Shortly after the November election, Zani Sunshine filmed a TikTok video for her more than 400,000 followers about “what you need to do in order to be prepared for the madness.” With her long blonde braids tumbling over a simple gray zip-front pullover, Sunshine then outlined the fundamentals of what is widely known as “prepping,” or the work of proactively preparing for disaster, whether natural or manmade.

This story was originally reported by Jennifer Gerson of The 19th. Meet Jennifer and read more of her reporting on gender, politics and policy.

In her post-election video, the veteran off-grid prepper emphasizes the need to gather shelf-stable food, store water, have a first aid kit and a trauma kit, take firearm lessons and prepare for an emergency exit, which requires a go-bag for each family member with enough personal supplies to last them 48 to 72 hours.

As of today, the nearly 2-minute video has been viewed 1.6 million times.

“The current political climate is definitely bringing people to my account,” said Sunshine, who often appears on her social channel in colorful, comfortable clothing. “People are really scared and my predominant demographic is Black women because Black women are like, ‘OK — what can I do to prepare my family? To think ahead?’”

A Black woman who lives off the grid with her husband and youngest child surrounded by greenery and birds in rural New Mexico, Sunshine may not fit the stereotype of a survivalist or prepper. Her easy, calm demeanor exudes through her popular videos in which she makes jokes with her husband or gathers eggs from her chickens. A self-described introvert, she playfully parodies TikTok trends as she shares preparedness advice and promotes her books, which focus on risk assessment, self-sufficiency and self-reliance.

A quick search for “prepping” on social media will turn up countless accounts detailing plans like those Sunshine discusses in her post-election video. The majority of these accounts are run by White men, often with military-adjacent aesthetics: Men with sweeping beards dressed in camo model their tactical gear in their doomsday bunkers.

But there are more and more people who do not fit that mold. Beyond those first search results are a small — but growing — community made up of people who look very much like Sunshine: Black women who are gaining social media prominence by influencing on preparedness, especially for an audience of other Black women. And given the current political climate, this audience has never been bigger or more invested.

In the r/preppers community on Reddit, the conversation is largely dominated by worry over whether President Donald Trump’s tariffs — amid the chaos of international talks and court rulings — will cause shortages of everything from toilet paper and toothpaste to basic food items. On this platform, people who have never prepped before describe loading up their SUVs at Costco, trying to anticipate what they most need in imagining a world with empty shelves. But for women like Sunshine, thinking about being prepared happened long before Trump took office for a second time — even if his reelection has also meant a marked increase in interest in her content. For the Black women who have been involved in prepping since before November 5, 2024, nothing about this moment feels surprising — it’s literally what they have been preparing for.

Sunshine is from Atlanta originally, and began making moves into prepping in the lead-up to the 2016 election between now-President Trump and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Feeling “that something was going to happen in society and that we weren’t going to be prepared,” she started doing the kinds of things she now advises her followers to do — buying an extra bag of rice when they go to the grocery store, picking up an extra flat of bottled water.

Five years later when COVID-19 hit, she felt compelled to make even bigger changes. She and her husband bought a travel trailer and with their youngest son, then 8, drove from Atlanta to New Mexico — where her husband is from — and bought land where they constructed a homestead. They now have their own septic system, a large solar system, a bigger, two-bedroom, full bathroom travel trailer, an additional guest trailer for visitors and a chicken coop.

Sharon Ross is another Black woman — and seasoned survivalist — who was thinking about preparedness well before Trump took office. Online, she is known as the Afrovivalist, a persona she often deploys as part of her preparedness consulting business.

Ross said that through her work, she is hearing from a lot of people of all races, ethnicities and ages who are reaching out for preparedness information. “White people saying, ‘I didn’t know this was going to happen. I shouldn’t have voted for that president,” she said of many of these calls from those newly concerned about shortages.

For Ross, the wake-up call was Hurricane Katrina: She was living in Portland, Oregon, at the time and found herself glued to the news as the storm decimated New Orleans, and in particular the Lower Ninth Ward, a predominantly Black neighborhood. She watched as survivors — including many Black women — said they regretted not preparing and not thinking that anything was actually going to happen. She decided she needed to start preparing — stockpiling rice and beans and building up her supplies — for whatever might happen next. “It opened up my eyes to the fact that I wasn’t ready for something like that.”

Preparing for the next disaster — of any kind — feels even more imperative today, according to Ross. She remembers after the 2016 election when Trump’s “followers were so proud. You can obviously tell who was racist and who wasn’t. People started coming out of the woodwork,” she said, as she heard more and more racist slurs. It was what first inspired her to get firearms training.

And like Sunshine, the pandemic also changed everything for Ross.

As a member of the state of Oregon’s radiological emergency response team, Ross was required by her job to take the new COVID vaccine. She wasn’t comfortable doing so. “I woke up on my 57th birthday, prayed about it, and said, ‘I’m leaving my job.’” She bought land in rural Washington state and started establishing a homestead. Today, she has 66 acres of land, a chandelier hanging in one of her cabins — she has built several herself, in addition to a pantry and prep house — on her property. Her grandchildren are going to spend time on the land this summer, she said, to start to learn how to homestead themselves.

In her online life today, Sunshine sees the kind of fear she sensed during the pandemic. “With this new administration, people are even more scared and they actually ready to start getting prepared now, especially urban people, Black people, people of color — because traditionally, preppers have been White, you know, and other communities weren’t even really thinking about it. But now everything has changed and people are really, really deciding to do something about it.”

Sunshine said that on social media, she hears from a lot of people — namely Black women — who say how inspiring she is to them, women who reach out and share that because of her, they also bought land or developed a food storage system — and feel more secure and empowered for it. With her message that prepping is for everyone — that it can be accessible, doable, and not scary — she’s built a loyal and diverse audience who eagerly look to her for advice and guidance. They tell her that compared to other prepping accounts they encounter, hers helps them feel more calm and secure instead of scared.

It’s a different perspective than that of White preppers, Ross said. “We as people of color have went through the struggle, we knew, we saw it was coming, we believed every word that that person said about what he was going to do, but everybody else was too mixed up with the whole, ‘I don’t want a Black woman telling me what to do.’”

Sunshine said that since Trump’s reelection, she is encountering more racist comments on her social media channels, too. “People feel more emboldened,” she said. The kind of racism and “nasty comments” she encounters online are part of the very dynamic that she thinks is bringing even more Black women into prepping. “It’s just a different climate overall and people don’t feel safe … The unknowns have increased. The potential for everything going off the rails has increased.”

“As a Black woman, I am vulnerable,” Ross said of the climate today, especially in the predominantly all White rural community in which she lives. “If this continues, I feel like we're going to be hunted in the future — you know, back to slavery days.”

It’s part of why Sunshine said she wants more Black women to be knowledgeable about prepping — and realize it is for them, the same as she wants it to be for everyone, too.

“It provides a level of security. It decreases stress when you’re worried about everything that’s going on in the world, when you know that if everything were to go crazy outside your doors, that you can hunker down in your home for an extended period of time and have everything that you need,” Sunshine said. “So it’s not about being scared. There’s this hashtag I use for my business #preparednotscared — it’s all about decreasing the fear.”

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Until recently, the young women at the forefront of conservative politics were largely evangelical Protestants. They looked like the kind of young women you might see showing their OOTDs on RushTok, marrying a certain Southern-bred feminine aesthetic with a defense of President Donald Trump. These young women aren’t fading into the background during the start of the second Trump administration, but they now have company.

This story was originally reported by Jennifer Gerson and Mariel Padilla of The 19th. Meet Jennifer and Mariel and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.

Young Catholic women have emerged as instrumental messengers of the MAGA message. While much has been made of Vice President JD Vance’s Catholicism and the role it plays in his politics, less attention is given to the young women talking about their Catholic faith — Instagram influencers like Isabel Brown, staffers at the pro-Trump America First Policy Institute and Jayme Franklin, founder and CEO of the online conservative women’s magazine The Conservateur. A new class of influential young women have made the communication of Trumpian politics an extension of their Catholic faith.

About 1 in 5 adults in the United States are Catholic, a significant group that’s split evenly between Republicans and Democrats. Recent polling shows that the younger generation of Catholics is becoming increasingly conservative, particularly in the United States. For many of them, it has come as the parties have become increasingly divided on the issue of abortion and religion’s role in public life. The more conservative American Catholics have gravitated toward Trump — who has claimed credit for eliminating federal abortion rights before saying he would not support a nationwide abortion ban and also established a religious liberty commission.

The Catholic Church itself is at a crossroads after the April 21 death of Pope Francis. Pope Francis had a couple of months earlier issued a letter to the church’s American bishops condemning the Trump administration’s approach to immigration, seemingly criticizing Vance himself for using his Catholic faith to justify the administration’s deportation policies.

On Wednesday, the Catholic Church’s cardinals gathered for a conclave to select the next pope. They’ll also set the direction of the church — picking either someone more progressive, like Francis, or a more conservative choice, who might be more aligned with right-wing American Catholics, some of whom gathered in Rome over the weekend to fundraise and organize.

On Saturday, the White House posted on Instagram a captionless AI-generated image of Trump himself as the pope, upsetting and offending many — but seemingly leaving the young women who have become some of the president’s most vocal supporters online unaffected. (Trump, meanwhile, told reporters Monday, “I have no idea where [the post from the official White House account] came from — maybe it was A.I.” and “They can’t take a joke. You don’t mean the Catholics; you mean the fake news media. The Catholics loved it.”)

Catherine Pakaluk is an associate professor at the Busch School of Business at the Catholic University of America and is an expert on Catholic social thought and political economy. She said an increasingly active anti-abortion movement in the church coincided with the growth of social media, which provided more and more economic opportunities for young women. This eventually created a certain kind of influencer for whom Catholic faith and political ideology are now synonymous.

“They see their work as being meaningful and that their [online engagement] matters politically in the same way that people see social justice as something that is political activity, where you get up in the morning and you think, ‘OK how am I going to help people today?’” Pakaluk said.

One of the most prominent is Isabel Brown, a Gen Z livestreamer and content creator, who frequently discusses conservative politics and culture debates, advocating for traditional Catholic values to more than a million followers. She was featured on the cover of Newsweek, wearing a red MAGA hat, in 2019 and published two books in the last five years calling for Gen Z to embrace so-called traditional values. Brown was in attendance when Trump signed the executive order at the White House banning transgender women and girls from school sports that align with their gender identity and recently posted a critique of liberals’ supposed pearl-clutching about Trump’s proposed “baby bonus” to increase the national birth rate.

Leah Libresco, a freelance journalist and former policy researcher who has written extensively on feminism and Catholicism, stressed that while many of the of the most popular MAGA influencers happen to be Catholic, they do not represent the majority of Catholic women’s political opinions — but do reflect the reality that many Catholic women do not feel like there is a home for them in the Democratic Party today, largely because of the party’s pro-choice stance.

While many of the most high-profile practicing Catholics in politics lately have been Democrats, including former President Joe Biden and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the Catholics now driving Republican politics are younger and more conservative. Not only is Vance a vocal Catholic convert, but Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, has spoken about the impact of attending a Catholic high school and Benedictine College. Over Easter weekend, Catholics for Catholics — the heart of far-right wing Catholicism in the United States — hosted its annual gathering and gala at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.

Conservative Gen Z Catholic influencers are being embraced by their party even as more progressive Catholic women feel shut out of liberal organizing spaces because of their belief that being anti-abortion is part of a larger, holistic approach to working to honor the sanctity and dignity of all life.

“I think a lot of the challenge for the faith right now is to try and talk about Catholicism as a whole unified faith and not just the little pieces that get snipped off as essentially controversial, so that you are making the case that pro-life activism for children who are disvalued in the womb is united to advocacy for the disabled is united to advocacy for the poor is united to advocacy for their caregivers,” Libresco said.

There’s another reason that social media is a natural fit for younger people looking to express their political, and religious, ideology — especially young women, Libresco added.

“I think when you have a platform that’s very photo- and video-oriented in the way that TikTok or Instagram is, you’re going to see that as creating different opportunities for very young women than those that are text-based and what they create for older women and that’s because people want to look at very young women,” she said.

Some of the most prominent Catholic voices on the right are converts, including Vance. One of the most controversial is Candace Owens, a far-right personality who rose to prominence as a Trump supporter and was fired from The Daily Wire in March 2024 for a series of antisemitic comments. The following month, she announced a conversion to Catholicism and was met with excitement from some Catholics online. She was immediately invited to Scottsdale, Arizona, for a welcome Mass that more than 200,000 people watched online. Then a month later when she posted pictures of her baptism in London, the Catholic Identity Conference — an annual event hosted by a traditionalist Catholic newspaper that often criticized the progressiveness of Pope Francis’ actions and teachings — announced she would be a headliner that fall.

Katherine Dugan, an associate professor at Springfield University and the author of “Millennial Missionaries: How a Group of Young Catholics is Trying to Make Catholicism Cool,” said that while the majority of Catholics are not enamored with “the moral life of Trump,” the influencers who have made their Catholicism synonymous with their politics are able to capitalize on a more widely felt sentiment that Trump represents “the lesser of two evils in a landscape where you have to choose between trans rights, abortion, and no religion in schools and the opposite of that.”

And though a minority voice within the world of mainstream Catholicism, Dugan said the women who have become key messengers of the Trump agenda are promoting not just a political message, but a version of Catholicism that they view as correct to other people’s wrong, more liberal Catholicism.

“My read is less that the politics are a necessary part of being Catholic in America, but they’re making a strategic choice to sort of pick a side of the spectrum that tastes a little better in their interpretation of the politics,” Dugan said.

Dugan explained that while this political ideology may not represent the majority of contemporary Catholics, a recent concerted movement to bring more young people into Catholicism has focused on young women — and offered them “a version of feminism that is different than second wave and even third wave feminism.”

This push stems from work done by Pope John Paul II in the early 1990s around what became known as “JPII feminism.” It was a kind of rebuke of the contemporary feminist movement, a disavowal of the idea that the way for women to assert greater power was to be thought of as like men.

“There’s this sense that culture has done women an injustice and in order to reclaim their power — like reclaiming the sanctity of life — they must reclaim a woman’s position in the world, which is that women need to not be like men,” Dugan said. “Women are to be women, and that’s how we celebrate God’s vision for all of human life.”

It has resulted in a unique cultural moment, Dugan said, where “Catholics understand their capacity to use Trump as a messenger, even if he is an accidental messenger, a great messenger for the dignity of human life” that is echoed through the way Trump talks about everything from abortion to increasing the birth rate to protecting women in sports.

And part of using Trump as a messenger means a cottage industry popping up of young women who both understand the power of Trump to act on their values, the power of social media to reach new audiences, and the power of the influencer economy to make new opportunities for themselves.

Part of this is also a natural side effect of a generation for whom social media is a native language. While evangelicals had a heavy radio presence throughout the 80s and into the beginning of the 21st century, “what has happened in the last 10 years is that Catholics woke up and figured out they’re not doing radio, but they’ve leaned pretty heavily into social media generally, especially in podcasting,” Pakaluk said.

“It’s still fringy, it’s not majority — but they are influential,” Pakaluk said of the emergence of the young women Catholic right-wing influencers. “I know a lot of young Catholic women who, like evangelical women before them, say it’s their number one interest after finishing college and before they get married to go down to Washington and be a staffer on Capitol Hill or work for think tanks. They want to change the world.”

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It feels like nowadays, you can’t talk about the professionalized world of fighting for entertainment without talking about Donald Trump.

Earlier this month, Trump and several Cabinet members sat cageside at the UFC match in Miami; Trump himself holds a spot in the WWE Hall of Fame, where his official bio page notes that he’s the first WWE Hall of Famer to hold the presidency. Ahead of last weekend’s annual WrestleMania, wrestling news sites were abuzz with rumors that the president might again be ringside. At the same time, one of professional wrestling’s biggest stars, Roman Reigns, made headlines for declaring himself as a Trump supporter.

This story was originally reported by Jennifer Gerson of The 19th.

The former CEO of WWE, Vince McMahon, is a longtime friend of the president’s and financial supporter of his political endeavors; McMahon’s now-estranged wife, Linda, is also a former WWE CEO and a current member of Trump’s Cabinet. And the CEO of UFC, Dana White, introduced Trump before he spoke on the final night of last summer’s Republican National Convention — Hulk Hogan also spoke, ripping off his shirt to reveal Trump/Vance campaign merch — and attended Trump’s inauguration in January.

The kinds of theatrics baked into the massive success of professional wrestling have been on display throughout Trump’s ascendency in American politics. On the campaign trail and now in the White House, a Trump event has a distinctive feel, a well-honed blend of spectacle, pageantry and hypermasculinity. It’s a style that feels lifted from the professional wrestling handbook, where aesthetics and narrative device choices are central to the delivery. In professional wrestling, this product is a form of entertainment that lets fans — predominantly young men — openly feel and freely celebrate masculinity. In the second Trump administration, the product is a barrage of new policy measures intent on crafting a very specific version of America where the feelings of men are prioritized and their power is irrefutable.

Though not a part of the action in the ring, there’s another significant tie between professional fighting and the Trump administration: allegations of sexual misconduct that have stretched back for decades. Vince McMahon, the visionary showman who made professional wrestling into the cultural force it is today, built the persona of “Mr. McMahon” around being a womanizing, vindictive philanderer — and today faces real-life accusations of sex trafficking, which he has denied. Donald Trump, the visionary showman who reshaped American politics in the mold of reality television, built his industry-spanning brand in part around the idea of being the consummate ladies’ man — and won the presidency for the first time just weeks after the “Access Hollywood” tape leaked in which Trump boasted, “And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything….Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”

Central to the concept of professional wrestling is the practice of kayfabe, or committing to the illusion that clearly staged events are real and true. It’s a narrative device that asks audiences to suspend their disbelief, not in a way of passive acceptance, but rather active participation in the creation of what is possible.

“It really does matter how well you’re doing the performance, but then what also really matters is how much the audience is going to buy into it. If they’re emotionally connected, that’s where the buy-in comes in,” said CarrieLynn Reinhard, an associate professor of communication arts and sciences at Dominican University and an expert on narrative devices in professional wrestling. “When you look at what Trump does, he is very good at getting to people’s emotions and understanding their emotions and — I’m going to say — manipulating their emotions for his own goals, and in doing so, he focuses on a reality that he believes in or at least he performs to believe in.”

Reinhard pointed to Trump’s rollout of tariffs — which he touted as immediately bolstering the economy even as markets tumbled — as an example of this dynamic. “What’s interesting is that with that little bit of doubt, his followers, his fans, they have the ability to engage in that rationalization that allows them to say, ‘He’s got a plan.’”

The gimmicks

Professional wrestling is immensely popular in America, one of the most enduring and dominant forms of pop culture of the past three decades. Just last year, the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) merged with the WWE under one new parent company, TKO. UFC is now the fourth-most watched sports league in America, after MLB, the NFL and the NBA.

And the people who made UFC and WWE what they are today are also inextricably intertwined with the creation and actions of the dual Trump presidencies.

By the time Trump mounted his first campaign during the 2016 presidential race, the McMahons were already major Republican donors. Linda, the former CEO of WWE and the current secretary of education, contributed a total of $7.2 million to two pro-Trump super PACs that cycle — Rebuilding America Now and Future45 — and the couple together donated more than $10 million to outside groups funding Trump’s race for the presidency. The McMahons also supported Trump before he formally entered politics, donating $5 million to the Trump Foundation in 2007.

Linda McMahon’s ability and facility in playing a role — a skill honed during her time as not only a WWE executive but also an on-screen performer — is essential to understanding her nomination within this administration, according to Kelly Dittmar, an associate professor of political science and the director of research at the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.

In naming her to his Cabinet, Trump “chose somebody who was willing to work herself out of a job. He had to find somebody that was willing to go and sit at a confirmation hearing and try to explain how she wanted to be the secretary of education, but also effectively get rid of the Department of Education, which is an incredibly hard position to be put in,” Dittmar said.

It feels not dissimilar to a part she had in what is considered by many fans to be one of the most infamous WWE storylines, playing comatose in a wheelchair for weeks before ultimately rising from her supposed catatonic state inside the ring to kick her philandering husband in the groin on live TV.

This time, of course,, the shock ending isn’t revenge for a titillating affair, but effectively shuttering a major federal agency.

Dana White, the CEO of UFC, has also been a longtime fixture in Trumpworld. He spoke at the Republican National Convention in 2016, 2020 and 2024. When it was clear Trump had won a second term last November, White spoke at the victory celebration, saying, “I'm in the tough guy business, and this man is the toughest, most resilient human being that I've ever met in my life.” White has long credited Trump for supporting UFC from its start, hosting UFC matches at Trump properties, attending events cageside, and generally being a champion of the brand of macho entertainment that became explosively popular under White’s watch.

The accusations

The Trump administration and WWE share another overlapping characteristic: The way leaders of both have faced numerous allegations of sexual misconduct and sexual abuse, or of ignoring such misconduct.

Trump, who has been accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women and long surrounded himself with men who have been similarly accused during his time in the public eye, was found liable by a jury in 2023 of sexually abusing and defaming the advice columnist E. Jean Carroll. In his second term, he put forth multiple nominees accused of or linked to sexual misconduct allegations.

White has offered more tacit support in other ways that underscore the misogyny and allegations of criminal sexual misconduct that proliferate in Trumpworld. In March, White welcomed Andrew and Tristan Tate ringside. The brothers — who face charges in Romania, including rape, human trafficking, trafficking of minors and sex with a minor — returned to the United States in February. They have denied any wrongdoing, calling the charges against them “garbage” and part of a “conspiracy.” The Financial Times reported that the Trump administration asked Romanian officials to return the Tates’ passports to them and allow them to travel while the criminal case against them proceeded in court. Trump’s presidential envoy for special missions, Richard Grenell, raised the Tates’ case with the Romanian foreign minister. Additionally, Paul Ingrassia, a former Tate attorney, is now a White House liaison for the Department of Justice.

The McMahons are currently facing a lawsuit accusing them of failing to stop abuse by an employee from the 1970s to the early 1990s. The suit, from “ring boys” who helped with setting up and breaking down wrestling matches, was filed in October. It says that a former WWE employee, Mel Phillips, sexually assaulted the ring boys and that the McMahons fired him in 1988 because of abuse allegations and then rehired him six weeks later. In a February statement, Greg Gutzler, the attorney representing the ring boys, said, “My clients’ lives were destroyed by the defendants who allowed and enabled the open, rampant sexual abuse to occur for years. … We will bring light to their truth and fight for accountability and justice.”

In early April, attorneys for Linda McMahon filed a motion to dismiss the ring boys’ lawsuit, saying that she has no connection to the state of Maryland, where it was filed. She also asserts that she has never met or communicated with the plaintiffs, to the best of her knowledge and memory. Vince McMahon has also denied all wrongdoing. Attorneys for Vince McMahon, Linda McMahon and WWE did not respond to The 19th’s request for comment.

Linda McMahon’s time in the WWE, including the ring boys' suit, was barely a topic in her February confirmation hearing.

Tom Cole was the first of the ring boys to come forward with allegations about sexual abuse while employed by WWE, according to his brother, Lee Cole. Tom Cole died by suicide in 2021.

Lee Cole said that he thinks people have failed to take the allegations against the McMahons seriously because of their ties to wrestling. “This has always been a wrestling story, and people have always known wrestling has been faked. And so they look down at these things, not knowing whether it’s a job — whether they’re pulling a job — or whether it’s real. They don’t know. People don’t take wrestling seriously,” Cole said.

Cole said he understands that there has been an increase in attention around the McMahons and the ring boys' lawsuit as a result of Linda McMahon’s role within the Trump administration. Too often, he said, he has seen reporters miss the mark by focusing their stories on the McMahons through the lens of Trump.

But to understand Trump, you need to understand the McMahons, the way they have used power, fame, and the ability to craft narratives that keep fans invested in the WWE brand and willing to dismiss the naysayers.

As a Trump supporter, Cole said he can see the appeal McMahon holds for the administration.

“They’re entertainers. Linda McMahon is an entertainer. She was part of the entertainment world. Why else would Donald Trump love her so much? He’s an entertainer.”

The ring boys’ suit isn’t the only accusation of misconduct against the McMahons. In 2024, Vince McMahon was sued by former employee Janel Grant; in her suit, Grant accuses McMahon of sex trafficking, making her employment contingent on engaging in a sexual relationship with him and being sexually available to others within WWE. WWE and former WWE executive, John Laurinaitis, are named as defendants in the suit as well. All defendants in Grant’s lawsuit have denied all wrongdoing. Attorneys for Vince McMahon and WWE did not respond to The 19th’s request for comment.

When it comes to the allegations of sexual assault against both Trump and McMahon, Reinhard said she sees “the double whammy of the toxic masculinity that still accepts and promotes — something we are seeing more of now since Trump won — the idea that women are supposed to be controlled and then the idea that if you’ve got the money and you’ve got the time, you’re able to essentially spend your way out of these allegations, spend your way out of any charges and essentially wait out the public debate until people forget about it.”

The feelings

Both Trump and professional wrestling are massive cultural entities that allow men to express their emotions, especially about their own masculinity. In the ring and now in the White House, men’s feelings matter — especially when it comes to defending their own identities and the men who give them that space to publicly feel and perform. “The idea of emotions being antithetical to politics really needs to be addressed, because they’re not just emotions — they’re a motivating force,” Reinhard said.

In the administration, the feelings lead to policies that promote a world where men can not only feel freely, but control the levers of society to make space for these feelings, too.

Letting voters get caught up in the fandom makes the unprecedented policy decisions all the more possible. From tariffs that threaten to raise daily costs on voters who say they voted because of the economy, to DOGE cuts resulting in job and program losses that are upending economic security for many, to a proclamation for National Sexual Assault Awareness and Prevention Month from a sitting president found liable for sexual abuse in 2023, the second Trump administration has taken to operating in a way that constantly asks constituents to not just accept but actively buy in to a reality that runs counter to the facts on the ground. It’s kayfabe for government: Creating a world for men to freely express emotion and set policies with no limits — and no consequences — for violating once accepted standards and norms.

The second Trump administration is showcasing a “much more extreme” version of the first Trump term’s commitment to “dismantling a particular version of politics on the Hill,” said Sarah Banet-Weiser, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania whose research focuses on gender, media and politics. “And if you dismantle those politics, you know, you have to replace them with something,” Banet-Weiser said.

And what remains is a stoking of men’s feelings in the wake of a slew of public policy decisions that in turn provoke even more emotion — even when the feelings run counter to the facts. The difference between reality television as entertainment and reality television as a political system is the consequences, Banet-Weiser said. “It’s not a group of housewives who fight and are riddled with scandal and then go on with their lives. It’s about the livelihoods of the American people.”

Grace Panetta contributed reporting to this story.

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