All Persecutions of Populist Leaders are Kayfabe

I’m going to start this article by making a series of statements, each more audacious than the other:

1. The Slopulist Charlatans Donald Trump, Nigel Farage and Marine Le Pen are not in any respect a threat to the system but rather solely figures of containment whose function is to act as a pressure valve for dissident energy.

2. No persecution of them by the state, the law, the regime or whatever you want to call it, will ever result in anything that sticks because these containment slopulists are structurally necessary for the illusion of democracy to persist.

3. The various travails they are forced to endure – such as the numerous court cases levied against Trump prior to 2024 resulting in the ‘Georgia Mug Shot’, the nonsense brought against Farage regarding his tax affairs or failure to declare election donations and whatnot, and the similar lawfare that threatened to bar Le Pen from running in the next French Presidential elections – are all kayfabe.

4. This kayfabe is designed to heighten the stakes and garner emotional investment in the slopulist: leftists can engage in Blueanon type slop while rightists can point to the persecutions to demonstrate how ‘the system’ is against their candidate as well as claiming various victim points.

5. While all this is not scripted as if it were a movie or pro-wrestling storyline, it might as well be, since the existence of these various storylines is for the suspension of disbelief in the laughable fiction that democracy actually registers and responds to ‘the people’.

6. Trump, Farage and Le Pen are purely a function of their donors and respond only to them and their interests, ‘the people’ will get nothing whatsoever should any of these people ever be in power (as Trump is currently proving with real aplomb).

Can anyone now remember the saga in which ‘they tried to lock Trump up’ and the cast of characters involved in that somewhat lame season of the long-running hit TV show called MAGA? Jack Smith anyone? Fani Willis? The BBC ‘trial tracker’? It’s like bringing up what happened in a soap opera two years ago, remember like when Ian Beale was homeless, or when he actually died, or when he got married for literally the sixth time, or when he reopened the chip shop, or whatever. No one can actually remember what any of it was about now and really, unless we are directed to by the writers, we are not really meant to look back. Just as in pro-wrestling, it’s not really the done thing to bring up old feuds unless there’s a current plot point that requires it. The whole saga in which ‘they tried to arrest Trump’ was election cycle slop and it worked too. Now, two years later, no one at all cares on any side about any of that, just as it was completely irrelevant at Survivor Series 1990 that Ted DiBiase had tried to buy Hercules as an actual slave in 1988 because now it was two years later and Hercules was a heel again and Ted had to run a team against Hogan. The commentators just didn’t bring it up. This short-term logic is constantly at play in the spectacle of mainstream democratic politics.

In 1999, Stone Cold Steve Austin was literally thrown off a bridge by The Rock. However, the small and inconvenient details of probably being killed wasn’t going to stop Austin main-eventing Backlash 1999 a week or so later. In exactly the same way, Marine Le Pen was sentenced to five years and barred from running for President. She was subject to electronic tagging, house arrest, outrageous fines, and found guilty of embezzlement, but these inconvenient details were never going to get in the way of her headlining Presidential Election 2027. You can’t leave off the marquee star like that, of course not.

British politics in one image.

The same is true in the crappy Butlins-cum-1970s-Doctor-Who-budget version of all this starring Farage. The pantomime of him resigning to ‘clear his name’ only to face the humiliation of taking on the comedy act Count Binface is another storyline straight out of WWE RAW. Just as Farage easily wins, the heel General Manager comes out and reopens the ‘watchdog probe’. Of course, none of any of it is going to stop Farage main-eventing the next British election, he’s the marquee star, and we have a hot and untested new opponent in Andy Burnham.

People who spend their time and attention getting emotionally invested in pro-wrestling storylines are ‘marks’. I would like to see a time when people are called ‘political marks’. A good example of a political mark is the scabies-ridden leftist YouTuber, A Different Bias, who cannot get enough of detailing every twist and turn of Farage’s various storylines, he dined out bigtime on Count Binface. But it’s worth noting that A Different Bias is a heel fan, that is, he was the sort of fan who would have supported The Corporation against Stone Cold. Slopulists are booked as babyfaces, which means you are supposed to like them and cheer for them. The regime wanted Trump and the persecution of him was a storyline designed entirely to get him elected. This is why it’s being re-run in France and Britain.

If you’re incredulous at any of this, if you feel yourself reaching to assert how ‘real’ these storylines are, like the proverbial mark who indignantly insisted that wrestling is real, then you are still a mark and will always be a mark. You’ll never put childish things away, you’ll never stop believing, and that’s okay. I look forward to the day everyone else will call you a mark and it is common knowledge that ‘politics is fake’ just as ‘wrestling is fake’. Many people have now tuned out of Hollywood slop and TV slop, a growing number are opting out of social media slop now too, but I long for the day when people en masse tune out of political slop.