about this.

Like I noted, in the era of social media, kayfabe has evolved. Rather than attempting to fool the audience, postmodern kayfabe functions as a type of psychological storytelling where fans are in on the secret but willingly suspend their disbelief to enjoy the narrative. The term has also bled into mainstream culture, often used to describe performative political theater or calculated, winking online behavior.

At Monticello we were asked to play our part in the same story Jefferson enacting when he lived there. He is the Declaration of Independence writer who owns slaves. We overlook the slaves, even though we know they exist, in order to keep his shrine in Washington D.C. making sense. He is the UVA founder where a white supremacist mob rolled over people protesting the domination he enjoyed and employed. We overlook how he managed the white supremacist Constitution so he always looks enlightened.

Jefferson was not as expert or as self-conscious as Trump and his followers are when it came to kayfabe, of course. I never knew how much Trump was practicing it until I wondered about that bizarre UFC fight. I may be the last person in the country who finds such a thing odd.

It is not just politics, it is the church

The term has increasingly crossed over into mainstream culture. In everyday contexts, “kayfabe” is used to describe a tacit agreement to pretend that something is real, sincere, or competitive when it is actually performative—often used to describe political theater, marketing, or corporate posturing

Trump’s first election was straight out of the pro wrestling playbook. Voters knew it was fake, but they loved it. [See this article from The Guardian]. They knew he was playing a character (he kept talking about himself in the 3rd person!) and they knew who they were in the story. Here is a representative fan homage:

WWE is a hybrid form of sport, street fight, ballet, spectacle, and soap opera that defies easy categorization. Trump is in the WWE Hall of Fame.  His WWE pedigree influenced his political campaigning style. It developed his boisterous, over-the-top character. The way he argues, insults and makes crass remarks all make perfect sense in the context of Trump the WWE entertainer. Trump’s pro-wrestling role is a celebrity who is a “no bullshit” straight talker who gets things done better than anyone else

Naomi Klein (2017) claimed that pro-wrestling is “invisible as a cultural force to most liberal voters.” I am one of them. My ignorance might go back to my father, who would not allow pro wrestling from KTLA, Channel 5, on his TV because it was all fake — which we doubted. We could, however, watch roller derby because we all knew that was staged. Now I am supposed to play along and help enact simulated emotions to produce alternative realities as if life were WWE. It’s a leap.

I can’t really do kayfabe. It is intrinsically unChristian, of course, but I also didn’t encounter it early enough, I think. I didn’t even play Dungeons and Dragons (D&D). Kayfabe now describes a form of audience engagement that involves, in the first instance, a willing suspension of disbelief within which performers, promoters and the audience, ALL “keep kayfabe.” For the latter, keeping kayfabe involves the active choice to participate in “performance conventions” such as cheering the “face” and booing the “heel.”  In doing so, fans do not simply pretend to be fooled by the “game;” rather, in the new kayfabe, everyone is invested and involved in the playing of the game itself — Magic: The Gathering (MTG) with flying folding chairs, perhaps.

To refer to the “real” of wrestling today is to refer to backstage politics, writers’ rooms, booking decisions, and corporate judgments about who has star potential, who is popular in the locker room, or who is unpopular with management. It is a kind of real that, strangely, even contradictorily, embraces the fake. When it leaks into everyday life,  newscasters always talk about the strategies of politicians and who is winning the latest contest rather than informing the listeners about the substance and consequences of what is going on.

Politics and church have largely followed suit

To enjoy WWE, fans must not only be aware of the inner workings of the business (the off-camera, backstage processes) but also able to construct hypotheses about them when they lack knowledge. The whole thing has become an active, collaborative relationship, a co-production in which fans both create and sustain kayfabe while simultaneously dissecting it, parsing the elements that construct the performance with a discerning eye on how well performers “follow the rules of the performance practice and play their role” and “read through the fiction to glean hidden truths.” If this sounds to you like conspiracy theories being monetized, you might be right.

Part of the fan’s participation becomes “a game of prediction and interpretation to which they apply their understanding of wrestling techniques, character histories, performers and WWE as a company.” For instance: Why did the bookers decide upon that outcome? Does the fact that the wrestler is “selling” the leg (acting as if it is injured) mean the match “finish” will involve that limb? Did an aggressive “promo” signal a “heel turn” by a “face?”  It seems like anything can be “gamified” these days  to increase fan devotion and profit.

So it was not surprising that at his post-2016-election thank-you rallies, Trump was able to level with his voters about the manipulative nature of his campaign tactics. When he referred to the redundant “Lock her up!” chants at his events, Trump now laughed with his supporters, telling them, “You people were vicious, violent, screaming, ‘Where’s the wall? We want the wall!’ Screaming ‘Prison! Prison! Lock her up!’ I mean you are going crazy!” The chants, he told them, contemplatively, “plays great before the election. Now we don’t care.” Far from his revelations undermining their enthusiasm for his Presidency, Trump’s supporters laughed along – after all, only marks truly believed all that stuff even if, while self-conceived smarts, they too chanted along.

That last point is the key to understanding Trump’s appeal. The country (and the church) may be more WWE, UFC, gamified, prediction addicted, and back-room cynical than you think.  Politics happens like pro-wrestling — the chance that Mitch McConnell is actually dead is more interesting than his actions as a Senator or the future of the democracy. In WWE the smarts differentiate themselves from the imagined marks (the people who actually believe WWE is a contest). Nevertheless, the “smarts” retain the “overt knowledge that the core wrestling narrative relies, to a significant degree, on their successful performance as dupes not in on the con” – that is, the capacity to suspend disbelief is predicated upon the collected audience playing the part of a “true believer” sports spectator. To retain its “dramatic appeal” pro-wrestling requires smarts to perform as marks when attending events. Just like Marco Rubio (and Lindsay Graham, RIP) act like they are taking Trump seriously, a successful WWE event or Trump rally requires its attendees cheer and chant, performing their role as supporters-who-believe in their own exposition of smart fandom.

The evangelical church has always been a step away from such carnival, since the carnival works better than actual faith to draw a crowd and fill the plates. One of the reasons it is hard to make a Christian in the U.S. is the thin line between willingness to disbelieve and actual faith. The atmosphere is filled with Christians who picked up Trump just like they  picked up Jesus. They were in it for the feels and vicarious sense of power, not the truth.

When Kelly Conway blithely talked about alternative facts, it was exposing kayfabe. When Paula White compares Trumps “sufferings” to that of Jesus, it is performing kafaybe. She actually stated, “No one has paid the price like you have,” likening his experiences to being “betrayed, and arrested, and falsely accused.” Furthermore, she has publicly declared that “to say no to President Trump would be saying no to God”

People on my feed shake their heads and say “Trump lives in his own world.” True. When he talks about Trump in the third person, he is talking about his persona, his WWE Hall of Fame persona. What he does as the real Trump may be lost on him at this point, I don’t know. But “his own world” is shared by millions who live in “their own world” with him. They are perfecting the unreality which accompanies the world we all share.

As we came home over the Walt Whitman Bridge, we snapped a picture of our smoke-dimmed home town. Canadian fires are climate-change induced —  some facts are difficult to undermine. As the smoke started rolling in last week, the president got on TV to repeat his lie about the 2020 election. He said that China had meddled because it obtained voter registration info that anyone with enough money can purchase legally. He did not hit anyone over the head with a chair, which probably would have garnered even more attention, but he did implicitly call on us to “keep the kayfabe” with him as the world burned.

The super-analog Proverbs in the Bible includes this one: Truthful lips endure forever, but a lying tongue is but for a moment (12:19).