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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

We can’t seem to escape his dark shadow.

Donald Trump has added another shameful chapter in the life of this nation. On Thursday he became the first ex-president to be indicted, by a New York grand jury investigating alleged hush-money payments to a porn star.

The wisdom of the indictment depends in large part on the facts of the case, which right now we know very little about. Is this a selective prosecution, which would be a grave injustice, or is the evidence in this case strong and the indictment, if made against a Donald Jones rather than Donald Trump, defensible? We’ll learn more about the answers to these questions in the days and weeks and months ahead.

If the full ramifications of the indictment are impossible to know at this point, there are some things we can count on. One of them is that in the short term, the indictment will inflame our politics, further outrage the former president’s supporters, and create in them an even greater sense of grievance and vengeance. This will become their rallying cry; Trump will become their martyr.

Republicans will vow payback. Believing that the law has been weaponized against them, they will promise to weaponize it against Democrats. Our politics, already brutal and savage, will get more brutal and more savage still.

As unfortunate as this is, it may be the cost of accountability, something Trump has avoided his entire life. It has long been a source of pride for Americans to say that no person is above the law. And while that’s never been quite true, that aspiration is admirable, a kind of north star to guide our justice system.

If we ever get to the point where efforts to intimidate prosecutors and judges keep justice from being done—where threats of violence, promises of revenge, or mob rule influences the outcome of legal cases—we will have started down the path of lawlessness. Trump has acted like a mob boss in this case, and through much of his life. It’s important that he not avoid being brought to justice just because of his thuggish tactics.

“Whether the indictment is warranted or not, it crosses a huge line in American politics and American legal history,” Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law professor and former top Justice Department official under President George W. Bush, told The New York Times. And more are likely to follow. Of the four potential cases against Trump—including a Fulton County, Georgia, investigation of election subversion; a federal probe of presidential documents at Mar-a-Lago; and a federal inquiry into incitement on January 6—this is generally regarded as the weakest. Which tells us something important.

Donald Trump obsessively portrays himself as a victim; in fact, he is a man of borderless corruption. It has touched seemingly every area of his life. That would be bad enough, but as president, he did inestimable damage to the country, up to and including inspiring a violent insurrection and attempting to overturn an election. Now that some measure of accountability may have arrived for the least of his offenses, he will rage and storm, sensing that the long-delayed reckoning for his other misdeeds may also be at hand.

In his statement responding to the indictment, the former president said, “Never before in our Nation’s history has this been done.” But never before in our nation’s history have we had a president as dishonorable, as unethical, and as malicious as Donald Trump.

The whirligig of time brings in his revenges.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

A grand jury has reportedly indicted Donald Trump on criminal charges stemming from his role in a hush-money payoff to the porn star Stormy Daniels. This historic event is a tragedy for the American republic not because of what it has revealed about Trump, but because of what it is revealing about us as voters and citizens.

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Donald Trump is about to be charged with crimes in New York. I do not know if he is guilty of any of these charges—we don’t even know the exact accusations yet—and neither do you. That’s for a jury to decide, and both Trump and the state of New York will have their day in court. In that sense, this is a good day for America, because it shows, in the most direct way possible, that no one in this country is above the law.

But this whole mess, no matter how it turns out, and no matter what other charges may come at Trump from elsewhere, is also an American tragedy. Trump’s status as a former president has not shielded him from answering for his alleged crimes. The indictment itself is shot through with tension, because Trump is, in fact, a former president and a current leading presidential candidate—which underscores the ghastly reality that no matter how much we learn about this crass sociopath, millions of people voted for him twice and are still hoping that he will return to power in the White House.

Trump’s defenders will argue that the New York case is just a local political vendetta, and that the potential crimes involved are relatively minor. As my colleague David Graham has noted, “Falsifying records is a crime, and crime is bad,” but this is like trying to get Al Capone on tax evasion, especially because “the Manhattan case seems like perhaps both the least significant and the legally weakest case.” David also notes that even some Trump critics wish Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg had waited for Trump to be indicted on more important potential charges.

I’m not so sure. Trump has kept his supporters in a state of high tension over the past few weeks, first claiming that he’d be arrested on Tuesday, March 21, and then, in an appalling cultlike rally in Waco, bellowing that 2024 would be “the final battle” after previously warning that to indict him would be to court violence and civil unrest. Perhaps the New York charges have popped that bubble of tension; Trump can now go and whine about that while others prepare the case arguing that he has committed crimes against American democracy.

But to focus on which indictment should come when is to ignore that Trump has already admitted to his awful behavior in the events around the case. Trump (who sometimes refers to Stormy Daniels as "Horse Face") denies that he had an affair with the porn actor, but no one contests that he authorized paying her off, nor does his legal team deny that he lied about that money while standing in Air Force One—part of their risible argument that she was being paid hush money to keep quiet about an affair that never happened. They’re simply saying that technically, he didn’t violate any namby-pamby laws about ledger entries and campaign funding.

To our shame, we have too often let those kinds of arguments define the Trump legal saga. If Trump is brought to trial on the far more serious charge of attempting to strong-arm Georgia election officials, his defenders will claim that that indictment, too, is just local huckstering. They will find other excuses in the event that he somehow must answer for his role in trying to overturn our constitutional processes. And once again, even after looking at Trump’s own behavior, including his phone call to the Georgia secretary of state and the exhortation to the mob on January 6, too many Americans will focus on whether he committed an actual crime instead of coming to their senses and realizing that in any functional and healthy democracy, someone like Trump would have been shamed and forced into political and social exile years ago.

Trump, like the Republican opportunists who cling to him like remoras under a shark, doesn’t care about shame—he cares about getting away with it. Indeed, rather than leaving the public arena, Trump has reveled in it all, rolling around in the garbage of his own life and grunting happily about how the rules don’t apply to the real elites like him. Forget about Richard Nixon, who publicly resigned; Trump isn’t even Spiro Agnew, a man who seethed with rage at the felony corruption charges against him but had the sense not to brag about them. (Agnew insisted on his innocence for two months and then took a plea of “no contest” to a single tax-evasion charge, after which he mostly vanished from public view.)

No such luck this time. Win or lose in court, Trump is determined to bring us all into a summer-heat dumpster with him for as long as he can. And that leads to the last and most shocking thing about today’s news: Late this afternoon, New York local media reported that security was tightening up in certain areas of the city. That’s how we knew something was coming: The former president had already told us that he fully intended to trigger violence if the institutions of the law tried to touch him.

Tomorrow, all NYPD officers have reportedly been ordered to be in full uniform and ready to deploy. And again, somehow, we’ve just accepted this as the new normal. We no longer even blink when New York, a city scarred by multiple terror attacks against its innocent citizens, has to go on alert just to charge Trump with a crime. That one fact, more than any other, tells you how far down the long slide into vice and venality—and violence—Trump has dragged this country.

Every defendant, including Donald Trump, deserves the presumption of innocence. But when it comes to our civic and political innocence, Americans long ago lost whatever is left of ours.

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‘A Common American Death’

By Nicole Chung

His death certificate doesn’t tell me how he died. The causes of death are listed as “end-stage renal failure,” “diabetes mellitus,” “hypertension.” Yet I have no idea what forced my father’s body to shut down, his heart to stop, on that given night.

He’d had a cold, my mother told me, and had gone to bed early in the spare bedroom so he wouldn’t keep her awake with his coughing. Did his cough give way to a silent heart attack? she wondered. We know more about what did not happen than what did. At no time did he shout for help, or cry out in pain. There was no harsh death rattle, no deep gasps for a final breath he couldn’t find. My mother sat not 10 feet away from him on the other side of a thin wall, reading a book; if he had called out for her, made any sound of distress, she would have heard, and gone to him.

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For months now, it has been apparent that Donald Trump might well become the first former president of the United States to be indicted. Now the once unthinkable has taken place. A grand jury in Manhattan has handed up an indictment of Donald Trump over his alleged coordination of hush-money payments in advance of the 2016 election. The indictment itself remains under seal.

It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. For one thing, it wasn’t supposed to happen today. Trump himself had announced earlier this month that he expected to be “arrested” on March 21; on the basis of what information was never clear. For another, of all the ongoing investigations into Trump—and there are many—the Manhattan probe is one of the least legally and factually straightforward. And yet, as is so often the case with Trumpian matters, the most outlandish outcome has somehow managed to come true.

The case traces back to 2018 reporting by The Wall Street Journal that Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen had orchestrated a series of payments to two women in the months leading up to the 2016 election, in order to prevent them from speaking publicly about their past sexual relationships with Trump. The scandal unfolded as an odd shadow of the at-the-time-ongoing investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller into Russian election interference in 2016. Both stories concerned behind-the-scenes efforts to clinch Trump the presidency, only where one involved Russia’s military intelligence agency, the other featured a former Playboy bunny and an adult film star. In August 2018, Cohen pleaded guilty in federal court to charges of lying to Congress about Trump’s entanglement with Russia—and, on the same day, also admitted to campaign-finance violations related to his coordination of the payments. The argument by federal prosecutors was that the payouts to the two women constituted an unreported in-kind donation to the Trump campaign.

The path from that 2018 plea deal to today is a strange and winding one. The federal government eventually declined to bring charges against Trump; the Manhattan district attorney’s office picked up the investigation, indicting the Trump Organization and its chief financial officer on tax fraud but not Trump himself; then the hush-money probe seemingly went dead, to the vocal frustration of the prosecutor hired to pursue the case. Then, in January 2023, the investigation suddenly sprang to life again, with reports that a New York grand jury was hearing new witnesses.

The past few weeks have been a very Trump-like stew of sound and fury, involving little information but a great deal of punditry as onlookers struggled to understand what might be happening. And the next few days will likely look much the same: With the indictment sealed, it’s hard to say much new. Reportedly, District Attorney Alvin Bragg is negotiating with Trump’s team about the process of the New York arraignment. The charges will become public when Trump appears before the court. Whatever comes of it, Trump will go down in history as the first president to be twice impeached, and the first to be indicted.

As Bragg’s office geared up toward the indictment in recent weeks, some commentators voiced worries about the strength of any case against Trump on the hush-money issue. Among other things, why Bragg suddenly decided to pursue the case is not clear, which risks lending credence to Trump’s claims that he’s the victim of a political prosecution. Until the public sees the evidence against the former president, though, evaluating these concerns remains difficult.

But on the basis of what’s already been reported, it seems fair to say that this is not the case most people thought would lead to Trump’s first turn in a courtroom as a defendant. Special Counsel Jack Smith at the Department of Justice is continuing to investigate the former president’s role in the January 6 insurrection. In Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis appears to be moving closer to seeking indictments over Trump’s effort to interfere in that state’s tallying of the 2020 presidential vote. Both these cases speak immediately to Trump’s abuses of authority and his desire to seek power at all costs. The hush-money case isn’t entirely separate from those ugly aspects of Trump’s presence on the political stage: It did, after all, involve an effort to meddle in the process of an election, in this instance by denying the public the full scope of available information about the man it would soon elect to high office. But even so, the interference itself does seem a little less urgent—and less weighty—than his involvement in fomenting an insurrection.

There’s something very, well, Trumpy about this: He has a way of making everything sordid. Instead of a dramatic discussion about the meaning of accountability for a president who sought to overthrow the will of the voters to stay in power, we’re arguing about the dirty mechanics of hush-money payments to an adult film star.

The situation might be merely crass if not for the shadow of violence hanging over it. After announcing that he expected to be indicted on March 21, Trump promised “death and destruction” in a post on his bespoke social media site, Truth Social. Now he’s busy raging about the indictment as “AN ATTACK ON OUR COUNTRY THE LIKES OF WHICH HAS NEVER BEEN SEEN BEFORE” and “weaponizing our justice system to punish a political opponent.” The ongoing investigations into Trump’s potential responsibility for the insurrection are a reminder of just how serious this rhetoric can get.