Donald Trump and the rise of the Pro Wrestling Republicans
And why recognizing this political and cultural realignment — as fake populist and hollow as it might be — is critical to Democrats’ ability to compete going forward.
The Recombobulation Area is a thirteen-time Milwaukee Press Club award-winning weekly opinion column and online publication founded by longtime Milwaukee journalist Dan Shafer. The Recombobulation Area is now part of Civic Media.
Donald Trump is president again, and the chaos, corruption and cruelty that marked his first term is back with a vengeance as we begin his second.
Last November, Republicans won the popular vote for the first time in 20 years. And while that vote was not a landslide and Republicans’ House majority remains slim, Democrats are a party in the wilderness now, with the GOP controlling the presidency and Congress, and appointing the majority of the U.S. Supreme Court. The path forward for those of us who reside left of center is undeniably going to be an arduous one.
But preparing for the battles to come also means better understanding the road that led us here. In the weeks and months since Donald Trump’s electoral victory on Nov. 5, there’s been endless discourse on what Democrats did wrong, or should have done differently, missed an opportunity to do more effectively, and so on.
Some of this has been a helpful, important exercise to assess the party’s losses; some of it has been a familiar type of intraparty arguments set to confirm one's priors or politically advantageous Dem-bashing from the right. But as these autopsies swirl through political conversations, part of me wonders if by focusing so intensely on what Democrats perhaps did wrong, we’re missing what might be the larger story of the 2024 election about what Trump and the Republican Party did right in their campaign.
Now of course, this is not to say these are things about the Trump campaign I agreed with, not by a long shot. His campaign and candidacy has in many ways been just as abhorrent and despicable and genuinely dangerous as anything he’s done or said since descending the infamous escalator in 2015.
But his 2024 campaign more closely resembled the winning one he ran in 2016 than his losing re-election campaign in 2020. Part of this, naturally, is that he was running on his record as president in 2020 — a record Americans rejected at the ballot box by electing Joe Biden — and that both 2016 and 2024 campaigns were able to offer a sort of anti-establishment or anti-incumbency message.
Part of it too, though, is about Trump’s remaking of the Republican Party. Trump has emerged as the singular dominant political figure of the last decade of American politics. The questions about “normalization” of him as a mainstream political figure are over. He’s won. His first election in 2016 may have seemed like a fluke, but winning the popular vote and seeing such a nationwide shift to the right in 2024 makes it all the more real.
It’s more than just the past decade, though. We are at the century’s quarter mark, and it is becoming clear that Trump — and not Barack Obama — has emerged as the most important and most influential leader of the last 25 years, and is in position to have a greater impact on the rest of the 21st Century.
I know; I don’t like it, either. But we need to face the reality of this moment.

Take a look at what happened in Wisconsin last fall. Yes, the state was the closest of the seven swing states. Yes, Wisconsin voted to the left of Michigan and Pennsylvania for the first time since 1988. Yes, Kamala Harris gained more votes in 2024 than Joe Biden did in 2020.
But 68 of Wisconsin’s 72 counties swung to the right, and Trump increased his vote share in every last one of them. Now, it is Donald Trump who has the record for most votes in any one election, receiving 1,697,626 votes toppling Barack Obama’s high water mark from 2008 (1,677,211), much to my millennial liberal chagrin.
This happened for a variety of reasons, of course. The anti-incumbency backlash that’s swept the western world, the larger dissatisfaction with the economy, the hole that Joe Biden put Democrats in by choosing to seek re-election and then delivering perhaps the worst presidential debate performance of all time, just to name a few.
But Trump’s success may go beyond these other factors. In a fairly revealing interview with POLITICO, Trump’s campaign team talked about what went into the success of his campaign on a variety of fronts. What stood out is how they discussed Trump as what the reporter characterized as a “cultural phenomenon” — the MMA fights, Joe Rogan, working at the McDonald’s drive-thru, etc.
The realignment we’re seeing that helped shape the Republican Party’s first popular vote victory in 20 years is not only a political one, but a cultural one, too.
Kid Rock performs at the RNC in Milwaukee. Video by Dan Shafer.
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