| President Donald Trump has a long history of showing up at and participating in pro-wrestling events. And he’s been known to use a few of its tropes in his political career. Daniel Flatley writes today about how that might affect tariff negotiations (really!). Plus: 100 Trump moments you might have missed, and the viral Labubu dolls will have to contend with tariffs. If this email was forwarded to you, click here to sign up. Donald Trump has made no secret of his fondness for combat sports. He regularly attends mixed martial arts bouts and has been known to sit ringside at boxing matches. But it’s professional wrestling where his ties run deepest, and he has adopted the rhythm and rhetoric of the sport’s bombastic milieu to enhance his appeal to voters. Now, just past 100 days into his second term as president, and with a bevy of complex trade negotiations underway, Trump is attempting to pull off a difficult feat: marrying the catharsis of professional wrestling’s arena-based spectacle with the difficult work of managing the world’s largest economy. Whether he can pull it off is a very real question that will have important implications not just for him personally but also for the political party that’s remade itself in his image.  Trump cheers on his fighter during the Battle of the Billionaires at Wrestlemania in 2007. Photographer: Bill Pugliano/Getty Images “When Trump used tariffs and trade deals like chairs in a no DQ match, I believe he underestimated how different the rules are when you’re not the one writing the script,” said Shannon O’Brien in her keynote address on Saturday at Wrestleposium VI, a virtual gathering of academics and scholars hosted by the Professional Wrestling Studies Association. A presidency scholar at the University of Texas at Austin, she was referring to a so-called no-disqualification match, in which wrestlers can’t be kicked out of the ring for breaking the rules, resulting in contests that amp up the violence by allowing the use of weapons or outside interference. Trump’s unconventional approach, which sees him treating alliances as temporary story lines and wielding tariffs as if they were props to create leverage is like “playing with unstable dynamite,” according to O’Brien. “In the wrestling ring, where I think he’s comfortable, the outcome is predetermined, usually,” she said. “But in global politics, explosions can be real, and they can be very damaging, and they’re unpredictable.” O’Brien says in a subsequent interview that Trump uses talk of tariffs to “pop a crowd,” that is, to get a reaction—positive or negative—from the people assembled to hear him speak. He’s described the word “tariff” as the most beautiful in the dictionary and said his use of the measures will make the US “rich as hell.” On April 2—Liberation Day, as he called it—he levied import duties on dozens of countries in a Rose Garden event complete with brightly colored charts as visual aides. That sparked turmoil in financial markets. One week later, he swooped in like a hero to issue a 90-day pause on tariffs for countries that didn’t retaliate. His announcement sparked criticism from economists, policymakers and even members of his own party. He subsequently tapped Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, along with other members of his administration, to take the lead on negotiating trade deals with dozens of countries. At a rally Tuesday in Michigan, Trump boasted negotiators are “coming from all over the world to see your president” and “they want to make a deal.” Yet no evidence of any such deals has emerged. That raises the stakes for Trump, who has to prove that the rhetoric that has served him so well in his political career will deliver a policy reality favorable to his supporters. That’s a tall order, say economists who’ve reviewed the impact of his moves. US consumers now face an average effective tariff of 28%, the highest since 1901, which is projected to result in an average loss in purchasing power of almost $5,000, according to the Yale Budget Lab. That burden is expected to fall most heavily on lower-income consumers, who generally spend a greater percentage of their income on goods. The lives of the crowd “unfold far away from the stage lights,” O’Brien said in her speech. “Grand promises, defiant stances, theme music—all the excitement of the stage resonates powerfully when you’re in that shared space of the rally. It’s fun. People get to emote and react. But what happens when the cheers fade and the reality of economics and policy and everyday struggles set in?” Related: Trump Says Tariffs Politically Risky, But He’s Not Rushing Deals | 
