Thread by @JYSexton

All right.

We need to talk about Donald Trump, this bad-faith, haphazard coup, and how professional wrestling explains what's going on and why this grift could become incredibly dangerous.

1/

I wrote a thread the other day about how this coup is both legitimate and a total grift, but something people need to realize is that we're watching the rhetorical strategies of professional wrestling play out in politics and our country.

Here's an explanation.

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Professional wrestling is an industry of grift. It's about open and closed system of power and knowledge. It is divided between "smarts," people who understand the grift and "marks," people who are being manipulated.

Right now, this coup is about the same systems.

3/

While we're on here talking about Trump's media moves, his staff looking for other jobs, and Republicans admitting they know Biden won, Trump's supporters are awash in declarations of stolen elections, fundraising schemes.

It's smarts and marks.

4/

What Trump is doing right now is called "a work." A work means people are involved in a scam together and know they're playing roles. They even engage in feuds and grudges as a means of bilking people out of their money.

Real moments are "shoots."

We're in a work right now.

5/

Trump, Fox, the GOP, all of the grifters who feed off them with podcasts, YouTube shows, they're bilking people for money in this work.

But here's the thing. Works become shoots in a real hurry as the performers are consumed by their own performances.

6/

The marks Trump and the GOP are hitting are getting worked up, meaning they're more likely to shell out money or even become violent, like fans at a wrestling show lashing out at the bad guys.

But if the work grows and catches, sometimes it becomes real and dangerous.

7/

Performers "work themselves into a shoot," meaning they begin by playing roles and then it becomes real.

With Trump/GOP continuing to ratchet up the temperature, the marks get more dangerous and the performers themselves can start to believe their own lies.

8/

Trump is professional wrestling through and through. He's even in the WWE Hall of Fame. He's been around it his entire adult life. Trump starts off working people and then works himself into a shoot. It's his essential characteristic.

This coup is a con, but it becomes real.

9/

The problem is that these con-men can't stop. Once a work starts to draw heat and money, it has to continue to grow and grow and grow. Trump and the GOP will peddle this stolen election garbage for forever.

But people will believe them, and they may start believing it.

10/

Again. This coup is a total con. A way to raise money, push the GA special election, fluff cable news viewership, and to save face.

Trump knows it. The GOP knows it. Fox knows it. But the more they push it the more the lie becomes real.

11/

This coup is a total work to steal money from the marks while all of us smarts sit here and shake our heads.

But the performers are working themselves into a shoot. It doesn't mean it'll happen or that the coup will be successful, but it's becoming part of their reality.

12/

This is the essence of the Trump Era of Politics. It's a matter of open and closed systems of knowledge and power, the malleable nature of reality.

Professional wrestling pioneered this stuff and it's now playing out right in front of us and threatening our society.

13/

You can roll your eyes all you want, dismiss the danger of the moment, but Trump and the GOP are not going to relent, and with every moment the work becomes a shoot, meaning either the marks are going to get violent, the coup will gain steam, or possibly both.

14/14

For those interested, my book AMERICAN RULE is about how the mythology of America is a work that became a shoot and how it ensnared the country and the rest of the world in a completely fabricated reality from which we need to escape.

penguinrandomhouse.com/books/611439/a…

And again, the coup is both real and a grift. It’s both things, simultaneously. While we’re all caught up in dichotomies the grifters have moved on into more complicated nuances. That’s an essential truth of grifting. The grift has to evolve above developing understanding.

This is why Trump successfully took over the GOP. He took their grift, called it a grift, and said here’s the truth and surprise, it was another grift that encompassed the tired grift. Circles within circles within circles of other grifts.