Conventional Wisdom IV

As I noted last time, the Republican National Convention has been fairly boring — psychotic, but boring — and not even last night’s speech from the vice presidential candidate managed to shake that up.

Tonight, however, promises to be different as we’ve got a WWE style Main Event in the making straight out of the reign of President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Camacho.

Tonight, we’re going to get what I think might be only the second speech from a former member of Trump’s Cabinet in the entire convention, as former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo blesses us with his presence.

It’s sort of staggering how many people who worked closely with Trump the last time he was in the White House want nothing to do with him. Seems like that should be a bigger story?

But never mind that, we’re about to have a night that leans into to Trump’s self-image as a macho “fighter.”

Linda McMahon, co-founder and former CEO of the World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc. as well as former head of the Small Business Association in the Trump administration — the center of the Venn diagram of wrestling and politics — will naturally be speaking, but there are several others purely from the world of wrestling and mixed martial arts.

Hulk Hogan, whose past is so checkered there’s a long article on the “scandals that nearly ruined his career” at Wrestling.com, will be speaking right before Trump for some reason. And so will Dana White, the president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship and a man who faced his own scandal after being caught assaulting his wife in public.

This combination of WWE, UFC and WTF moments is a bit unprecedented in the history of national political conventions, but not entirely.

As we wrote in Fault Lines, the legendary political strategist Lee Atwater — the godfather of the ugly campaign strategies that came to dominate the party — took a great deal of inspiration from the world of pro wrestling when he masterminded a mudslinging campaign in 1988:

The strategy Atwater crafted for the Bush campaign elevated the practices of negative campaigning to new levels. The overall plan for Dukakis, Atwater later noted, was a brutal assault meant to “strip the bark off the little bastard.” The comment didn’t sound like one from a typical political consultant, but Atwater was anything but that.

Famously, he had long been a fan of professional wrestling, which he insisted was the only “honest sport” there was, because everyone involved – the producers, the performers, the announcers and the audience – all knew it was entirely scripted and thoroughly fake. The world of politics, in contrast, may have seemed wholesome on the surface but, behind the scenes, was full of cheaters.“He was basically saying that politics is phony, the government is phony, that a lot of personal life is phony,” reporter Howard Fineman recalled. “And ‘phony’ was a big word with him.”

While Atwater respected wrestling for its honest dishonesties, he also learned a great deal about stagecraft and storytelling from the sport. As his biographer later noted, wrestling shows were “where he learned bombast, and how to immobilize a larger opponent.” In the 1988 campaign, he took those lessons to heart, presenting his candidate to voters as the crusading hero and his opponent as the untrustworthy heel.

For years, this sort of approach has worked well for Republican campaigns. Think of the campaigns that Karl Rove ran for George W. Bush, pitting the candidate you’d like to have a beer with against the Liar Al Gore and the Phony John Kerry.

But as always, Donald Trump has taken a subtle political strategy and turned it into the least subtle thing imaginable. (He is, after all, a member of the WWE Hall of Fame, elected in the “Celebrity” category like Pete Rose and Mike Tyson.)

And so tonight we’re going to see an unsubtle effort to make Trump the hero and Biden the heel, aided not just by these figures from the fighting world but other assorted unscrupulous con men like Tucker Carlson and Franklin Graham.

It may seem new, but as with many things in the Trump era, it’s merely an acceleration of trends that have been bubbling up in Republican politics for decades now.

LATE EDIT: There were rumors that Hulk Hogan was abruptly dropped from the program after a video of him mocking Trump’s hairdo came out, but he just showed up a half hour late and did his shtick.