Political Cage Matches

Will the kayfabe of political theater ever be too much, or will all the true believers take over?

In the wake of the assassination of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk last week, many takes landed on the same theme:

“He played a character. The real man was polite and earnest with the young people in Turning Point. The character spread hate and poison, but there was a human behind it.”

It echoed 2021, after January 6th, when Fox News texts revealed that on-air stars knew the Big Lie was false—even as they begged Trump to stop the insurrection privately. They had played characters for their audiences, and people got hurt.

On the Ezra Klein Show, Jon Stewart explained it perfectly when reflecting on his 2004 appearance on CNN’s Crossfire:

“So, what I was complaining about on ‘Crossfire’ was kayfabe — this idea that this is just theater and everybody’s playing a character and nobody’s a blah, blah, blah. But the other way to describe it for them is, there’s an establishment, and then there’s the anti-establishment — the disrupters and the rebels. Tucker Carlson was establishment, and he tried to be a face. He was a heel. Like, Fox News, Megyn Kelly, same thing.”

For decades, political media has been a performance. Faces and heels. Heroes and villains. Theatrics designed to rile up audiences while insiders wink and break bread behind the curtain. But the longer this goes on, the harder it gets to tell the difference between performance and belief—and the more it fuels real violence.

Kayfabe: The Ultimate Commitment to the Bit

Let's start with what Kayfabe is and what it does.

“Kayfabe” comes from pro wrestling, where staged rivalries and personas are presented as real. It’s carny-speak for “stay fake.” Wrestlers don’t admit the script, even outside the ring, because the suspension of disbelief is the point.

There are two main factions of characters in kayfabe: faces (the heroes, or “babyfaces”) and heels (the villains). Faces are designed to win fan support through humility, patriotism, and determination. Heels embody narcissism, rage, and cruelty—foils for the audience to boo. Classic matches leaned on real-world anxieties to heighten drama, like Hulk Hogan, the “Real American,” taking on the Iron Sheik, a caricature of Middle Eastern “villainy” during the rise of Saddam Hussein and Ayatollah Khomeini.

But kayfabe isn’t just written by management—it’s co-written by the crowd. Audience reaction can literally flip the script. Fans rejected a young Rocky Maivia as a bland babyface, but when he turned heel and embraced arrogance, he became “The Rock,” one of the most beloved stars in history. The feedback loop between audience and performers made wrestling feel interactive, a communal suspension of disbelief.

The only time kayfabe was allowed to break was in moments of tribute (for a fallen wrestler) or when a serious in-ring injury forced reality to intrude. Otherwise, the act was airtight. The world outside the ropes was just as scripted as the matches inside them.

That’s why the concept maps so neatly onto politics. Politicians, like wrestlers, play roles—faces and heels—crafted for their audiences. And, just like wrestling fans, political “audiences” shape the script by rewarding certain behaviors with cheers, boos, donations, or votes. The act doesn’t work without their buy-in.

From the Ring to the Hill

Former wrestler–turned–Minnesota Governor Jesse “The Body” Ventura often compared Congress to the ring:

“Politics in America today is identical to pro wrestling. In front of the cameras, we all hate each other. Now I’m gonna kick my opponent’s butt, I’m gonna wail him from here to high water. Yet behind the scenes, we’re all friends going out to dinner.”

You can see the same dynamic in long-tenured senators who spar viciously on the floor, then joke together at fundraisers. In 2017, Kamala Harris and Ted Cruz had a friendly wager over the Dodgers and Astros. Seven years later, Cruz declared Harris the “embodiment of the radical left” and blamed her for border “chaos.”

So which was real—the camaraderie or the condemnation? The answer, of course, is both. It’s kayfabe.

Sometimes politicians even parody it themselves. Senators Cory Booker and Orrin Hatch once joked on Parks and Recreation that after hours they were in a Polynesian folk band.

The King of the Ring

No one embodies political kayfabe more than Donald Trump. As Abraham Josephine Riesman argues in Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America, Trump modeled his swaggering, macho persona on his friend Vince McMahon, the WWE mogul.

Trump’s rallies mimic wrestling events—walk-up music, dramatic set design, speeches full of riffs and call-and-response chants. His supporters cheer like fans in an arena, responding to cues. Even the assassination attempt in Butler became theater: Trump raising his fist and shouting “Fight!” like a wrestler refusing to break character.

Every issue becomes faces vs. heels. Trump the hero, Democrats the villains. Childish framing, maybe, but effective. By reducing politics to morality play, he convinces supporters that compromise is betrayal and opponents are enemies of the people.

That’s why his audience loves him. They already believe politics is fake. Trump leans into it, branding himself the only authentic character in a world of liars. That opens the door to conspiracy theories—the Big Lie, QAnon—because they fit perfectly into kayfabe’s universe of good vs. evil.

Is this the Real Life or is this just Fantasy?

Fox News perfected political kayfabe after the Fairness Doctrine ended. Its lawyers even admitted in court that Tucker Carlson wasn’t delivering facts but “non-literal commentary.” Yet the network presents it all with the tone of hard news, blurring entertainment and journalism.

Carlson himself illustrates the point. He once bantered with Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, later railed against her nightly, and even in 2025 still goes fly-fishing with her. On-air enemies, off-air friends. Kayfabe.

But the mask slips when private texts leak.

• On January 4, 2021, Tucker Carlson wrote:
  “We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can’t wait. I hate him passionately. … I can’t handle much more of this.”
  Yet on-air, he defended Trump and platformed his lies, even bringing him back for interviews in 2024.
  
  

• Sean Hannity said on his broadcast after January 6th:
  “Our election, frankly, was a train wreck. Eighty-three percent of Republicans, and millions of others, do not have faith in these results. You can’t just snap your finger and hope that goes away.”
  But earlier that day, he texted Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows:
  “Can he make a statement? Ask people to leave the Capitol.”
  
  

• Laura Ingraham told her viewers that same night:
  “Earlier today the Capitol was under siege by people antithetical to the MAGA movement. They were likely not all Trump supporters—some reports say antifa sympathizers were sprinkled throughout the crowd.”
  Yet her text to Meadows admitted:
  “Hey Mark, the president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home. This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy.”
  
  

• Brian Kilmeade, who pushed theories that January 6th was a false flag, wrote Meadows that afternoon:
  “Please, get him on TV. Destroying everything you have accomplished.”

• Even Trump’s own son, Don Jr.—whose online persona thrives on vitriol and violent memes—texted Meadows in the middle of the chaos: “We need an Oval address. He has to lead now. It has gone too far and gotten out of hand. He needs to condemn this shit asap.”

This is the heart of political kayfabe: in private, they acknowledge reality, but in public they never break character. The audience, however, only sees the performance. And when the performance is anger, grievance, and conspiracy, the fallout in the real world is unavoidable.

Stop the Madness

The world of infotainment and kayfabe politics hasn’t just blurred the lines between performance and reality — it’s lit a match in a room full of gasoline. What used to be theater for ratings now inspires real-world violence, and the consequences are piling up.

The infamous “Pizzagate” conspiracy is one of the clearest examples. After months of QAnon propaganda, a 28-year-old man from North Carolina drove to Comet Ping Pong in Washington, D.C. with an AR-15, determined to “save the children” from a fictitious pedophile ring supposedly run by Hillary Clinton and other Democrats. He fired shots inside the restaurant, only to discover there wasn’t even a basement, let alone the underground tunnels of satanic fantasy that had been spun online.

But Pizzagate was just a prelude to something larger. The “Big Lie” of the 2020 election metastasized into the January 6th insurrection. Fueled nightly by Fox News kayfabe and amplified by Trump himself, thousands descended on the Capitol. Members of Congress like Barry Loudermilk even gave rioters reconnaissance-style tours the day before. On January 6th, the mob stormed the halls of Congress, explicitly hunting for Nancy Pelosi and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — two of the Right’s most vilified “heels” — with chants of kidnapping and violence.

The culture of demonization has also spilled over into personal attacks. After years of being cast as a villain by right-wing media, a man broke into Speaker Pelosi’s home in San Francisco and brutally assaulted her husband, Paul Pelosi, with a hammer. He later admitted he had been looking for Nancy to “break her kneecaps” so she’d have to be wheeled into Congress as a warning to others.

Even when the violence targets their own side, the kayfabe doesn’t stop. At his rally in Butler, PA, Donald Trump narrowly survived an assassination attempt in 2024, taking a bullet graze to the ear. And yet — even in that moment — he raised his fist and yelled “fight,” never breaking character, leaning deeper into the performance of indestructibility.

The violence has not been contained to Washington. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and his family were targeted in a plot where an armed man tried to assassinate him while torching the Governor’s Mansion in Harrisburg.

And in Minnesota, House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, were assassinated in their own home—a targeted killing authorities have explicitly called political violence. The same gunman shot Senator John Hoffman and his wife in their home that same night but they miraculously survived. The gunman’s manifesto was later discovered with a list of dozens of other political figures going as far away as Nebraska.

And most recently, Charlie Kirk was assassinated during a Turning Point USA event at Utah Valley University — gunned down in the middle of a debate where, in grim irony, he had been painting trans people as mass shooters.

Each of these tragedies exposes the danger of politics conducted as wrestling theater. The rhetoric isn’t just bluster. When you tell your followers that opponents are “traitors,” “pedophiles,” or “Satanic cabal members,” some will believe it literally — and act accordingly.

So this begs the question: have the lines of fact and fiction been blurred for too long? Do we no longer just have people “playing characters” in our government anymore but genuine true believers?

You regularly see members of Congress like Marjorie Taylor Greene who seems to truly believe the ridiculous stories she sells—about Jewish space lasers or Democrats belonging to a satanic cabal. You see Nancy Mace, once billed as a moderate, turning herself into a walking Fox News chyron, staging photos outside bathrooms to “hold the line” against the supposed invasion of trans legislators. And you see Speaker Mike Johnson confidently declare that the only reason Donald Trump would be in the Epstein Files was because he was an FBI informant working to take Epstein down—a claim so absurd that even Trump’s own press secretary had to refute it.

Long-tenured members of Congress have facilitated this culture, either out of political expediency or fear of retribution from the granddaddy of them all, Donald Trump. But the true believers are pushing them out, as seen in the ousting of former Speaker Kevin McCarthy after a revolt by the MAGA wing of his caucus.

Whether or not they truly believe what they’re saying, the rhetoric they engage in is the same as Trump’s wrestling-esque persona: over-the-top, dramatic, and often violent. And that has real-world, dire consequences.

The more we continue this culture of vitriolic rhetoric in politics, the more likely violent outcomes will result.

These aren’t “storylines.” They’re blood and bodies.

And the crowd reacts accordingly.

Jon Stewart described it best:

“The image of Americans reflected back to us by our political and media process is false. It is us through a fun-house mirror… So why would we work together? Why would you reach across the aisle to a pumpkin-assed forehead eyeball monster? If the picture of us were accurate, of course our inability to solve problems would actually be quite sane and reasonable. Why would you work with Marxists, actively subverting our Constitution? Or racists and homophobes who see no one’s humanity but their own?”

That’s kayfabe. A distorted mirror. And when people mistake it for reality, they storm the ring.

TL;DR

American politics has become kayfabe — a scripted performance like professional wrestling where politicians and media figures play characters (heroes and villains) to keep audiences hooked. This theatrical style, perfected by Donald Trump and echoed by right-wing media, blurs fact and fiction to the point where violent rhetoric spills into real-world violence.

Behind the scenes, figures like Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity admitted privately that they didn’t believe their public lines about Trump or the election, but they kept playing their parts for ratings and influence. Meanwhile, true believers like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Mike Johnson push conspiracy theories as if they’re gospel, fueling a culture where violence is no longer just metaphorical — from Pizzagate to January 6th to the assassinations of figures like Charlie Kirk.

The more politics mimics wrestling theater — over-the-top, dramatic, and villain-driven — the more likely it will lead to bloodshed. What once was performance now risks becoming reality, with “characters” turning into zealots and kayfabe collapsing into chaos.

By the Ballot is an opinion series published on Substack. All views expressed are solely those of the author and should not be interpreted as reporting or objective journalism or attributed to any other individual or organization. I am not a journalist or reporter, nor do I claim to be one. This publication represents personal commentary, analysis, and opinion only.