Election Day Is America’s WrestleMania
Election Day Is America’s WrestleMania
A smart mark’s guide to booking the payoff of the Harris-Trump feud.
It’s going to be a weird day. I hope you stay off social media and more or less check out from the world—after you’ve voted. There’s no reason to plug into news until about 7:30 pm tonight.
That’s when we’ll start our live coverage over on the YouTube channel. I hope you’ll join us. It’ll be what cable news could be if cable news weren’t terrible.
That said, today I want to go high concept and talk about both the future and the past.
Once more unto the breach, my friends.
1. Storylines
One way to view the last eight years is as a decade-long professional wrestling storyline: The emergence of a monster heel (Trump) who destroys an aging face who was never fully over with the crowd (Hillary). The heel then goes on a reign of terror, drawing heat the likes of which no one has ever seen.
The problem is, the writers didn’t really know where to go from there. The heel champion can’t hold the belt for forever, because the audience eventually tunes out. But in 2020 there weren’t any new babyface characters ready for the main event. So the writer brought an old, beloved performer out of retirement (Biden, obviously) to beat the heel and serve as a transitional champion.
But the audience wasn’t ready to see the heel retired, either. So the writers gave the 2020 match a dirty finish,1 setting up a comeback for the monster heel in which he could claim that he had been robbed and was eager to reclaim his belt.
In 2024 the writers discovered a new face character (Kamala) to fight the monster heel in the main event. Only no one is sure if she’ll be over enough with the audience to have the belt put on her waist.
I hope I don’t have to spell it out for you, but in this analogy the wrestling promotion is America and the writers are the voters.
Is it depressing to view this decade-long confrontation between Donald Trump and liberal democracy as a storyline authored by a bored, decadent public looking to create political entertainment? Probably.
But that doesn’t mean it’s wrong, either.
In wrestling, all storylines eventually end. Even the biggest ones. Hulk Hogan loses the belt. The Undertaker’s streak is broken. The Stone Cold–Mr. McMahon feud resolves.
Usually storylines end—or “pay off,” as the writers say—in the main event at a pay per view. The biggest storylines are resolved at the biggest PPV of them all: WrestleMania.
Again with the metaphor hammer: Election Day is our WrestleMania and Trump vs. Kamala is the main event.
The only question is what kind of finish the writers will give us.
There are five classic finishes in wrestling.
The heel wins a clean victory. (Clean meaning an undisputed ending to the match with no interference or chicanery.)
The heel wins a dirty victory.
The face wins a clean victory.
The face wins a dirty victory.
The schmozz: a chaotic finish that produces no clear winner or loser.2
Writers choose the ending based on two factors.
One: They consider future booking—transitioning both the face and the heel onto their next storylines with different opponents. Two: They try to intuit which ending will get the most “over” with the audience.
Depressingly, these finishes map extremely well onto the potential outcomes of our election.
(1) Trump wins a clean victory. In this scenario, Trump wins the Electoral College fair and square and holds Harris to a plurality in the popular vote.
Trump becomes champ president again. Harris fades into the background. The new storyline is an extension of the old one in which Trump embarks on an attempt to fundamentally change America and is opposed by . . .
Well, this is where it gets hard. Who would be the opposition? Biden and Harris will be gone. The Republicans would hold the Senate and probably the House. They control a majority on the Supreme Court. And Trump will have a mandate to do all of the illiberal stuff he talked about during the election: Sending the military after domestic protesters, rounding up immigrants and putting them in camps, etc.
That’s a story, I guess. But it’s hard to see the writers going for it.3
(2) Trump wins a dirty victory. This could take two forms. The most likely is that Trump wins the Electoral College while Harris goes above 50 percent in the popular vote.
This is unlikely, but possible. And while it would all be perfectly legal and proper, it would be seen as illegitimate by the majority of the public. At best, it will spark a mass movement to change the Electoral College. At worst? Yikes.
The second form is that Trump loses the vote but uses a combination of legal challenges to reverse the outcome. For instance: By winning court fights to toss ballots during recounts. Or by having state legislatures send alternate slates of electors, which are then ruled to be inbounds by SCOTUS.
This kind of excitement might appeal to the writers, but they would need cooperation from the courts and/or various elected Republicans to make it happen.
(3) Harris wins a clean victory. In this finish, Kamala Harris wins in such a manner that the main body of the Republican party and Republican voters acknowledge her as the new champ and Trump moves off into retirement. (Possibly shifting to managing a stable of wrestlers or doing ringside commentary.)
I rate this finish as extremely unlikely.
(4) Harris wins a dirty victory. Harris wins the Electoral College and is (eventually) sworn in as president. But Trump and Republicans swear up and down that she stole the title, the election was rigged, the ref didn’t see Biden come in with the steel chair, etc.
My view: This is the most likely outcome because it satisfies everyone in the audience. Democrats get their new champion and she is given the chance to become the face of the franchise. Republicans get tons of heat. Trump is still completely over with his fans and is free to move on to his next storyline without having his prestige diminished. Everyone wins.4
(5) The schmozz: The election results become so muddled that it is left to the Supreme Court and/or Congress to come up with a winner.
This is the most unlikely finish, though it has happened before. Let’s not even contemplate it, though. It’s too grim.
What will the writers decide? My guess is #4. It makes the most sense. But you never know. Sometimes in wrestling the writers swerve on purpose. Sometimes they just make terrible, inexplicable decisions.
2. The Past
Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been thinking about the opening of the 2003 remake of Battlestar Galactica.
The show begins with series of steadicam interior shots of Galactica as the ship is about to be decommissioned. Various crew members are going about their chores while a public information officer gives a tour to a group of visiting dignitaries. Meanwhile, the old captain—played by Edward James Olmos—is walking the halls practicing his speech for the decommissioning ceremony. Only he keeps getting interrupted by a series of grateful young officers who awkwardly try to tell him what a privilege it was to serve with him.
And in every case, the old man stops, looks them in the eye, and responds, “It’s my honor.”
I’ve had this in mind because over the last few weeks I’ve had a series of conversations in which people have told me how grateful they’ve been for The Bulwark and how much it has meant to them.
But truly, it’s my honor.
It’s been my honor to write for you guys. It’s been my honor to read your comments and talk to you over email. It’s been my honor to meet hundreds of you in person and be part of this community and this movement. I think we have done important work. Doing it together, with you, has been the greatest honor of my career.
Thank you, my friends.
And I want to say a word to you about my colleagues. They are, without exception, some of the finest people you will ever meet. You know the names and faces from the front-of-the-house operation: Sarah, Tim, Mona, Will, Jim, A.B., Joe, Sonny, Egger, Cathy, Marc, Sam, and Bill.
These men and women have been brave, honest, and tireless. I admire them all more than I can properly express.
And behind the scenes are my colleagues you don’t often see—but they have done the work that makes all of this possible: Adam Keiper, Hannah Yoest, Ben Parker, Martyn Jones, Barry Rubin, Chris Herbert, Sebastian Hughes, Catherine Lowe, Meaghan Leister, Jamie Abraham, Katie Cooper, Jason Brown, Patrick Stoltzfus, Conor Kilgore, Addison Del Mastro, Tony Franquiz, Noah Friedman, Rupert Manderstam, and Jonah Yurman.
I know that people’s eyes glaze over when they see lists of names. I get it. But while it seems silly, I want you to know their names. Because they’ve built this thing right alongside you.
I’m of an age where I have now had a fair number of work colleagues. I’ve been lucky that over the years, the vast majority of them have been fine people. But not all of them.
Except for here. Every single person at The Bulwark is aces. These are people I would trust with my children. People I would go to war with.
It has been the honor of a lifetime to work with them.
Whatever happens today, tomorrow we will still all be in this together.
Vaya con Dios, my friends. I’ll see you on the other side.
3. The Notebook
No, not the movie.
A notebook is a record of both solitude and connection. It’s a place for making real the quiet, flickering thoughts that otherwise might pass unnoticed, where words and sketches can stumble and fail. In a notebook, failure is less consequential because it’s not failure at all; it’s a necessary part of the messiness of exploration, of letting the unknown and the uncertain find form.
Look no further than the notebooks of the famous authors and artists whose relationships with these indispensable creative tools are chronicled by Roland Allen in THE NOTEBOOK: A History of Thinking on Paper (Biblioasis, 416 pp., paperback, $19.95). Beginning with a wax tablet recovered from a ship wrecked around 1305 B.C., Allen traces how notebooks, and their many permutations, have been used by a vast range of people — including politicians, mathematicians and sailors — from across the world.
The book is a revealing document of a relationship so intimate as to be sacred: that of the writer and the page. It’s a reminder that note-taking is an act of noticing, of being present and showing up to the blank paper, again and again, and discovering what may arise there. Below is a brief illustrated history, inspired by “The Notebook,” of some of the luminaries who did exactly that.
A “dirty finish” is an ending to a match in which the loser is given room to complain that he was cheated. Classic dirty finishes include:
The winner uses a foreign object that the ref does not see.
There is outside interference from a manager or stablemate.
The ref himself is corrupt, either performing a fast count or signaling a submission when there was none.
Usually because a truckload of wrestlers rush the ring and it descends into chaos.
I mean, except democracy. While this scenario is the second-best outcome for democracy, it’s also a recipe for dysfunction, acrimony, and potential violence. Not great, Bob.
Grateful for all the Bulwark. And to the staff we don’t see- thank you!!!
Love you buddy, thanks for getting us through another one.