Like any liar, the press is filled with contradictions. Seldom holding itself accountable for what it says, it can blithely produce information and opinions that conflict with previously held ones, without a word of explanation for the shift.
— Michael Parenti, Inventing Reality
On April 1 2007 US reality TV star and repeatedly failed businessman Donald Trump appeared in a WWE storyline opposite his longtime friend and putative rival, the now disgraced wrestling promoter Vince McMahon. Billed at Wrestlemania 23 as The Battle of the Billionaires, the premise was suitably at once farcical and mythic – each man selected a wrestler to fight as his champion; Bobby Lashley in Trump’s stable, Umaga in McMahon’s – we won’t go into the post-colonial symbolism at play here – it speaks for itself. The loser’s patron would have his head shaved live in the ring and retire from wrestling management forever.
It was pure kayfabe – the wrestling term for a fabricated reality participants must maintain at all times to effect the illusion, the suspension of disbelief, required for the spectacle to remain compelling. Break kayfabe and the illusion collapses, and the viewer is left with disengagement, disdain, and worse, boredom.
Here’s where things get ontologically interesting. In mythic terms a hair vs hair match is a Samson versus Samson struggle, however power, true power, is only invested in one competitor’s hair. McMahon’s position is a little like that of Schrödinger’s cat: as owner and impresario for the audience he oscillates between a state of belief and a state of suspended disbelief. A state of reality and a state of unreality existing at the same time. The audience understands this. They understand that McMahon as a participant in the narrative logic of spectacle, is perfectly willing to be subject to the illusory humiliation of having his head shaved.
Trump appears as the outsider, the intrusion. Reality creeping in, undermining the self-perpetuated delusion. But is he? He’s a reality TV star, and while from a different arena, he is nevertheless part of the loud, the crass, the frenzy, the ozone, saltpetre and popcorn stench of American spectacle. The stakes, the focus, the star of the match – the only thing that is in fact real and at risk, the only thing in which reality and power are invested – is not Trump himself, but the defiant, inscrutable, dangerously lacquered, geometrically impossible and architecturally improbable object of Trump’s hair.
Pyotechnics. We fast forward 8 years. The Democratic Party strategists and an outrage and spectacle hungry media pushes Trump as a pied-piper candidate – a candidate so oafish, so foolish, so grotesque, so unserious, their own deeply unpopular candidate can’t help but win. They fail to see the oscillation, they fail to understand the kayfabe. Hilary Clinton wasn’t in a knockdown drag out president bout with Trump – we’ve already established Trump isn’t real – the game was rigged against her – Clinton had the impossible task of defeating Trump’s impossible hair.
Trump, of course has his own nemesis. Barack Obama’s hair, for Trump, is ungraspable. Obama’s legacy, his defining narrative, is not incremental liberal social advances, or gestural healthcare reforms, not Hope, or Yes We Can, but the wholesale slaughter of foreign brown people and the elimination of US enemy number one, Osama Bin Laden – an orgiastic spectacle of narrative violence in which according to the Council on Foreign Relations Obama dropped 26,171 bombs across 7 countries in his final year alone. Assassinating Bin Laden, in a plot so full of incongruities it might as well have been a worked shoot – a wrestling term for when a scripted storyline – a work – intersects with real event – a shoot – a hybrid moment where the tension between the real and the imaginary escalates for the audience to point where doubt and desire are held in a singularly thrilling oscillation.
Obama is shorn, disciplined, with a sociopath’s aesthetic, his hair and his narrative supremacy impossible for Trump to grasp, to reconcile. Again, Samson versus Samson, hair versus hair.
Trump has his writers construct a narrative around narcoterrorism. In late 2025 a fleet of US Coast Guard and Naval vessels blockade Venezuela. They bomb Caribbean fisherman in a display of extrajudicial murder that rivals Obama’s drone obliterated Pakistani weddings. The mass media lays on the kayfabe. In January Trump sends in Delta Force not to eliminate, but to capture Venezuelan Socialist President, Nicolas Maduro. Trump defeats Obama – in the arena, the crowd goes wild.
At the box office Chevron’s prices spike and fall and spike again. The only US oil company licensed to pump Venezuela’s vast oil reserves. The scalpers make bank. Everyone else gorges. Yes, Virginia, you can bet on wrestling. We all sit back and watch, caught in the tension between fury and disbelief, high on the obnoxious burnt oil stench of popcorn.
This is Chaos Capitalism – a system in which political and economic actors deliberately foster instability, uncertainty, or crisis in order to manipulate markets and extract financial gain. Unlike disaster capitalism, which exploits external crises, chaos capitalism involves the intentional creation or amplification of disruption to serve private profit.
Trump is plastered (even more than usual) across the world’s media, hair glowing golden in the klieg lights of victory. His thinning bouffant, combed over and perched precariously on the bare, pink-blotched painted desert of his scalp, is posturing before the world’s cameras – it has a narrative legacy to rival Obama’s.
Now we hit rewind – the image ladders and judders like an old VHS tape, – we scroll back a few weeks, to an earlier episode. An episode you may have missed.
There is an adhesive bandage on the back of Trump’s hand. Padded, vaguely skin coloured. Roughly 5cm by 5cm. Not Trump’s skin colour. As perfectly and generically inhuman as Trump’s poured on umber, in different ways they both signal the gamut of human frailty. This is the new real. The new Schrödinger. The new oscillation. Not box office at the gate, a work in the ring, kayfabe in the arena, but a death match; a confrontation with the undeniable. The cat is living and dead until the moment we try to predict its state – which forces one or the other depending on the position of the observer.
Because of the bandage – perhaps covering the spider-like intrusion of a cannula – the New York Times and others write pieces speculating on Trump’s health. Trump’s mortality, Trump’s body, becomes the new arena of a contested reality.
Trump responds in a late night rant on his social media platform, Truth Social, denouncing journalists who speculate on presidential fitness as guilty of sedition –
The New York Times, and some others, like to pretend that I am “slowing up,” am maybe not as sharp as I once was, or am in poor physical health, knowing that it is not true, and knowing that I work very hard, probably harder than I have ever worked before. I will know when I am “slowing up,” but it’s not now! After all of the work I have done with Medical Exams, Cognitive Exams, and everything else, I actually believe it’s seditious, perhaps even treasonous, for The New York Times, and others, to consistently do FAKE reports in order to libel and demean “THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.” They are true Enemies of the People, and we should do something about it.
– perhaps even treason.
The impulse is not without precedent. Elizabeth Barton, The Holy Maid of Kent, was hung at Tyburn on April 20 1534, beheaded, her severed head spiked and displayed on London Bridge – the only woman to have been so honoured. She was executed by Henry under England’s Treason Act of 1351, for “compassing” the monarch’s death. An offence that treats mortality itself as a kind of disloyal speech. Barton prophesied that Henry VIII’s “Great Matter” – the annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon and his marriage to courtier’s daughter Anne Boleyn, would end in disaster, and that Henry’s death would soon follow.
Henry VIII’s wives are remembered in simple rhymes; Kate and Anne and Jane and Anne and Cat and Kate (again!) and the grimmer, divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived. This repetition reduces a violent, pathological misogyny to a kind of fable, a parlour game, a nursery rhyme; a mythic construction of reality.
Henry also massacred pilgrims, burned down monasteries and slaughtered monks, and is suspected in some quarters of pitching Anne Boleyn’s beloved little dog, Pourquoy out the window.
Trump is no less misogynistic, no less authoritarian, no less a brute, no less a glutton, no less a myth, no less a fable.
Dr Stacey Patton argues the controlled release of the Epstein Files has been a process of psychological conditioning, one that has proceeded from distraction to noise.
We’ve been watching information about elite criminality being released in fragments. Some names today. Some documents next month. A headline here. A shrug there. This strategy trains the public to metabolize horror in manageable doses. Not to act, not to demand, but to absorb so that all this evil just gets turned into background noise…The public is being shown just enough to know the truth, and to understand that nothing is going to happen.
This isn’t noise. This is spectacle. As with the genocide of the Palestinians by Israel, Trump and his collaborators, we are reduced by endless debate from an outraged public to a consuming audience –one that in speculation leaves reality contested, and therefore unable to be acted upon. We do not live in the real moment. Like Schrödinger’s cat, we live in the oscillation between potentialities. We are in the ring. We know it is rigged, we both know and don’t know who will always win.
What can we do, to escape the box, but turn the tables.
Lewis Carroll, Alice In Wonderland
Fey psychic Jean Barrowman knew I wanted to ask about someone’s death even before I posed the question. Did you know it was Trump’s death?
“Yes,” she replies with dark eyes almost aglow.
She uses an ancestral name when practising the fey, a skill she says she inherited from her Scottish forebears, “My grandmother knew the dead,” she tells me, “and I have a little of that – impressions.”
“How?”
She fixes me again with dark eyes, almost agleam, “I see Trump keeling off a podium with a sudden stroke, something green on the backdrop behind him. That’s the only vision I’ve seen, I don’t usually interpret or even tell anyone. I get these presentiments usually only when it affects me or someone close.”
Professional British internet medium and astrologer, who goes by the name “Cosmic Monica” refuses to participate. “Your project sounds fascinating and I wish you the best of luck. Unfortunately, due to the nature of this, I don’t feel comfortable proceeding.”
Monica’s reluctance probably doesn’t stem from the fact that “compassing the death of the Monarch” remains an offence under the UK’s treason statute. Despite apparent foregoing all sovereignty, Trump is not king of the UK. It is indisputable that in June 2025, coinciding with Trump’s 79th birthday, across the US millions marched under “No Kings” banners. Millions more watched WWE’s King Of The Ring match broadcast live from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. In the stadiums, in the streets, in living rooms, millions gorge and scream at the spectacle. The US is a nation who for all their cries of freedom, loves, and loves to disdain the overseer. To oppose a king, you must first elevate that king.
In Antigone, in Oedipus Rex, in so many of our ancient myths that concern themselves with the folly and hubris of kings, one maxim holds true; whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad. Another, perhaps more of a plot device, also holds; the more we resist the fate decreed for us, the more we are driven to the madness of its inevitability.
George R R Martin’s impish power broker Tyrion Lannister in Game of Throneswhen asked threateningly how he wants to die replies, “In my own bed, with a belly full of wine and a maiden’s mouth around my cock.” This is not a scene we want to see repeated in the sequel to the film Melania. We are, nevertheless, left with the question, how will Trump die?
The Gods are the highest, and cheapest seats in the arena. It is from these heights we watch. It is in the moment of observation that the oscillation ends and reality consolidates. There are innumerable forms of divination available, in real life, on the internet, and in the oscillation between the two, Which is a work, and which a shoot, who can tell? It’s all part of the spectacle. If we compass Trump’s death, if we speculate, if we laugh, roar, fume, and share those prognostications, are we not Gods? Along with The New York Times, how can we not drive him mad?
Trump will die sooner rather than later, and unless he radically changes electoral terms defined in the US constitution he will not be the next US President. The spectacle, a chaotic and carefully arranged conflagration, is eternal. It changes shape. It changes colour, it changes heads.
Think of it as an ugly crown for a nation that at once worships and disdains its kings.
Lewis Carroll, Alice In Wonderland
