Mr. Trump’s homeland security adviser, Thomas Bossert, defended the video when he viewed it for the first time during a broadcast interview with Martha Raddatz of ABC News. “No one would perceive that as a threat,” Mr. Bossert said. “I hope they don’t.”
“He’s a genuine president expressing himself genuinely,” Mr. Bossert added.
.. CNN also replied to Mr. Trump on Twitter with a quotation from one of the president’s press aides, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who in a briefing on Thursday told reporters: “The president in no way form or fashion has ever promoted or encouraged violence. If anything, quite the contrary.”
President Trump, Melting Under Criticism
After all, he so clearly lacks the toughness of George Washington, who once privately observed that his critics’ “arrows … never can reach the most vulnerable part of me.” He lacks the confidence of Dwight Eisenhower, who said, when asked if he thought his press coverage was fair, “Well, when you come down to it, I don’t see what a reporter could do much to a president, do you?”
.. Mr. Trump may be a more tender soul, or less resilient. In any case, he can’t seem to take the heat.
.. The big question for all of us is whether with his foot-stamping and his vulgarity Mr. Trump, in defiance of all his predecessors, is creating a new model for future presidential behavior. Can the etiquette of professional wrestling and reality television truly pass as acceptable for the Oval Office?
Ted Cruz Might Be the Only Republican Who Understands Donald Trump
If that wasn’t clear before the lights went up in the Quicken Loans Arena on Monday, it certainly was by the time Trump made his from-the-shadows entrance that night. Within minutes, you could find photos of the scene paired with shots of “the Undertaker” entering a crazed arena that made overt what we already suspected: that this week’s festivities were going to be as much W.W.E. as R.N.C.
.. And that’s what I like about what Cruz did last night: He embraced the professional-wrestling ethic that Trump has so fully imposed on this campaign. He leaned full-on into the spectacle.
.. But Cruz played the arena, as Triple-H or the Donald would. He understood that Trump doesn’t just want his former opponents to endorse him — he expects them to submit to him. This nominee does not consider it his job to reach out and favor his vanquished opponents with magnanimity and grace. His willingness to humiliate the likes of Christie, mocking his weight (“No more Oreos”), among other things, should make that obvious.
Is Everything Wrestling?
the rest of the world has caught up to wrestling’s ethos. With each passing year, more and more facets of popular culture become something like wrestling: a stage-managed “reality” in which scripted stories bleed freely into real events, with the blurry line between truth and untruth seeming to heighten, not lessen, the audience’s addiction to the melodrama. The modern media landscape is littered with “reality” shows that audiences happily accept aren’t actually real; that, in essence, is wrestling.
.. The way Beyoncé teased at marital problems in “Lemonade” — writing lyrics people were happy to interpret as literal accusations of her famous husband’s unfaithfulness — is wrestling. The question of whether Steve Harvey meant to announce the wrong Miss Universe winner is wrestling. Did Miley Cyrus and Nicki Minaj authentically snap at each other at last year’s MTV Video Music Awards? The surrounding confusion was straight out of a wrestling playbook.
..In politics, as in wrestling, the ultimate goal is simply to get the crowd on your side. And like all the best wrestling villains — or “heels” — Donald Trump is a vivacious, magnetic speaker unafraid to be rude to his opponents; there was even a heelish consistency to his style at early debates, when he actively courted conflict with the moderator, Megyn Kelly, and occasionally paused to let the crowds boo him before shouting back over them. (The connection isn’t just implied, either: Trump wasinducted to the WWE’s Hall of Fame in 2013, owing to his participation in several story lines over the years.)
.. Ted Cruz’s rhetorical style, with its dramatic pauses, violent indignation and tendency to see every issue as an epic moral battleground, was sometimes reminiscent of great wrestling heels. The way Rick Perry called Trump’s candidacy a “cancer” that “will lead the Republican Party to perdition” before endorsing Trump and offering to serve as his vice president: this was a tacit admission that all his apocalyptic rhetoric was mainly for show. Pure wrestling, in other words.
.. (In wrestling, it’s considered a cardinal sin to genuinely hurt your opponent, thereby limiting their ability to work.
.. to analyze each narrative not just through its in-world logic (“this guy will win the championship because he seems more driven”) but by considering external forces (“this guy will win the championship because he is well-spoken enough to represent the company when he inevitably shows up on ‘Today’”
.. So when I think of how politics and pop culture are often compared to wrestling, this is the element that seems most transferable: not the outlandish characters or the jumbo-size threats, but the insistence on telling a great story with no regard for the facts. Donald Trump can claim there were thousands of Muslims in New Jersey cheering when the World Trade Center came down.
.. When everything becomes a story, the value of concrete truth seems diminished. There’s too much going on in the world to dive this deep into something as frivolous as entertainment, you might say.
.. And ultimately, we can’t expect that post-truth culture will somehow collapse because of its perfidiousness. The WWE, for instance, now tells its story without challenge: It’s outlasted all its major competitors and holds the rights to the very images wrestling’s history is made of.