3. A “Broader Dynamic” in American Media
John Cena about to “turn heel” against Cody Rhodes at the behest of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, April 2, 2025 (WWE).
Roland Barthes’s analysis of the world of wrestling as a spectacle without thought did not go so far as to imagine that such a world, through the expanded practice of corporatized kayfabe, could ultimately encompass the public life of an entire nation. In the grotesque and exaggerated gestures of this larger arena, as in Barthes’s more restricted arena from the 1950s, the egregious displaces the normative. Satire, with its deep appreciation of irony and its capacity to make tone a medium of knowingness, has long been recognized as a key resource for dealing with monstrous developments of this kind. But how does satire manage in the face of the prophylactic ambiguities of kayfabe, the attempt to neutralize tone and destabilize irony itself? And what further mayhem follows when, in another twist, a kayfabe style of politics is supported by a crackdown on public media carried out in the name of free speech?
Barthes initially published the essays collected in Mythologies as part of a series of some fifty-three installments in Les Lettres Nouvelles from 1954 to 1956, an attempt to bring what he later called semiology, the analysis of sign systems, to the proliferating forms of postwar mass culture and media. But Barthes is not, alas, living at this hour, and we do not have anyone quite like him to decode the troubling signs of our moment through the medium of the literary essay. Perhaps we never did. In America we have not accorded our public intellectuals the same kind of respect that the French have accorded theirs. Or the same kind of attention: Barthes not only wrote about the young medium of television in his moment, he appeared on it often, with an impressive mix of cool and brio, though television never became his home medium. We have no Roland Barthes in contemporary American, but we do have some brilliant interpreters of contemporary politics and culture who have made the television medium their own.
One of them is Rachel Maddow of MSNBC. Stephen Bannon has gone on record on War Room to the effect that MSNBC offered better news coverage than Fox News, and he singled out Maddow and her colleague Chris Hayes for special praise. Maddow has established her reputation on the basis of not only strong reporting and news analysis but also a capacity to provide longer historical perspectives on contemporary issues. She has written books on Spiro Agnew’s attacks on news media in the 1970s, on American fascism in the 1920s, and on the history of Russia’s dealings in oil and gas that begins with the discovery of “rock oil” in western Pennsylvania in 1859. A December 2025 podcast addressed the scandal of Japanese internments during World War II. One signature of her television reportage, her distinctive mode of decoding political culture, is to start a story off with some seemingly random event from the past and then “connect the dots,” as her MSNBC promotional trailer puts it, to what’s going on in the present. She might, for example, begin her coverage of a new authoritarian move in the MAGA world with a look back at the vast influence of Father Coughlin’s quasi-fascist radio sermons in the 1930s. These longer historical trajectories lend Maddow’s journalism a depth not readily available elsewhere in American mass media.
Bannon has praised Maddow’s work, but he also may well recognize that her deliberate—sometimes too deliberate—style of presentation may not withstand the rage being generated on sites like War Room. As we have seen, Bannon himself describes his operation as programmatically stoking rage and retaliation to enable the resulting “angry voices” to be “weaponized.” If “properly directed,” he cautions, such voices “have latent political power.” (Perhaps an example of an undirected angry voice would be the now largely forgotten Alex Jones, the TV snake-oil salesman who believed that the rage he whipped up on Infowars played a role in Trump’s 2016 election victory; Jones even boasted that Trump called to thank him for his help.) In any case, a MAGA website is not a place for the open exchange of ideas. The liberal traditions of curated knowledge, reflective deliberation, and active sympathy often seem to prove no match for supercharged emotion leveraged for combat. This is one reason universities, founded on these same liberal traditions, are faring so poorly in the current struggle.
“The crisis in America deepens every day in the midst of a public media environment turned warlike and cynical, the stuff of shared illusion. How does one engage a public discourse driven by weaponized anger?”
The crisis in America deepens every day in the midst of a public media environment turned warlike and cynical, the stuff of shared illusion. How does one engage a public discourse driven by weaponized anger? How does one gain rhetorical purchase? The history of rhetoric in the West, going back to crises of political culture in the ancient Athenian and Roman empires, would suggest that part of the answer lies in the realm of satire, which has grown in national importance over the past few years. There is more than one kind of satire in this tradition, but what its various forms have in common is a capacity for dealing with a world out of whack. Satirists have time-honored techniques for coping with bizarre public moments. They do not just unmask those responsible for delusional spectacle; they don their own masks to mock it. They fight dark emotion with levity—light emotion. Against a political community organized around anger, they convene one organized around laughter. Rather than mirroring rage with rage, they turn it into a joke.
Jokes mark the intersection between satire and comedy, but the overlap is only partial. Comedy and tragedy differ not just as laughter differs from tears, but also in their more general emphases, respectively, on community and isolation. Laughter and community both operate in satire as well, but in other ways. The joke in comedy tends to have a generalized field of reference, and “it helps us test or figure out what it means to say ‘us.’” The satirist’s joke, by contrast, is aimed at a specific public situation; it both presupposes an “us” and lends it solidarity. The satirist’s specific form of community, that is, comes together with the force of a mutual recognition that occurs when a well-crafted punch line or well-timed gesture successfully targets an identifiable public situation. Whew! we say to ourselves, I guess I’m not the only one who thought that was really crazy.
To get a joke in any context is not only to know something but also to acknowledge that you know it. In the domain of satire, however, jokes often involve moments of acknowledgment that are conspicuously missing from the environment they lampoon. In “A Modest Proposal,” his famous satire of British attitudes toward Irish Catholics in the early eighteenth century, Jonathan Swift adopted the mask of social engineer, or “projector,” floating a new solution for the Irish population problem. His proposed scheme, published in the guise of a political pamphlet, is to serve up Irish babies for British consumption. The in-joke involves a send-up of the new discipline of “political arithmetic,” which—like its successor discipline, political economy—tended to look to Ireland for its subject matter. Thomas Malthus’s later treatise on population, for example, had Ireland squarely in view.
Swift’s projector is a man so caught up in his numbers as to lose sight of the barbarism they imply:
I do therefore humbly offer it to publick consideration, that of the hundred and twenty thousand children, already computed, twenty thousand may be reserved for breed, whereof only one fourth part to be males; which is more than we allow to sheep, black cattle, or swine, and my reason is, that these children are seldom the fruits of marriage, a circumstance not much regarded by our savages, therefore, one male will be sufficient to serve four females. That the remaining hundred thousand may, at a year old, be offered in sale to the persons of quality and fortune, through the kingdom; always advising the mother to let them suck plentifully in the last month, so as to render them plump, and fat for a good table.
We do not know much about how Swift’s pamphlet was received on its appearance in 1729—whether it is really true, as some have speculated, that there were contemporaries who took its proposal at face value. What can be said with some assurance is that for readers able to see what Swift was doing, the satire was as much an attack on the self-important institution of political arithmetic, in denial about its own implications, as on the colonial barbarism it served. Swift could be tough on other institutions too. There is no more trenchant satire of academics in the language than the one he produced about the academy on the floating island of Laputa in the third book of Gulliver’s Travels (1726), populated with men so absent-minded that they require a personal “flapper” to snap them out of their speculative reveries with a good slap in the face, even as their neglected wives travel to the mainland below for their sexual gratification.
Swift’s own models were classical—he sided with the ancients in the great quarrel between the ancients and the moderns—and this kind of humor at the expense of public institutions has long afforded satire the means to build solidarity out from society’s radical middle. Yet the Trump administration’s tactics pose special challenges for satire in our own moment. In a recent discussion of Trump and kayfabe, the brilliant young (and literally masked) Irish satirist who goes by the name of Blindboy Boatclub makes this point forcefully. “When you think of fascism,” he says, “most of us, we have a clear idea of what fascism is . . . Hitler, Franco, Mussolini,” and “it’s quite humorless”: “it’s ‘solemnity, ... not being serious,’ [but rather] the performance of seriousness.” Solemnity is easily punctured by humor, but the Trump administration is “not using solemnity.”
Case in point: When this administration has people deported to Venezuela, “which is possibly illegal . . . and clearly fascist,” the White House “is posting comedy videos of these people being deported, but with the sound of their chains, and . . . the official account labels it ASMR” (a video designed to calm anxieties). These videos, explains Blindboy, invite us “to engage in a kayfabe and the kayfabe . . . is: ‘this is all a joke.’” The official in charge of this is “not really bad”; he is just “a heel” in a wrestling storyline. Charlie Chaplin was able to puncture the solemnity of the Nazis in The Great Dictator, but in the case of the Trump administration, “you can’t do any Charlie Chaplin on that, because they are making the joke first.” Not only have they created a would-be prophylactic against satire, but they have also attempted to reverse satiric polarities: “they use memes and humor . . . as a way to laugh at anyone who criticizes it.” That doesn’t mean that what they do is itself satire. After the second No Kings marches brought millions into the streets in 2025, Trump posted an AI animated video of himself as a pilot wearing a crown and dumping tons of shit on protesters in New York City. Speaker of the House Michael Johnson tried to defend it as “satire,” but the only thing that Trump’s self-aggrandizing video has in common with Swift’s skillful lampoons is the scatology.
As Swift showed, and as his Irish compatriot Blindboy Boatclub knows, the resources of actual satire to counter such moves are considerable, especially when it comes to the power of irony. Linda McMahon may have posed a kayfabe question about hate to Harvard, but that question is not unanswerable if the right tone can be struck. Though a master of tone and irony, Barthes himself did not identify as a satirist. But at this hour in America, satire, especially television satire, has emerged as a dominant mode for interpreting political culture in a way that answers to the darkness of the moment. There are many talented satirists working these days—including John Oliver, Jimmy Kimmel, Trevor Noah, Wanda Sykes, and Seth Meyers—but Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert in particular have played an outsized cultural role during the rise of MAGA politics.
Like most great satirists before them, including Jonathan Swift, Colbert and Stewart hew to the moral and political center of the spectrum. Three centuries ago, Swift sent up partisanship itself in Gulliver’s Travels with his mockery of Lilliputian factionalism—bitter disputes between the Big-Endians and the Little-Endians—whose fundamental disagreement was over how best to crack open a hard-boiled egg. Even though the egregious Donald Trump has come to preoccupy their ongoing attention, Colbert and Stewart make fun of both political parties from a moral middle ground. Colbert is a devout Catholic and devoted family man who makes no secret of either commitment. Stewart’s own most high-profile activism includes work on behalf of American veterans and a nonpartisan campaign on behalf of responders to the World Trade Center attack whose disability compensation was being delayed by both Republicans and Democrats in Congress. The comic recognitions in which they both trade derive less from, say, attacking a certain political development as right-wing than from simply exposing it as weird, crazy, or hypocritical, or all of the above. This is why so much of their comedy depends on wordless mugging at an outlandish piece of video from the day’s news.
The program that Jon Stewart hosted from 1999 to 2015, The Daily Show, airs on Comedy Central yet humorously introduces itself as “America’s only source for news.” The Daily Show established a new mode for satiric television commentary, a twist on the format of the late-night host’s opening monologue, pioneered decades ago by the likes of Jack Paar and Johnny Carson on the long-running Tonight Show (begun in 1954). Stewart’s innovation was to use his stand-up routine—performed at a desk, sitting down—to comment on video clips from the day’s programming across the networks. After five-day-a-week broadcasts for sixteen years, Stewart left in 2015, thus missing much of the Trump era.
Stewart returned in early 2024 for one evening a week, and, relieved of the burden of nightly broadcasts, his decoding of American political culture has achieved a new level of brilliance. One of his most memorable recent performances came in an extended monologue on March 2, 2025, his first broadcast after Trump’s attempt to humiliate Volodymyr Zelensky in their February 28 meeting in the Oval Office. Stewart began by addressing the question on everyone’s mind about how to make sense of this bizarre episode. Perhaps taking a page from Barthes, he answered it by reference to the world of wrestling, but in a somewhat different vein.
Over a still image of Trump, Vance, and Zelensky in the Oval Office, Stewart addressed the general mystification as follows: “The best way I can explain what happened and show Americans how to process this new reality [is] with another shocking turn of events from this weekend.” His inset screen then switches to ESPN video footage of a recent WWE wrestling event. With Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in the ring looking on, a white man in wrestling trunks approaches a handsome blonde-haired man dressed in fancy street clothes, kicks him in the groin, then throws him to the ground. A woman from ESPN supplies the commentary: “On Saturday night from the elimination chamber, the WWE shocked the world when John Cena turned heel, joined The Rock, and attacked Cody Rhodes.” Jon Stewart chimes in: “Now if that doesn’t immediately explain to you our current geopolitical climate, then you must have grown out of watching wrestling through the normal course of aging.”
Stewart’s mock exegesis involves the specific wrestling angle of the “heel turn,” the technical term for a plot twist in which one of the good guys (“faces”) reverses roles. John Cena, Stewart explains, is indeed the “good guy of professional wrestling, Mr. Hustle, the Champ, the man who stood for everything, truth, justice, the guy who literally holds the record for the most Make-a-Wish Foundation meetings of all time.” This is indeed the literal truth, and the number of wishes he has granted is more than 650. “People would get cancer,” adds Stewart, “just to meet John Cena.” In what Stewart calls his “metaphor,” Cena is America, and although Stewart doesn’t say so, Cena’s gifts to Make-a-Wish might stand for, let’s say, USAID around the world. Cody Rhodes is Stewart’s Zelensky figure.
We are then shown what led to the groin kick. At the start of this episode, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson enters the ring with Cody Rhodes, the reigning champ and also a “face” (good guy). Johnson, who now owns the WWE, announces darkly to Rhodes: “I want your soul.” Rhodes (Zelensky) replies that he has nothing to fear from the bigger and stronger Johnson (Stewart’s Putin figure) because he has the backing of his trustworthy ally John Cena. Cena then enters the ring on cue and embraces Rhodes. But Johnson, standing behind Rhodes, catches Cena’s eye and performs the cutthroat gesture. That’s when Cena kicks Rhodes in the groin and throws him down.
The little allegory, based on a spectacle that had been staged over the same weekend, and broadcast on the Monday night show after the Zelensky meeting, is so elegant, and in its way so neat and tidy, that it almost seems (impossibly) to have been contrived in response to what all Americans saw happen in the White House the day before. It is a mark of the genius of Stewart and his team of writers that they are able to respond so aptly to the outlandish maneuvers of the second Trump administration. Though they don’t say as much, they may have had some help from Fox News, whose headline coverage of the Oval Office meeting on The Five had already, apparently without irony, baked in the wrestling metaphor for their coverage: “Trump’s Zelensky Smackdown.” In any case, what Stewart and his team do every week is all the more impressive given the calculated acceleration of the news cycle—an explicit strategy of the forthright Steve Bannon—that has left so many wise heads spinning.
In concluding his decoding of the Oval Office meeting with Zelensky, Stewart goes on to spell out its implications with a guess about Trump’s motives: “It was a ‘heel turn’ designed to create the alliance that Trump always wanted in the first place,” the one with Putin’s Russia, and ultimately against Europe and its political framework, the European Union. To support the point about Russia, Stewart offers a video sampling of Putin’s comments on neoliberalism, identity politics, sexual orientation policies, and transgender accommodations, commenting that Putin sounds like someone “primarying Marjorie Taylor Green from the right.”
But the other side of the coin, the turn away from Europe, is just as crucial to Stewart’s analysis, and one must, he says, give credit where credit is due: to “MAGA architect Steve Bannon,” who has been “working to take out the EU for some time now.” Stewart then shows Bannon speaking with his trademark candor about matters treated more circumspectly by others: “The beating heart of the globalist empire is in Brussels,” he declares in a video interview with The Guardian. “If I drive the stake through the heart of the vampire, the whole thing will start to dissipate. . . . And that’s literally when we take over the EU.” Part of the brilliance of Stewart’s satiric analysis is meeting Bannon’s MAGA movement on its own terms. There is a certain fit between a kayfabe spectacle of raw, retributive, and often random justice—“emotion without reserve”—and a media platform like Steve Bannon’s War Room. Mobilizing the one to expose the other is characteristic of Stewart’s distinctive satiric art.
Stephen Colbert, who got his start on The Daily Show, has followed Stewart’s innovation in the late-night monologue. On The Colbert Report (“Report,” like “Colbert,” pronounced as if it were French), his first solo show, Colbert presented himself in the persona of a vaguely pompous right-wing TV personality modeled to some extent on Bill O’Reilly, then host of The O’Reilly Factor. (O’Reilly’s program was introduced every night, without irony, with the words: “The Number One show that dominates cable news.”) Colbert’s mockery of O’Reilly as an interview guest on O’Reilly’s own show (November 7, 2007) remains one of the most hilarious episodes in recent American television history. Telling O’Reilly that he was the model for his own career, Colbert, in persona, mixed flattery and zingers until his host was utterly lost: “I wanna bring your message of love and peace to a younger audience . . . [PAUSE] people in their sixties, people in their fifties, people who don’t watch your show.”
After a ten-year run on The Colbert Report, Colbert dropped his right-wing persona and replaced David Letterman on The Late Show in September 2015, just in time to cover the start of the primary season for the 2016 election. By the time Trump emerged from the pack of candidates in the Republican primary a few months later, Colbert had found his go-to subject matter and métier for years to come. No one over the course of this decade has captured Trump’s character with more penetration or lampooned it with more skill. There was evidence that Colbert was getting under Trump’s skin, but Trump continued to oblige him with fresh material—even or especially from 2021 to 2024, when Trump was out of office but much in the news—and Colbert and his writers knew how to turn it into effective satire. The Late Show became the most highly rated show in late-night broadcast television, and 2025 was shaping up to be a particularly good year for Colbert. In March he went to London to do a marathon interview with actor Gary Oldman that aired over four nights to rave reviews. In early July, The Late Show was nominated for an Emmy Award.
On July 17, 2025, not long after the Emmy nomination, Colbert announced that the CBS network was canceling his show, effective May 2026. CBS cited financial reasons, but the timing of this announcement raised questions. The decision came a week or so after CBS’s parent company, Paramount, had decided to settle a suit brought against it by the Trump administration. Many legal observers thought the suit frivolous. And it was brought in the midst of an $8 billion deal, subject to approval by Trump’s FCC, in which Paramount Global was acquired by Skydance Media. In his first monologue back from vacation, Colbert called the settlement a “big fat bribe.” Two days later came the announcement of the show’s termination. The following week Paramount announced that the sale to Skydance Media had gone through. Paramount Global, as it happens, also owns Comedy Central, The Daily Show’s network, and Stewart had already expressed fears for his own future even prior to the decision to terminate Colbert’s show.
“Trump has been threatening networks’ licenses since his first term in office. But the very threat of such revocation is itself a form of control—an exercise of coercion not in keeping with the “rules” supported by the principle of press freedom in the First Amendment.”
Were the reasons for Colbert’s termination financial? No one doubts that broadcast television is in decline, late-night programming in particular. Yet when Trump-appointed FCC Chairman Brendan Carr was asked directly by a Fox News anchorman whether Trump had “anything to do with the cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s show,” Carr (as the Fox anchorman himself later pointed out) dodged the softball question by delivering a rather self-incriminating overview:
What’s important to keep in mind is a broader dynamic. When President Trump ran for reelection, he ran right at these legacy broadcast media outfits and the New York and Hollywood elites that are behind it, and he smashed the façade that these are gatekeepers that can control what Americans can think and what Americans can say. . . . There’s a lot of consequences that are flowing from President Trump deciding, “I’m not going to play by the rules of politicians in the past, and let these legacy outfits dictate the narratives and the terms of the debate.” And he’s succeeding. . . . NPR has been defunded, PBS has been defunded, Colbert is getting canceled.
Just days later, Trump himself weighed in. After crowing over Colbert’s cancellation at CBS, Trump targeted both NBC and ABC: “Networks aren’t allowed to be political pawns for the Democrat Party. It has become so outrageous that, in my opinion, their licenses could, and should, be revoked! MAGA.”
One might speculate that this was just an idle threat—kayfabe. After all, Trump has been threatening networks’ licenses since his first term in office. But the very threat of such revocation is itself a form of control—an exercise of coercion not in keeping with the “rules” supported by the principle of press freedom in the First Amendment. This is the key to understanding what Carr calls the “broader dynamic” in American media. Here, as usual, Trumpian rhetoric has turned the world upside down, suggesting that the legacy networks must, in the name of freedom, be checked by government coercion. Hence the pivotal importance of Carr’s specific charge that the networks assume they can “control what Americans think and say.” This “façade” must be smashed in the name of freedom, even if it means exercising government control over the press in violation of that most venerable of American rights.
Under this regime, laws and norms protecting press freedom can just, with a wave of the hand, be dismissed by the chairman of the FCC as “the rules of politicians in the past.” Less than two months after Trump and Carr threatened the three major broadcast networks, a second one, ABC, “indefinitely preempted” another late-night host, Jimmy Kimmel. Kimmel’s offending monologue came in the wake of the fatal shooting on September 10, 2025, of right-wing political activist Charlie Kirk on a university campus in Utah. The ostensible reason for the cancellation was a comment not about Kirk’s murder, which Kimmel had addressed respectfully, but about its politicization by a “MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.” Kimmel explicitly criticized those who celebrated Kirk’s death, but he also added a comment about Trump’s strange response when asked how he was doing after the shooting of his friend and supporter: “I think very good. And, by the way, right there you see all the trucks. They just started construction of the new ballroom for the White House, which is something they’ve been trying to get, as you know, for about 150 years. And it’s going to be a beauty.”
Kimmel then commented: “Yes, he’s at the fourth stage of grief: construction. . . . This is not how an adult grieves the murder of someone he called a friend. This is how a four-year-old mourns a goldfish.” This follow-up probably offended the White House more than the comment about the MAGA spin on Kirk’s assassin. As things fell out, the Walt Disney Corporation, which owns ABC, faced such consumer backlash that they reinstated Kimmel a week later. Together with Harvard’s continuing resistance to Trump’s takeover efforts at about the same time, ABC’s reversal sounded a note of hope that things might soon begin to turn around.
Questions of knowledge, information, and free speech link these attacks on the institutions of American media and the ongoing assault on higher learning. I have only half playfully turned to the world of wrestling, both the spectacle of kayfabe and the metaphor of the heel turn, for a pair of lenses to bring into focus the kind of decision making that underlies this campaign. Another such lens, however, is implicit in Trump’s own metaphor of the networks as pawns for the Democrats. To understand how that one works means turning to a second commentary by Jon Stewart on Trump’s Oval Office meeting with Zelensky.
