The role of cultural production in celebrity politics: Comparing the campaigns of Jesse ‘The Body’ Ventura (1999) and Donald Trump (2016)
| Published date | 01 May 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0263395719862446 |
| Date | 01 May 2020 |
| Author | David S Moon |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
research-article2019
Article
Politics
2020, Vol. 40(2) 139 –153
The role of cultural production
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in celebrity politics: Comparing https://doi.org/10.1177/0263395719862446
DOI: 10.1177/0263395719862446
journals.sagepub.com/home/pol
the campaigns of Jesse ‘The
Body’ Ventura (1999) and
Donald Trump (2016)
David S Moon
University of Bath, UK
Abstract
This article draws out the significant similarities between the political insurgencies of Jesse Ventura
in 1999 and Donald Trump in 2016, charting their own premillennial political collaborations as
members of the Reform Party, before identifying wider lessons for studies of contemporary
celebrity politicians through a comparison of their individual campaigns. Its analysis is based upon
the concept of the ‘politainer’, introduced by Conley and Schultz, into which it incorporates Mikhail
Bakhtin’s conception of the carnival fool. The heterodox nature of both Ventura and Trump’s
political campaign styles, it argues, is in part explained by the nature of the cultural spheres within
which their public personas were produced; specifically, the fact that these personas, which they
carried over from the entertainment to political spheres, were produced within genres of popular
culture generally positioned as having ‘low’ cultural value. This, it argues, furnished both with an
anti-establishment ethos as ‘no bullshit’ straight-talkers, marking them as outsider candidates able
to act as conduits for political protest by an electorate alienated from mainstream political elites.
It concludes by emphasising the potential importance that political celebrities’ specific cultural
production can play in shaping a subsequent political campaign in general.
Keywords
celebrity politics, Donald Trump, Jesse Ventura, Mikhail Bakhtin, politainer
Received: 28th December 2018; Revised version received: 6th June 2019; Accepted: 17th June 2019
Introduction
In April 2004, Donald Trump attended WrestleMania XX, the largest annual pay-per-
view event of the World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) calendar,1 held that year at
Madison Square Garden, New York. Trump sat ringside, where he was interviewed by
Corresponding author:
David S Moon, Department of Politics, Languages & International Studies, University of Bath, Claverton
Down, Bath BA1 7AY, Somerset, UK.
Email: d.s.moon@bath.ac.uk
140
Politics 40(2)
retired professional wrestler and former politician Jesse ‘The Body’ Ventura. Ventura,
whose recent tenure as the 38th Governor of Minnesota had run from 1999 to 2003, asked
Trump whether he could expect his ‘moral and financial support’ were he to ‘get back into
politics’. When Trump promised Ventura that he would – ‘one hundred percent’ – Ventura
triumphantly declared, ‘You know what? I think that we may need a wrestler in the White
House in 2008!’ Ultimately, Ventura did not run for White House; this article argues,
however, that, as a political campaigner, his example nevertheless lay a groundwork for
Donald Trump – his friend, interviewee, and fellow member of the WWE Hall of Fame
– in his successful 2016 campaign for the Presidency of the United States.
This article draws out the similarities between the political insurgencies of Jesse
Ventura in 1999 and Donald Trump in 2016, using this comparison as the basis through
which wider lessons for the study of contemporary political campaigning can be identi-
fied. In doing so, it utilises two interrelated concepts, both previously applied separately
to Ventura’s political career, illustrating their combined value as explanatory tools for the
Trump campaign also. To this end, the article first introduces the concept of the ‘polit-
ainer’, developed by Conley and Schultz (2000) as a label for celebrity politicians who,
rather than shedding the persona they initially developed within the entertainment world,
carry it with them, unabated, from the cultural into the political field. Second, it supple-
ments this conceptualisation through the incorporation of Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1984a) con-
cept of Carnival.
Examining Ventura first, followed by a comparison with the 2016 Trump campaign,
the article ultimately contends that both can be understood as politainers, each of whom
were furnished with an anti-establishment ethos by the specific nature of their cultural
production within ‘low culture’ forms of entertainment – including, but not confined to,
their shared involvement within pro-wrestling. This ethos granted both Ventura and
Trump significant communicatory freedoms and opportunities as political campaigners
that were unavailable to mainstream politicians, marking them as outsider candidates and
as such viable conduits for carnivalesque political protest against mainstream politics as
a whole. At the same time, these cultural personas delimited their available political pos-
sibilities, rendering more ‘serious’ campaigning styles inauthentic, making the carni-
valesque the most natural ‘fit’.
In making this case, the article emphasises the need for political analysts to pay atten-
tion to the important role played by the specific cultural production of celebrity politi-
cians themselves before they enter the political arena – that is, the context within which
they are moulded, formed, and presented – in directing the subsequent nature of their
political campaign styles.
The Ventura–Trump connection
Born James Janos, Jesse ‘The Body’ Ventura worked in pro-wrestling between 1975 and
1994, originally as an in-ring performer, then, following his in-ring retirement, as a ‘col-
our commentator’. A former Navy Seal, during his time in the pro-wrestling industry,
‘The Body’ was a flamboyant, charismatic presence with a penchant for wearing feather
boas, who performed as a ‘heel’ (bad guy), both in the ring and later in the commentary
booth, insulting the ‘baby-faces’ (good guys) and favouring the ‘heels’. Starting in the
late 1980s, Ventura transitioned out of pro-wrestling into acting, playing secondary roles
in major action movies such as Predator (1987), The Running Man (1987), and Demolition
Man (1993). Coming from this background, his campaign for and subsequent election as
Moon
141
Governor of Minnesota in 1998 was, at the time, ‘one of the most surprising events to
occur in the modern era of American politics’ (Lentz, 2002: 1); running on a Reform Party
ticket, Ventura secured 773,713 votes, 37% of those cast. His victory remains the most
successful third-party result in modern US politics (see Hausser, 2002).
Jesse Ventura makes a useful point of comparison with Donald Trump for a number of
reasons, not least their real-life interactions and linkages. Trump and Ventura have known
each other a long time and collaborated closely, politically, during their time together in
the Reform Party. They first met at WrestleMania IV in 1988 and became ‘casual friends’;
it was in July 1999, however, when paleo-conservative Pat Buchanan signalled he would
leave the Republican Party to join the Reform Party, that their political relationship truly
developed, as Ventura and his allies sought to draft Trump as a proxy candidate to defeat
Buchanan (Kelly and Wetherbee, 2016: loc.1045). Trump went so far as to quit the
Republican party (stating, ‘I really believe the Republicans are just too crazy right’) and
form a presidential exploratory committee that October. During this period, Trump trav-
elled to Minnesota to attend a fundraiser for Ventura’s campaign for governor, speaking
at a Reform Party rally alongside ‘The Body’ (Margolin, 2017: 66). Ultimately, despite
their work together, Ventura and Trump would both leave the Reform Party – mere days
apart – when, by February 2000, it became clear that Ross Perot’s faction of the party had
won control (Kelly and Wetherbee, 2016: loc.1082). The two kept in touch, however,
speaking frequently during Ventura’s term in office (Kessler, 2016).
Trump saw Ventura’s 1999 campaign for governor up-close, sharing platforms and
addressing rallies with him; more than this, however, according to Dean Barkley, Ventura’s
campaign chairman, following the latter’s shock victory Trump again visited Minnesota
with the express purpose of learning how he did it. Barkley describes a private 2-hour
meeting in which he and the newly elected Governor Ventura broke down their winning
campaign strategy for Trump, ‘month by month’ (Kessler, 2016). The notion that Trump
may have learnt something from Ventura’s successful campaigning experiences does not,
therefore, seem too far-fetched; indeed, Barkley, the man behind that campaign, believes
this to be the case, claiming in 2016 that ‘he [Trump] obviously studied what we did’
(Kessler, 2016). Whether or not Trump did draw upon these experiences in 2016, Ventura
declared himself impressed by his campaign, initially professing his support to Trump’s
candidacy for President2 and offering himself up as a potential running mate: ‘this country
needs to be shaken to its very core, and Donald Trump is doing that’, he stated (Kelly and
Wetherbee, 2016: loc 1101).
The notion that the two figures share some sort of campaigning DNA is not itself new;
Hall et al. (2016: 77), for example, have identified Ventura and another WWE Hall of
Famer, Arnold Schwarzenegger, as ‘precursors to Trump’, albeit on a different scale.
Hitherto, however, there have been no substantial analyses to...
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