A small handful of psychological concepts transformed our understanding of the world, and each other. Firstly, Sigmund Freud’s discovery of the unconscious. Alongside that, Carl Jung’s hypothesis of the collective unconscious. Comedian Munya Chawawa’s fantastic documentary Wrestling With Trump (Channel 4, Tuesday, 10pm) offers a startling new idea: that the American president’s bullish political style has been cribbed entirely from WWE SmackDown. Let’s call it the theory of knocking everyone unconscious.
We meet the aide who advised Trump on how a crowd-rousing pantomime of good v evil could be politicised. We cringe at WrestleMania 23 footage, in which Trump appears, pushing promoter Vince McMahon and punching him in the head, the so-called Battle of the Billionaires. We’re reminded how many wrestlers, including the Undertaker and Kane, now stump for Trump; that Hulk Hogan ripped his shirt open at the Republican National Convention in 2024, shouting “Let Trump-a-mania rule again!” It’s all very funny, though of course it isn’t. Former wrestling executive Linda McMahon is currently the US secretary of education. Is that a punchline?
