When attempting to untangle the perpetual *schmoz of Trumpmania, it helps to spend time in the WWE glossary.

AP

Lisa Van Dusen

August 23, 2018

In the colorful subculture of professional wrestling that, along with the colourful subculture of reality television, proved the Stanislavski system for Donald Trump’s career as a political actor, there is a concept called “kayfabe” (KEI-feib). Kayfabe is the portrayal of staged events, contrived performances, fake rivalries and manufactured melodrama as authentic or spontaneous. It is a word that carries not only its face-value meaning but the code-y mystique and shushing cargo of omerta; a sotto voce exhortation to slackers to maintain their cover in the presence of suckers.

Just as Trump’s body avalanching (a sort of extreme chest-bump) cactus clotheslining (a stiff-arm move that propels both wrestlers over the ropes and outside the ring) testicular clawing(clutching an opponent’s testicles and squeezing until they start speaking in tongues — first patented by Margaret Thatcher) Battle of the Reality Show Hams with Omarosa Manigault-Newman was getting grunty last week, into the White House ring lumbered former CIA Director John Brennan as the main event to Omarosa’s curtain-jerker, seeking distance-delineating revenge for Trump’s off-with-his-talking-head revocation of Brennan’s security clearance.

In their 2008 album Hear Nothing See Nothing Say Nothing, the British punk band Discharge, on the single Drunk with Power, howled, “For how long do we tolerate these fools drunk with power…A giant game of chess they play with you and I as the disposable pieces.”

Brennan is probably as much of a punk fan as I am, and I’m really just fan of Googling stuff, so he probably wasn’t referencing Discharge when, in high dudgeon, he accused Trump of being “drunk on power.”

“The fact that he’s using a security clearance of a former CIA director as a pawn in his public relations strategy I think is just so reflective of somebody who, quite frankly, I don’t want to use this term maybe, but he’s drunk on power,” Brennan told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, (with an erroneous choice of preposition the late New York Times political language maven William Safire, were he not already dead, would be mortified by.)

The irony of Trump stripping Brennan of his security clearance on the grounds of insufficient circumspection was one of the more kayfabe moments of this relentlessly kayfabe-y presidency. But it allowed a whole crew of babyfaces (good guys), to swarm the ring in the form of a gaggle of former senior intelligence officials who collectively stink-faced (rubbing one’s bum in one’s opponent’s face) Trump — in WWE dramatis personae, the heel (bad guy).

The spectacle of so many members of the intelligence establishment flapjack-punching (an overhead lift-drop pancake slam followed by a punch to the liver) Trump was quite an exotic Washington power move. Especially after two decades during which the intelligence community, despite its unprecedentedly well-funded tech-endowed omnipotence, failed to see 9/11 coming, slam-dunked the war in Iraq, was blindsided by the 2008 financial cataclysm, missed the global China and Russia-led war on democracy that helped install Trump as president and has apparently been powerless to stop him from expediting the systematic degradation of American influence fueled by the events above.

“Has anyone looked at the mistakes that John Brennan made while serving as CIA Director?” Trump tweeted Saturday. I’m generally not one to concur with Donald Trump but if he was talking about how the CIA failed to covertly prevent him from becoming president of the United States, he may actually have a point.

Thankfully, the world was able to start a new week with the wisdom of Rudy Giuliani, in what was presumably a test-run of the kayfabe “Hope and Change” of 2020; “Truth isn’t Truth.” Sadly, he wasn’t talking about the former WWE champion, R-Truth.

*Schmoz: A scrum of brawling wrestlers.

Lisa Van Dusen is associate editor of Policy Magazine. She was a senior writer at Maclean’s, Washington/international affairs columnist for the Ottawa Citizen and Sun Media, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News, and an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.