Martin Luther King on Steroids

Photo by Madeline Gray/Washington Post for Getty Images via Advocate.

GREENSBORO, N.C. — Former President Donald Trump likened North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson to Martin Luther King Jr. in an endorsement Saturday, despite the gubernatorial candidate’s long history of controversial comments about homosexuality, religion and victims of sexual abuse.

“This is Martin Luther King on steroids,” Trump said of Robinson at a pre-Super Tuesday rally in North Carolina.

“I told that to Mark. I said, I think you’re better than Martin Luther King. I think you are Martin Luther King times two.” (NBC News)

In my alternative history novel, Martin Luther King on Steroids, I grapple with one of the big questions: What if Dr. King, instead of getting a Ph.D. in theology and following his father into the ministry and civil rights activism, had gone into pro wrestling, hooked up with the young Vince McMahon and medical genius Dr. Zahorian, and crafted himself a fantastic body with the help of drugs?

What kind of dreams would that young man have had? What kind of amazing job would he have done, getting himself recognized more and more? How different would our world be today? Let's just say there's a good chance he wouldn't have thought of organizing a nonviolent civil rights movement based on the principles of Tolstoy and Gandhi, successfully pressured the US government into passing the Civil Rights, Voting Rights, and Fair Housing Acts, or lost his life to an assassin's bullet during a campaign for fairness to Memphis garbage collectors.

Postmodern Day Presidential

George Raymond Wagner, known as Gorgeous George, 1915-63, via Wrestlepedia.

So on Independence Day weekend 2017, in his sixth month in office, President Donald J. Trump broadcast this to the wider world:

#FraudNewsCNN #FNN pic.twitter.com/WYUnHjjUjg

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 2, 2017

The footage, if you need to know, is from the World Wrestling Entertainment network video of Wrestlemania 23, April 1 2007, which featured a Battle of the Billionaires between the champions (Bobby Lashley and Umaga respectively) of WWE executive Vincent McMahon (whose wife Linda is now head of the Small Business Administration) and then reality TV star Donald J. Trump, and originally showed Trump savaging McMahon, in a righteous rage, after McMahon's evil subterfuge of trying to replace the guest referee, Stone Cold Steve Austin, with his own son Shane.

After which Umaga won, of course, and McMahon had to submit to having his beautiful hair shaved off his head. Which you couldn't help appreciating the dramatic justice of, if you were seven years old and refused to believe that the entire event was scripted and staged. My son was eleven, but we still watched, because it was funny, or seemed funny at the time.

A much longer excerpt with audio is here, via Hollywood Reporter:

Still more good news for John McCain!

Hobart Bosworth in Rowland V. Lee's The Sea Lion (1921). Via Fritzi.

Shorter David Brooks, "Donald Trump Isn't Real", New York Times, February 2 2016:

1. Donald Trump draws his political style from the theatrics of World Wrestling Entertainment, in which what matters isn't whether you win or lose or whether you are good or evil but how aggressive you show yourself to be, so if he wins it won't be real, right, Dad? But it's real if he loses?

2. Marco Rubio's surge in Iowa is amazing.

(That's Brooks's 140th career use of "amazing/amazingly" in his Times column since September 2003, for the record, maintaining a steady rate of just over once a month.)