Kayfabe, Trolling, Satire, and Cynicism

James Chandler draws, as he writes, on his “training as a critic to engage situations marked by ironies so dark that satire itself seems at once indispensable and impossible.” Pursuing this insight, his pamphlet brilliantly probes some essential, and still perplexing, features of MAGA politics. What purchase can satire have when its object — though notoriously thin-skinned and capable of brutal retaliation against his critics — also so often seems impervious to ridicule and inclined to something like self-parody? Compared with the cruelty and wanton destructiveness of Trump and his administration at home and abroad, their seeming immunity to satire and irony can feel an inconsequential or frivolous concern. It is, though, so bound up with their communication strategies and their corrosive effect on public debate that it is worth dwelling on in the ways Chandler invites us to do.

Chandler acutely reads Linda McMahon, and the kayfabe that lies at the core of her pro-wrestling world, as one key to Trumpian politics. Kayfabe, like bullshit in Harry Frankfurt’s sense — and unlike more standard forms of lying — confounds or obliterates the distinction between real and fake, true and false. Fans know kayfabe is fake but emotionally engage as if it’s real. It can also be both staged and real at once, as Chandler points out (Vince McMahon really is groping another woman while his wife looks on, even if the scene is scripted). This kind of spectacle disarms judgment or suggests there’s no point in trying to exercise it. The media could hardly ignore the shock of Melania’s wearing a jacket reading “I really don’t care. Do U?” on a 2018 visit to a detention center for migrant children separated from their parents. Still, not only did it prove unproductive to speculate about her intended message, but such efforts just seemed to play into the administration’s tactic of distracting by generating confusion and futile outrage.

Fact-checking Trump’s fabrications has felt, like satire, at once imperative and beside the point. It is impossible to keep up with the volume of lies. The corrections have no uptake with a significant portion of their intended audience (how often are we told that Trump’s base takes him seriously but not literally?). And the act of checking treats misinformation as if it were part of a shared practice of assertion and counterargument, while the Trump administration hardly pretends to be playing that game. The meticulous fact-checking by institutions like the New York Times that was prominent early in Trump’s second term (Linda Qiu’s beat) is no longer so consistent or conspicuous, as though they have either given up or decided not to give patently bogus claims too conspicuous a platform.

Chandler writes of the “deeply cynical worldview” of Trump and the McMahons. What characterizes that cynicism, and what makes it impervious to satire? A key point of satire or irony is to cultivate a community of critique, a fellowship among those who share in the rejection of what is being satirized. Satire offers a collective reality check. It also implies a dupe, someone who through arrogance or obtuseness fails to get the joke. Trump’s extravagant, preposterous ignorance (musing about injecting bleach to kill the Covid virus, bragging about how he “aced” the cognitive test that has you identify the bear in a series of four line drawings) is both an irresistible target for ridicule and a deflater of it. How can he be the butt of someone else’s irony when he has already made himself so absurd? Trump’s aesthetic, his bodily comportment, his marathon stream-of-consciousness tirades, come so close to self-mockery that caricature and ridicule are defused.

Some, even those who detest the Trump regime, might argue that Trump has some capacity for irony, that AI photos and videos he posts and recirculates — of himself as pope, or playing all the instruments in a mock video of a Journey song — means that he appreciates a parody and is able to cultivate a kind of ironic distance from his own image. But the fact that he so relentlessly undermines any grounds for judgment means, I think, that he doesn’t have a place from which to ironize. Is the gold-leaf statue of himself recently installed at one of his golf courses evidence of ironic distance or not? He spews such a barrage of that kind of thing (occasionally retracting or pretending he meant something different when it upsets the wrong people) that it is impossible to know and feels pointless to ask. Trump has committed himself and his supporters to the breaching of anything that looks like a constraint, since if he ever acknowledges the pertinence of any limits, including basic standards of taste or consistency, he will be admitting the validity of judgment of all his prior violations.

We might, then, ask whether Chandler’s notion of “situations marked by [dark] ironies” is adequate to the trolling, the provocations, and the bullshit inflicted on us by Trumpism. Situational irony — events characterized by a reversal of what is expected or intended (say, a fire station burning down) — may not be quite the right concept to capture what’s going on in the instances Chandler calls ironic. His examples include Trump’s using the guise of a campaign against antisemitism to control universities, his making Linda McMahon Secretary of Education, and Bannon and Trump’s peddling of the very anti-immigrant slander that their own Irish and German ancestors would have met with from the original Know-Nothings. But it is not ironic that Linda McMahon is the Education Secretary: it’s trolling masquerading as a political appointment, a middle finger to the very idea of professional qualifications or expertise. It is not an irony that Trump, who has long flirted with antisemitic figures like Alex Fuentes and the “great replacement” conspiracists who rallied in Charlottesville, has used accusations of antisemitism in his assault on universities’ science funding. It is a cynical power play and an attempt to muddy and disarm moral or political judgment. The same goes for the anti-immigrant vitriol from these descendants of immigrants. To see this as an irony is, I would suggest, to presuppose ethical and logical standards of consistency that, essential as they are to a decent society, it is the Trumpian m.o. to trample.