Americans are often criticized, whether it be by their European counterparts or their own, “more refined” countrymen, for enjoying the false competition of pro wrestling, this kayfabe — and, it just so happens, that Politico has added to that canon only last month. I’ve long found this an unfair characterization: that somehow Americans are too stupid to understand that the event is artifice, and that some politicians, namely Trump, have exploited their simplicity.

What these commentators fail to realize is that a plurality of the American public regards most of what transpires and has transpired in Washington as kayfabe. If Trump, a WWE personality in his own right, has mastery there, then it’s because he broke the fourth wall of the self-dealing and duplicity that the public has long suspected but could only occasionally glimpse through the chaff of a sympathetic press corps. The Trump presidency is ugly satire, the gilded Gatsby laughingly showing his unopened classic collection before tearing through the untouched libraries of the elites and throwing down their volumes in the street for all to see the philosophically empty vessels that have toasted themselves as the expert class for decades.

Do I like the development? No, I don’t. Because while Trump’s critiques have some merit, they come at a cost, and rather than further a plan for reform, he and his alt-swamp cast intellectuals and institutions as universally bankrupt. The jester should never assume the throne, and that’s what we have today. In response, more to preserve their holdings than conduct a legitimate conservation effort, the establishment has fallen into hysterics and extralegality as it tries to unseat the truth-telling con man with anything and everything that comes to hand.

So really, there’s less kayfabe in D.C. than we’ve had for a long time, and the bouts are that much more damaging and long-lasting as a result because they have real effects for the players — pardons fly thick and fast partly because consequences have crossed the Potomac. This does the American public and its constitutional order little good, but a population so self-satisfied and saturated with entertainment occasionally finds a lion loose in the coliseum’s spectator gallery.