BY GREGORY QUINN

The president-elect is a WWE Hall of Famer.

I understand that in the great, grand tragedy that is the Rise of Trump, his desultory affiliation with America’s premier fictional sports league hardly matters. It doesn’t even qualify as Trump’s weirdest pre-president professional dalliance, not when pro wrestling is currently a multi-billion dollar global media industry and Trump used to peddle frozen steaks on late-night television. And it’s not as if other presidents didn’t take unusual career routes to the Oval Office; Reagan starred in shitty westerns, Carter farmed peanuts, and Truman was a haberdasher (apparently.) But Trump’s affiliation with the WWE feels different — and not just because I happen to be a 31-year-old man desperate to justify my lingering fascination with entertainment designed for middle school boys.

It feels different because of the type of business pro wrestling is. At its most basic, pro wrestling is an art form built on blurring the lines that separate reality from fantasy, presenting fiction as fact, and promoting broad stereotypes in order to perpetuate a thousand rehashes of the basic good vs. evil trope. That’s pretty much pro wrestling. (Well, that and chair shots to the back.) The industry has a unique term for adherence to this particular philosophy. It’s “kayfabe.”

Like so many customs, traditions and terms associated with pro wrestling, kayfabe — the concept and the word — had for years hid in the shadows, segregated from proper entertainment and common parlance. But in 2015, the Oxford English Dictionary added the word kayfabe to the dictionary, defining it as “the fact or convention of presenting staged performances as genuine or authentic.”

Donald Trump is our first kayfabe president.

Let’s backtrack a little.

Wrestling is, spoiler alert, fake. But it’s complicated fake. It’s fakeness treated as real. This is what separates pro-wrestling from other scripted forms of entertainment, and it’s what makes wrestling something close to truly unique. While characters in movies certainly don’t admit to their situations being scripted (most of the time, Deadpool fans, most of the time), there is no artifice between screen and audience; even children understand that what they are seeing is not “real life.” Pro-wrestling, on the other hand, operates in that artifice. Because of this, WWE is more aligned-in-spirit to Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny than the Marvel Cinematic Universe. (Indeed: The specific moment you awaken to the falsehood of wrestling — usually a wrestler recoiling in pain from a punch that very clearly missed, or something like that — is a minor rite of passage for wrestling fans such as myself.) How wrestling storytellers navigate in kayfabe is part of what makes pro wrestling so beguiling and fascinating to adults who have long since wised to the scam.

Donald Trump is also complicated fake.

And he learned the Dark Arts of Kayfabe after spending parts of four decades in-and-out of the WWE universe.

Donald Trump’s association with the WWE stretches back to the 1980’s, when Trump Plaza in Atlantic City hosted consecutive WrestleMania events, and it continued to various degrees throughout the years, culminating with the recent hiring of former WWE CEO Linda McMahon to Trump’s Small Business Administration. (Maybe culminating; this is Trump we are talking about. And the WWE, to be fair.)

It’s clear after the past 18 months that Donald Trump picked up a thing or two about manipulating, repacking, and laundering the truth from pro wrestling. He ran a campaign that operated several degrees removed from reality, passing off untruths as facts to his supporters while slyly winking to level-headed people who knew better. A bulk of his campaign persona — his gleeful dissemination of obviously fake news, his habitual half-truths — was as obviously fake as a kick that landed 13 inches away from a wrestler’s chiseled midsection. But, as in pro wrestling, the fakeness didn’t matter to devotees. It was a beautiful ballet of bullshit. It was kayfabe, baby.

The problem was that — in this instance — the fans buying into the kayfabe weren’t children in purple John Cena shirts; they were adults who voted. The tragedy was that what was at stake was a lot bigger than a gilded wrestling belt.

(This is the point in the article where I’d like to acknowledge that, yes, all presidents occasionally present unreality as truth; that is: they’ve all practiced kayfabe. But none have to Trump’s degree, nor have any others taken shitty stunners from “Stone Cold” Steve Austin or form-tackled Vince McMahon on live television. So there.)

All signs point to Trump “keeping kayfabe” once he is actually in office. To use wrestling lingo: he has “swerved” his fans — promising them to drain the swamp then assembling a who’s who of cartoonishly evil Wall Street billionaires to fill out his cabinet. How the media, his supporters/detractors, and the rest of the world will deal with a president who resides permanently in kayfabe remains a mystery.

Trump’s entire political existence is a virtuoso display of reality bending, befitting of the best pro wrestling storytellers.

In 2013, Donald Trump was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame. In 2016 he finally earned that distinction.