Jul 19, 2025 4 min read

I’ve been having trouble getting my head around two fairly recent political developments – one from the left, the other from the right.

From the left: the unlikely ascent of the drag queen show.

Not so long ago, drag shows, in which men dress as women, were considered side shows.

In recent years, however, drag shows have been elevated to a new, higher status. Cheered by trans-liberation leftists, today they are as much about politics as they were about titillation in former times.

Can this really be what liberalism has come to? Hopefully not. The minute Bernie Sanders shows up at a drag show (he hasn’t, as far as I know), that’s the minute I run for the exit.

From the right comes the fascination and even fixation on professional wrestling and mixed martial arts.

What is going on? Today’s wrestling is slicker – much slicker – than Studio Wrestling in the 1950s and ’60s. Late Saturday afternoons on Channel 11 in Pittsburgh featured the likes of Crusher Lisowski, “the wrestler who made Milwaukee famous,” whose speciality, as far as I can remember, was smashing aluminum beer cans on his bleached-blond mop of hair.

Studio Wrestling was choke-full of fake falls, head locks, and “sleeper holds.” Everyone – I speak generally – knew the action was a recital of prearranged roles, bad guys vs. good guys, and known outcomes.

Twelve-year-old boys accepted all this, and moved on. Professional wrestling was as far from politics as can be imagined.

How times have changed! Donald Trump has embraced professional wrestling in more ways than one. A proud member of the wrestling Hall of Fame, Trump placed Linda McMahon, a former professional wrestling promoter, in his Cabinet as Secretary of Education.

And professional wrestling has embraced politics, and Donald Trump.

Hulk Hogan, who pretty much ruled the wrestling ring until his retirement in 2012, campaigned for Trump in 2024. Other wrestlers who support Trump include Mark Calaway, aka, The Undertaker, and retired “Road Dogg” Jesse James.

These latter two are people who, frankly, I couldn’t identify in a room of the wide-shouldered, or in any other room.

Likewise, martial arts’ Jake Paul, also an actor and a podcaster, who after the assassination attempt in Butler, said, “When you try and kill God’s angels and saviors of the world it just makes them bigger.” Paul endorsed Trump for president.

Dana White, president of UFC, a martial arts promotion company, calls Trump (and I paraphrase), the ultimate and coolest American dude.

I assumed the MAGA-wrestling alliance was all about rowdy masculinity, braggadocious virility, intractable manliness – the very things that Trump projects to effect on stage at his mega-rallies.

Zack Montellaro, writing in Politico, takes a more nuanced view. “Most of the fun of wrestling comes from the blurred lines of real and make-believe.” Much of which can be said of Trump in the White House.

Kyla Scanlon, a 28-year-old Gen Z economist with a strong footprint in the image and video generation, recently posited that professional wrestling “is just always a show,” and “elements of politics increasingly resemble wrestling – this theatrical pursuit of justice and truth.

“You can align [politics] with the way wrestling always has a heel – there’s always a bad guy to defeat … which is kind of how Trump moves [through] his presidency.”

“Trump gets it,” Scanlon said. “He knows that in order to keep people engaged you have to keep the story line moving along.”

All of this may have been glimpsed in Studio Wrestling days. In a story marking his death in 2005, the AP said that Reginald “Crusher” Lisowski’s “blue-collar bona fides made him beloved among working class fans for 40 years.”

Like Trump, The Crusher knew the show was the show, and it must go on.

Apropos, the president recently announced that martial arts matches would come to the White House grounds next July Fourth. It will be red, white, and blue politics at its bloody best.

Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.