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It feels like pro wrestling. Fake pro wrestling. From back in the heyday.
It feels like Hulk Hogan versus the Iron Sheik.
It feels like the same tired formula, a rehash of the same old song-and-dance—a new iteration of the testosterone-fueled, homoerotic-but-also-beloved-by-straight-young-men type of spectacle that made the Secretary of Education and her husband inordinately wealthy.
Even the jargon is straight out of the WWE: Unconditional Surrender. The 12-Day War. Massive Ordnance Penetrator.
It feels like something from the 80s—the go-go decade of Aqua Net and Izod and cocaine, when Trump’s orange star was still ascendant, when he published The Art of the Deal, when he and Ivana were bold-faced names on Page Six, when he hobnobbed with Robert Maxwell, when he hit Studio 54 with Chuck Schumer and Roy Cohn, when the Kremlin started to cultivate him, when he returned from his maiden voyage to Moscow and immediately began bashing NATO.
Everywhere you look, now, you find creatures of the 80s: Linda McMahon in the Cabinet. Hulk Hogan at the RNC. Sly Stallone is an ambassador to Hollywood. Mel Gibson, too. The National Guard, the U.S. Marines, have been sent to the state that elected 80s poster boy Arnold Schwarzenegger governor. Twice.
All that shitty AI, bequeathing flabby Donald the physique of Hulk Hogan, of Rocky Balboa, of Rambo. All the amped-up “U-S-A” memes. The guns, the fist pump. Fight fight fight. The spurt of blood on his ear—an old pro wrestling trick? Trump: the Last Action Hero.
This is not diplomacy. This is not a show of military might. This is Thunderdome. This is Geopolitical WrestleMania. It’s 2025, we should know by now what’s real and what’s fake, but fantasy and reality have blurred together too completely, the special effects are too good, and it’s fun, isn’t it?, it’s fun to have heroes and heels, decisive winners and irredeemable losers, Hulksters and Iron Sheiks.
It’s the 80s all over again.
In 1981, Israel bombed the Osirak nuclear reactor outside of Baghdad. Operation Opera, that was called. Iraq’s nuclear capabilities were destroyed.
In 1981, Israel was selling arms to Iran, helping the Ayatollah in the Supreme Leader’s war against Saddam Hussein. Operation Seashell, that was called.
In 1981, Ronald Reagan became president, he got Tehran to release the American hostages, and his shadowy underlings began covertly, and illegally, selling arms to Iran, to thwart the Soviets.
In 1981, the Talking Heads released “Once in a Lifetime” as a single.
Washington, Moscow, Tel Aviv, Tehran.
Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was.
Tehran, Tel Aviv, Moscow, Washington.
Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was.
In the 80s, Benjamin Netanyahu was the Israeli ambassador to the United States. He was buddies with Mitt Romney, his colleague at the Boston Consulting Group, whom he met after graduating from MIT. He was friends with Fred Trump. He was friends with Charles Kushner. He was a shill, a carnival barker. He was there to sell something.
Later, back in Israel, he became prime minister with help from Arthur Finkelstein, purveyor of the darkest of dark arts. A crook, these days; a criminal, a maniac.
Bibi was on the way out, hundreds of thousands marching in the streets demanding his resignation, and then the Hamas leaders his Likud party abetted returned from Moscow, launched a horrific terrorist attack, and took Israeli hostages—on October 7, which oh-by-the-way is Putin’s birthday. An excuse to unleash pure hell on the Palestinian people. Now Bibi is in power until the war is over, which means the war is never going to end.
The U.S. taxpayer-funded genocide in Gaza is almost complete. It’s a tiny place. There’s only so many hospitals you can bomb, only so many journalists you can kill. Bibi desperately needs a new front. So: Tehran. Israel hits Iran, decapitates its military leadership, destroys its air force and its defense capabilities. Flaccidly Iran strikes back.
With the skies safe over the old Persian Empire, the U.S. Air Force illegally bombs nuclear reactor sites with names out of Tolkien: Isfahan, Natanz, Fordo. The sites had already been evacuated, the nuclear material moved. Trump spent a billion dollars and risked the lives of God knows how many service members to blow up some holes in the ground. In retaliation, Iran hits an empty U.S. military base in Qatar. And now we’re done, there’s CEASEFIRE, there’s PEACE—or so says Trump, who so badly yearns for his Nobel Prize, although no sooner does he announce an end to the hostilities than Iran sends another volley of missiles into Israel.
The Washington piece of this is performative: pure theater. There is no substance to Donald Trump. No grand strategy. It’s all fake, all for show. This is cosplay. These are LARPers—but their actions have horrible real world consequences. People are suffering and dying so they can live out their fantasies, so Trump can rehash his glory days of 40 years ago.
“Glory Days,” another vestige from the 80s.
As a child of the 80s who religiously watched pro wrestling, I can attest: when Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka leapt from the top turnbuckle and landed an elbow with maximum force on some hapless opponent; when “Rowdy” Roddy Piper smacked a defenseless fool with a metal folding chair; when the Iron Sheik deployed his patented Figure-Four Leg-Lock; when Hulk Hogan appeared at the end of a tag-team match, miraculously but inevitably, to pry victory from the jaws of defeat: it was exciting. It made you feel good. It made you feel powerful. Like you yourself were the warrior in the ring. Like their strength was your strength; their triumph, your triumph. This is why pro wrestling was, and remains, so popular. It’s visceral.
It was a similar feeling—vicariously violent, righteously euphoric—to what I experienced one afternoon during this same time period. In April of 1986, I watched on TV, spellbound, as the U.S. military rained 60 tons of munitions on strategic targets in Libya. This was after a terrorist attack at a West Berlin nightclub that had killed two U.S. service members and injured 79 others was found to be the work of a Libyan terrorist cell in East Berlin. Ronald Reagan decided to strike back—and did he ever! We bombed the shit out of targets in Tripoli and, yes, Benghazi. In just 12 action-packed minutes, we wrecked military bases, airfields, barracks, and a residential compound where Muammar Qaddafi lived with his family. That loathsome madman survived, but we killed his mom—or so the rumor was at the time.
If I could somehow articulate the surge of adrenaline coursing through my veins that afternoon, watching all that glorious destruction on my TV set; if I could give voice to how I felt that day, it would be summed up in three words: “America! Fuck yeah!” When I close my eyes, I can still feel it, still summon it. And I’m sure I’m not the only one.
I was 13.
That feeling is what Trump hoped to recapture, I believe, as he sent U.S. service members in harm’s way to cluster-bomb some empty holes in the ground in Iran. He wanted the adrenaline surge, the vicarious burst of triumphant glee, the satiation of the national bloodlust. That’s why he went against the advice of literally every single one of his advisors, including the drunken Defense Secretary who, with his muscles and his tattoos and his hair gel, looks not unlike some lesser pro wrestler from the bygone era (Brett “The Hitman” Hart, maybe?). The birthday military parade was a flop, could not rekindle the feelings. No—to access emotions that reptilian, that primal, he had to blow shit up.
And so he did.
But it didn’t work.
Despite being in his eightieth year of life, Trump remains a pubescent boy. He is forever 13, forever the dorky, paste-eating kid desperately trying to be tough, to be cool, to be liked and admired. (Come to think of it, this arrested development explains his lifelong and perverted attraction to girls of that same age group.) The MAGA faithful may be similarly stunted in growth, but we are not, thank God, a nation of 13-year-old boys.
It didn’t work. The ill-advised bombing campaign elicited no nationwide feelings of “America, Fuck Yeah!”, just another dip in his plummeting approval numbers. His preening and posturing on Truth Social did not make him look tough, just cowardly and dumb and divorced from reality. The carefully curated photos from the Situation Room did not afford him the gravitas he so desperately seeks. All we saw was an old man in a branded red baseball cap with a cake of burnt-siena makeup spackled on his old man’s visage, thumb hooked on his belt like a cosplay cowboy. The look on his face that he thought projected Leadership and Strength was one of utter and abject stupidity.
It didn’t work. The 80s nostalgia play was ineffective. We are sick to the death of that decade: the same tired characters, the same old plots. We bomb empty holes in the ground, they bomb an empty military base, everyone talks tough to save face, and life goes on. How many times can we watch the same movie before we change the channel?
Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was.
It’s the U.S. versus Iran. Hulk Hogan versus the Iron Sheik. Again, and again, and again, like an animated GIF on a loop, forever.
Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was.
In real life, two American pilots died bombing Libya in 1986. In real life, pro wrestlers suffer from arthritis and back problems and chronic traumatic encephalopathy. In real life, Hossein Khosrow Ali Vaziri served as a bodyguard to Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran, before fleeing his native country out of fear of political prosecution, moving to the U.S., and recasting himself as the Iron Sheik. In real life, Terry Bollea is a serial fabulist whose lawsuit against Gawker was underwritten by the sinister billionaire Peter Thiel—more Donald Trump than Hulk Hogan. In real life, actual wrestlers, amateur ones, were abused by a doctor at Ohio State, a serial rapist enabled by Trump’s House ally Jim Jordan.
In real life, Donald Trump is directly responsible for the needless, preventable deaths of half a million people—and the number keeps increasing.
Pro wrestling is fake. But the death Donald brings is real. The destruction is real. The threat to our democracy is real.
And unlike at WrestleMania, there’s no referee to end the match.
Photo credit: Rick Foster. Trump at Wrestlemania 29, 2013.
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