Donald Trump and the Kayfabe Presidency

This book examines Donald Trump's longstanding connections to professional wrestling in relation to how he uses and exploits language, and the ways in which he has weaponized going public never before seen in previous administrations. Trump utilizes the language of wrestling to make rhetorical appeals and draws upon its theatrical tactics to redefine expectations of spaces to fundamentally change the nature of political expectations and expression. Wrestling is almost always about stories within a confined space, and Donald Trump inculcated many of its techniques to command an audience with rhetoric. The emotional performance supersedes truth or accuracy; factual exactness matters less than your presentation of the material. As Donald Trump blends performance and public service, social confusion over boundaries has occurred. Theatrical norms, when applied to daily life, generate vastly different reactions than within the artificial confines of an arena. It is notsimply a muddling of public and private, but rather a jumbling of theatrical and generalized social standards. This book examines these aspects and explores how Donald Trump has also utilized well-established presidential tools in completely new ways in an attempt to build the strongest executive branch in American history.

Explores the idea of manufactured realities within the context of the American Presidency Brings insight from theater and performance studies to areas such as presidential rhetoric, political communication, and media and politics Places the unprecedented Trump presidency within the historical context of past administrations

Auteur

Shannon Bow O'Brien is an Assistant Professor of Instruction at the University of Texas at Austin. She specializes in American politics with a focus upon executive politics and presidential rhetoric. Her previous book, Why Presidential Speech Locations Matter: Analyzing Speechmaking from Truman to Obama, was published in 2018.

Contenu
Chapter 1. Introduction.- Chapter 2. Manufacturing Realities: Truth is What You Can Get Away With.- Chapter 3. Wrestling with the Presidency: How Donald Trump Uses Wrestling and Theatrical Tactics in the Public Sphere.- Chapter 4. Going Re'public'an: How Donald Trump Uses Speeches to Target Audiences and Mask Reality.- Chapter 5. Why Does Any of This Matter?: What Can We Learn from These Strategies?.