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Let’s begin by assuming you’re not planning to watch WrestleMania this weekend. World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), with its ridiculous bombast and barbaric violence, has turned people off for decades. Yet its popularity—not to mention its profound influence on American culture and politics—persists. Below, I explain why.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

The first electoral test of Trump’s indictment Something odd is happening with handbags. Childbirth is no fun. But an extremely fast birth can be even worse.

The Man in the Arena

WWE can be eerily prophetic. Had you watched WrestleMania 23, back in 2007, for instance, you would have seen a future president of the United States, Donald Trump, standing in the ring with a devilish smile, preparing to humiliate the WWE head honcho, Vince McMahon.

Although scores of articles have been written about the connections between wrestling and Trumpism, comparatively little is understood about McMahon—who, in reality, is one of Trump’s close friends. (During the 2016 campaign, McMahon was reportedly on the extremely small list of individuals whose phone calls Trump would take in private; his wife, Linda, went on to serve in Trump’s Cabinet.) A new biography of McMahon, Ringmaster, came out earlier this week, and I spent some time with its author, Abraham Josephine Riesman, trying to unpack the book’s principal argument: that McMahon and WWE led to “the unmaking of America.” McMahon reigned over the thorny world of professional wrestling until last summer, when he stepped down from his position as CEO and chairman following an alleged sex scandal and related hush-money payments. (Sound familiar?) He returned as chairman at the beginning of this year, after the WWE’s investigation into the allegations concluded.

What McMahon understood better than anyone was that the physical act of wrestling was just one element of what the audience wanted. Millions of people flock to WWE for the monthslong story lines, the operatic entrances, the cheeky backstage drama. Wrestlers seize the mic and deliver fired-up speeches filled with taunts, zingers, and thrilling call-and-response sections. Trump grew up a wrestling fan and mastered these arena-style linguistics. His rallies, his debates, his interviews, his social-media posts—no matter the venue, Trump relied on WWE tactics. When he launched his first presidential campaign back in 2015, this approach was shocking to some. And even more shocking when it worked.

The 45th president is not scheduled to make a cameo at this weekend’s WrestleMania. At the moment, he’s preparing to turn himself in to the authorities in New York City on Tuesday following yesterday’s grand-jury indictment. One of Trump’s congressional acolytes, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, announced that she, too, will be in New York on Tuesday: “We MUST protest the unconstitutional WITCH HUNT!” she tweeted today. Greene has also used WWE tools to propel herself to elected office. Earlier this year, during President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address, Greene heckled him, not unlike a WWE fan screaming from the sidelines.

I’ve watched a lot of old wrestling clips in recent weeks. Specifically, I went down a rabbit hole of interviews with the wrestler Ric Flair. Flair routinely boasted of his alligator shoes, his Rolex watch, his libido. His absurd brag—“I’ve got a limousine sittin’ out there a mile long!”—may or may not make you think of Trump and/or his first press secretary, Sean Spicer, whose use of hyperbole was, shall we say, unrestrained.

I texted some of these outlandish Ric Flair videos to friends. In response, a buddy pointed me to an October 29, 1985, speech from Flair’s former wrestling nemesis, Dusty Rhodes, a.k.a. “The American Dream.” The grainy YouTube clip of Rhodes’s monologue has more than 2.6 million views. It’s three and a half minutes long, and worth watching in its entirety.

Whereas Flair’s oratory is all “me,” Rhodes takes the approach of “we.” Rhodes ticks off examples of challenges that everyday Americans face, something that the stylin’, profilin’ Flair could never understand. His speech has a decidedly Grapes of Wrath feel to it. “Hard times are when the autoworkers are out of work and they tell ’em, ‘Go home!’” Rhodes shouts. “And hard times are when a man is workin’ a job 30 years—30 years!—they give him a watch, kick him in the butt, and say, ‘Hey, a computer took your place, daddy!’ That’s hard times!” Trump, for all of his abhorrent narcissism, shrewdly uses the “we”—specifically, the us-versus-them—approach in nearly all of his campaign speeches to similar effect. When headlining this month’s CPAC conference, he sounded not only like a vengeful pro wrestler, but like someone seething with menace: “I am your retribution.”

This year’s WrestleMania title match will be between the current champion, the hulking Roman Reigns, and Rhodes’s 37-year-old son, Cody. The younger Rhodes is a cocky blonde who leans heavily into American-flag iconography, wears a business suit and power tie, and goes by “The American Nightmare.” (Again: Sound familiar?)

WrestleMania used to be available on pay-per-view, but now it’s a two-night event streaming on Peacock on April 1 and 2. I am not the die-hard wrestling fan I was back in middle school, but I’ll likely dip in and out of the broadcast to catch a few of the monologues, if not the matches. I don’t want to go so far as to predict that a future president will enter the ring, as was the case in 2007. But I wouldn’t rule that possibility out.

Related:

How wrestling explains America Donald Trump, wrestling heel

Today’s News

After a grand jury voted to indict Donald Trump yesterday, he will likely be arraigned on Tuesday. One of his lawyers said that the former president is prepared to go to trial. The Minneapolis City Council approved an agreement with the state of Minnesota to revamp its policing system, nearly three years after George Floyd’s murder. A “high risk” storm alert—a rare weather designation reserved for severe events—was issued for parts of the American Midwest and mid-South.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: Maya Chung explores what California means to writers. Work in Progress: Derek Thompson unravels why Americans care about work so much.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic

The Influencer Industry Is Having an Existential Crisis

By Kaitlyn Tiffany

Close to 5 million people follow Influencers in the Wild. The popular Instagram account makes fun of the work that goes into having a certain other kind of popular Instagram account: A typical post catches a woman (and usually, her butt) posing for photos in public, often surrounded by people but usually operating in total ignorance or disregard of them. In the comments, viewers—aghast at the goofiness and self-obsession on display—like to say that it’s time for a proverbial asteroid to come and deliver the Earth to its proverbial fiery end.

Influencers in the Wild has been turned into a board game with the tagline “Go places. Gain followers. Get famous. (no talent required)” And you get it because social-media influencers have always been, to some degree, a cultural joke. They get paid to post photos of themselves and to share their lives, which is something most of us do for free. It’s not real work.

But it is, actually. Influencers and other content creators are vital assets for social-media companies such as Instagram, which has courted them with juicy cuts of ad revenue in a bid to stay relevant, and TikTok, which flew some of its most famous creators out to D.C. last week to lobby for its very existence.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The woolly-mammoth meatball is an all-time great food stunt. The rise of AI Taylor Swift Photos of the week: a tattoo convention in Ecuador, a sunrise over Rio de Janeiro, and more

Culture Break

Chris Reel / Prime Video

Read. “The Vendor of New Hearts,” a poem by Colin Channer.

“Once way far in time in a village coiled from stone / I met an elder in a teahouse. He proposed, and I said yes / I’ll join you, and we walked together to the vendor of new hearts.”

Watch. Swarm, Donald Glover’s horror-comedy (on Amazon Prime), has a twisted take on celebrity culture.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Tomorrow, April 1, marks the 20th anniversary of the White Stripes’ Elephant, one of the defining rock albums of the new millennium. You surely know the inescapable earworm “Seven Nation Army,” but I think the peak of the record is track eight, “Ball and Biscuit,” a swaggering garage-blues romp.

P.P.S. An impeccable list of records also turn 20 this year: Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief, Jay Z’s The Black Album, Death Cab for Cutie’s Transatlanticism, OutKast’s Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, My Morning Jacket’s It Still Moves, Songs: Ohia’s The Magnolia Electric Co., and the Strokes’ Room on Fire, to name just a few. As you settle into this Friday night, pour yourself a drink and crank the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Fever to Tell, yet another 2003 banger. Here’s a great clip of Karen O and the band crushing “Y Control” on Late Night With Conan O’Brien.

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

AI Taylor Swift is mad. She is calling up Kim Kardashian to complain about her “lame excuse of a husband,” Kanye West. (Kardashian and West are, in reality, divorced.) She is threatening to skip Europe on her Eras Tour if her fans don’t stop asking her about international dates. She is insulting people who can’t afford tickets to her concerts and using an unusual amount of profanity. She’s being kind of rude.

But she can also be very sweet. She gives a vanilla pep talk: “If you are having a bad day, just know that you are loved. Don’t give up!” And she just loves the outfit you’re wearing to her concert.

She is also a fan creation. Based on tutorials posted to TikTok, many Swifities are using a program to create hyper-realistic sound bites using Swift’s voice and then circulating them on social media. The tool, the beta of which was launched in late January by ElevenLabs, offers “Instant Voice Cloning.” In effect, it allows you to upload an audio sample of a person’s voice and make it say whatever you want. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty good. The audio has some tonal hitches here and there, but it tends to sound pretty natural—close enough to fool you if you aren’t paying enough attention. Dark corners of the internet immediately used it to make celebrities say abusive or racist things; ElevenLabs said in response that it “can trace back any generated audio to the user” and would consider adding more guardrails—such as manually verifying every submission.

Whether it’s done this is unclear. After I forked over $1 to try the technology myself—a discounted rate for the first month—my upload was approved nearly instantly. The slowest part of the process was finding a clear one-minute audio clip of Swift to use as a source for my custom AI voice. Once that was approved, I was able to use it to create fake audio right away. The entire process took less than five minutes. ElevenLabs declined to comment about its policies or the ability to use its technology to fake Taylor Swift’s voice, but it provided a link to its guidelines about voice cloning. The company told The New York Times earlier this month that it wants to create a “universal detection system” in collaboration with other AI developers.

The arrival of AI Taylor Swift feels like a teaser for what’s to come in a strange new era defined by synthetic media, when the boundaries between real and fake might blur into meaninglessness. For years, experts have warned that AI would lead us to a future of infinite misinformation. Now that world is here. But in spite of apocalyptic expectations, the Swift fandom is doing just fine (for now). AI Taylor shows us how human culture can evolve alongside more and more complex technology. Swifties, for the most part, don’t seem to be using the tool maliciously: They’re using it for play and to make jokes among themselves. Giving fans this tool is “like giving them a new kind of pencil or a paintbrush,” explains Andrea Acosta, a Ph.D. candidate at UCLA who studies K-pop and its fandom. They are exploring creative uses of the technology, and when someone seems to go too far, others in the community aren’t afraid to say so.  

[Read: Welcome to the big blur]

In some ways, fans might be uniquely well prepared for the fabricated future: They have been having conversations about the ethics of using real people in fan fiction for years. And although every fandom is different, researchers say these communities tend to have their own norms and be somewhat self-regulating. They can be some of the internet’s most diligent investigators. K-pop fans, Acosta told me, are so good at parsing what’s real and what’s fake that sometimes they manage to stop misinformation about their favorite artist from circulating. BTS fans, for example, have been known to call out factual inaccuracies in published articles on Twitter.  

The possibilities for fans hint at a lighter side of audio and video produced by generative AI. “There [are] a lot of fears—and a lot of them are very justified—about deepfakes and the way that AI is going to kind of play with our perceptions of what reality is,” Paul Booth, a professor at DePaul University who has studied fandoms and technology for two decades, told me. “These fans are kind of illustrating different elements of that, which is the playfulness of technology and the way that it can always be used in the kind of fun and maybe more engaging ways.”

But AI Taylor Swift’s viral spread on TikTok adds a wrinkle to these dynamics. It’s one thing to debate the ethics of so-called real-person fiction among fans in a siloed corner of the internet, but on such a large and algorithmically engineered platform, the content can instantly reach a huge audience. The Swifties playing with this technology share a knowledge base, but other viewers may not. “They know what she has said and what she hasn’t said, right? They’re almost immediately able to clock, Okay, this is an AI; she never said that,” Lesley Willard, the program director for the Center for Entertainment and Media Industries at the University of Texas at Austin, told me. “It’s when they leave that space that it becomes more concerning.”

Swifties on TikTok are already establishing norms regarding the voice AI, based at least in part on how Swift herself might feel about it. “If a bunch of people start saying, ‘Maybe this isn’t a good idea. It could be negatively affecting her,’” one 17-year-old TikTok Swiftie named Riley told me, “most people really just take that to heart.” Maggie Rossman, a professor at Bellarmine University who studies the Swift fandom, thinks that if Taylor were to come out against specific sound bites or certain uses of the AI voice, then “we’d see it shut down amongst a good part of the fandom.”

But this is challenging territory for artists. They don’t necessarily want to squash their fans’ creativity and the sense of community it builds—fan culture is good for business. In the new world, they’ll have to navigate the tension between allowing some remixing while maintaining ownership of their voice and reputation.

A representative for Swift did not respond to a request for comment on how she and her team are thinking about this technology, but fans are convinced that she’s listening. After her official TikTok account “liked” one video using the AI voice, a commenter exclaimed, “SHES HEARD THE AUDIO,” following up with three crying emoji.

TikTok, for its part, just released new community guidelines for synthetic media. “We welcome the creativity that new artificial intelligence (AI) and other digital technologies may unlock,” the guidelines say. “However, AI can make it more difficult to distinguish between fact and fiction, carrying both societal and individual risks.” The platform does not allow AI re-creations of private people, but gives “more latitude” for public figures—so long as the media is identified as being AI-generated and adheres to the company’s other content policies, including those about misinformation.

But boundary-pushing Swift fans can probably cause only so much harm. They might destroy Ticketmaster, sure, but they’re unlikely to bring about AI armageddon. Booth thinks about all of this in terms of “degrees of worry.”

“My worry for fandom is, like, Oh, people are going to be confused and upset, and it may cause stress,” he said. “My worry with [an AI fabrication of President Joe] Biden is, like, It might cause a nuclear apocalypse.”