Description
How can IR scholars make sense of Donald Trump? There is a widespread suspicion that the discipline’s existing categories are inadequate to the task, manifested in claims that Trump’s ascendancy to high office is symptomatic of various crises: of liberal internationalism (Ikenberry, 2018), American hegemony (Stokes, 2018; Nye, 2019), and/or grand strategy (Reich & Dombrowski, 2017). These analyses are themselves indicative of a general uncertainty regarding how to meet the challenge that Trump’s personality and style pose to established ways of thinking about world politics. In this paper, we seek to make sense of Trump as an actor in international affairs by considering his place within popular culture, and in particular his personal and professional association with the performed, theatrical wrestling staged by organisations like World Wrestling Entertainment. Drawing on Roland Barthes’ Mythologies (1972), we suggest that contemporary pro wrestling offers important insights into Trump’s method and style of foreign policy. Introducing concepts like ‘heat’, ‘the heel’ and ‘cutting a promo’, we suggest that wrestling can help to explain three aspects of Trump’s approach to politics that existing theories and lenses are poorly-equipped to explain or identify. We conclude by reflecting on the implications of our analysis for foreign policy leadership on the world stage, drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of ‘grotesque power’ (2003) to suggest that the ‘shamelessness’ that Judith Butler (2019) identifies at the heart of Trump’s public performances is not entirely without political precedent.
