On its 250th birthday, the United States has turned heel

Andrew Potter is a former editor-in-chief of the Ottawa Citizen.

In late February, 2025, just over a month into Donald Trump’s second term as President, Volodymyr Zelensky travelled to Washington to finalize a minerals deal that would guarantee American access to Ukrainian natural resources in exchange for continued military support in Ukraine’s war against Russia. The meeting was held in the Oval Office, and was televised live.

What followed was less of a diplomatic negotiation than an ambush.

Mr. Trump and his Vice-President, JD Vance, took turns insulting, goading and threatening the Ukrainian President, the head of a country that had been fighting for its survival for the better part of three years. “You don’t have the cards,” Mr. Trump told Mr. Zelensky. Joining the pile-on with the particular condescension of a man who is desperate to impress his new boss, Mr. Vance demanded that Mr. Zelensky say “thank you” for past American help.

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After some more jousting, between both the leaders and the assembled journalists, Mr. Trump abruptly cancelled the meeting. Mr. Zelensky and the rest of the Ukrainian delegation were asked to leave, with some of them apparently near tears.

Three days later, the U.S. suspended military aid to Ukraine, and shortly after, they cut Ukraine off from intelligence-sharing as well.

There had been ominous signs the meeting might not go smoothly, and in the days leading up to the summit, Mr. Trump had called Mr. Zelensky “a dictator.” He eventually apologized, but to the countries that had for decades understood themselves to be America’s closest allies, the scene in the Oval Office was shocking. What they saw was not an America that had decided to pull back from Ukraine in the hope that Europe would step up, or that Mr. Trump was pressing for a negotiated settlement to a war that had gone on too long and which would, out of tragic necessity, have to end with Ukrainian concessions. What stunned the world was the sneering contempt with which Mr. Zelensky was treated, and the realization that Mr. Trump’s clear sympathies lay not with Mr. Zelensky and the Ukrainian people, but with Vladimir Putin and his war of conquest.

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In the vocabulary of professional wrestling, what the world had just witnessed was a heel turn.

For those unfamiliar with the jargon of the art form, professional wrestling divides its performers into two archetypes. The babyface, or just “face,” is the underdog or the hero, the good guy the crowd roots for, whose victories are well-earned and whose defeats seem unjust.

The heel is the villain, the cheat, the rule-breaker who draws jeers and boos, and who exists to make the babyface’s eventual triumph morally satisfying.

These are stock roles, but a wrestler’s assigned place in the narrative is not stable or fixed. The most dramatic moments in wrestling storylines occur when a beloved hero abruptly, and seemingly without warning, reveals himself to be a villain. This is the heel turn: the betrayal that reframes everything the audience thought they knew about right and wrong, good versus evil.

The key word is “reveals.” A good heel turn doesn’t really come completely out of the blue; there are almost always signs of unhappiness with the good guy role. Properly done, it is less of a transformation than an unmasking.

On the Fourth of July, the United States will celebrate the 250th anniversary of its Declaration of Independence. For a good chunk of that quarter-millennium, it has not been unreasonable to describe the United States as the world’s pre-eminent babyface, the country that others looked to for moral leadership and military protection, the ultimate defender of freedom and democracy against villainy near and far.

America’s standing as the indispensable good guy was always complicated by its domestic contradictions, including slavery, Jim Crow, and the fight for civil rights, while its foreign policy, from Cuba to Vietnam to Abu Ghraib, was never as tidy as the self-image. But the claim is not that America was ever saintly – it is that those failures were understood, both by Americans and their allies, precisely as failures. They were departures to be acknowledged, mistakes to be rectified and sins to be atoned for, as measured against a set of regulative ideals that everyone saw as fundamentally righteous.

That is no longer obviously true.

The greatest heel turn in the history of professional wrestling took place on July 7, 1996, at World Championship Wrestling’s Bash at the Beach pay-per-view event in Daytona Beach, Fla.

Hulk Hogan, who at the time was the most famous good guy in the sport – the red-and-yellow-clad embodiment of a certain patriotic, say-your-prayers-and-eat-your-vitamins form of American wholesomeness – came down to the ring amid a sea of cheers. The crowd expected him to rescue his beleaguered allies. Instead, he put a leg drop on his long-time friend Randy Savage and aligned himself with Scott Hall and Kevin Nash, the two villains at the centre of the match.

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When he was interviewed in the ring after the match, Hogan announced what he called a “new world order of wrestling.” Afterward, the furious crowd responded by throwing garbage into the ring,

Hogan defended his heel turn: “For two years, I held my head high! I did everything for the charities! I did everything for the kids! And the reception I got when I came out here, you fans can stick it, brother!”

Part of what made it the greatest heel turn of all time was how complete it was. Hogan committed to the bit, ditched the red and yellow outfit for head-to-toe black, and spent the next three years being spectacularly, enthusiastically villainous. And it worked, because for all his fan-friendly persona, Hogan understood that what makes wrestling narratives work is that, ultimately, they rely on a profound contempt for the fans, or “marks,” as wrestling insiders call them, using a carnival barker term for gullible losers. As early as 1990 after WrestleMania, Hogan had apparently been pushing to have his character turn heel.

The meeting in the Oval Office was America’s Bash at the Beach moment. And just as the seeds of Hogan’s heel turn had been visible for years to those paying close attention, Mr. Trump’s ambush of Mr. Zelensky should not have come as any particular surprise. His fondness for Mr. Putin goes back decades and has survived every conceivable test of loyalty. Mr. Trump’s hatred for Mr. Zelensky has roots in his first term, when he attempted to blackmail the Ukrainian President into digging up dirt on the Biden family. When the effort was exposed by a whistle-blower, it formed the basis of his first impeachment. And in the final year of the Biden administration, Republican members of Congress, anticipating a Trump restoration, spent months stalling, obstructing, and otherwise sandbagging American aid to Ukraine.

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Over the course of Mr. Trump’s two presidencies, but especially since he was returned to the White House in early 2025, commentators have struggled to understand what motivates Mr. Trump and the people around him. Countless interpretive schemes have been used to parse Mr. Trump’s world view, understand his decision-making process and explain his policies. These include the claim that he is a Russian agent, that he’s running interference for a pedophile ring servicing global elites, that he’s a lazy grifter, that he’s a nihilist, an authoritarian, that he has dementia.

But probably the most effective framework for understanding Donald Trump is his own extensive history with professional wrestling. His involvement with the industry spans nearly four decades, beginning with his sponsoring of WrestleMania IV and V in Atlantic City in 1988 and 1989, and culminating in his induction into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2013.

He has appeared as onscreen talent and as a guest ring announcer, but his most memorable performance was as the central figure in the “Battle of the Billionaires” storyline at WrestleMania 23 in 2007. There, his chosen champion defeated Vince McMahon’s man, and Mr. Trump personally shaved Mr. McMahon’s head in front of a delighted crowd.

Spy magazine co-founder and long-time Trump critic Kurt Andersen has argued that pro wrestling is “a large key to the Donald Trump phenomenon.” Paul Michael Levesque, the retired wrestler who went by the name Triple H and who currently serves as WWE’s current chief creative officer, has been blunt about how deeply Mr. Trump is influenced by wrestling: “I think he likes generating heat the way he does. It’s amazing and it’s genius and it worked in our business.”

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The most telling detail here comes from WrestleMania 29 in April, 2013, the day after Mr. Trump’s Hall of Fame induction. Backstage at the event, he encountered Dutch Mantel, who under the character name Zeb Colter had just cut a promo (a scripted interview designed to advance a storyline) about “criminals and illegals” and non-English speakers not being welcome in New York. Colter was a heel character, broadly satirizing the reactionary politics of the then-ascendent Tea Party movement. But Mr. Trump sought him out afterward, saying, “I loved it, I loved it, tremendous.” According to Colter, Mr. Trump especially liked a part of the bit where Colter got the crowd to chant along with him to the phrase “We The People,” but only if they were “real Americans.” He later accused Mr. Trump of stealing the bit for his MAGA platform.

There, in a dressing room in East Rutherford, N.J., you could discern the outlines of the character Donald Trump would eventually bring to the role of the most powerful person on Earth: the nativist heel whose contempt for the audience is disguised as an appeal to their self-interest, the populist salesman who convinces the marks to cheer their own debasement.

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What happens next is the question that most of the world’s democracies are trying to answer, with limited success. The big hope is that what we are witnessing is part of a cycle, one of America’s periodic retreats into insularity and nationalism that are unsettling but ultimately only temporary. In the shorter term, there is the expectation that this November’s midterm elections will begin the process of course-correction.

But the evidence for that optimistic reading is thin. There are too many plot points beyond the Zelensky ambush, including the continuing annexation threats against Canada and Greenland and the deliberate cultivation of far-right movements in Germany, Britain and elsewhere in Europe. There is the denial, gusting to indifference, with which Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has greeted allegations that the U.S. military might be committing war crimes.

But above all, there is the consistent alignment of American foreign policy interests with those of authoritarian regimes and against those of erstwhile democratic allies.

In wrestling, a heel turn only works if the character commits to it. Those who turn heel and then keep showing flashes of their old babyface self, who seem to regret what they’ve become, satisfy nobody. They draw neither love nor anger from the crowd, so there is no place for them in the Manichaean storylines of pro wrestling.

So far, there is no sign of waffling in the current American administration. The new costume fits, the promos are crisp and consistent, and the naked contempt for the old allies is deeply held.

It’s possible that this isn’t a permanent shift, that it is more like a recalibration than a transformation. If you’re looking for slivers of hope in the annals of professional wrestling, it is worth noting that Hulk Hogan himself returned to his old babyface self in 1999, after three years as a hated villain.

There is a bread-crumb trail of evidence, going back to Sept. 11, 2001, and the War on Terror, that Americans were growing tired of their self-appointed role as the world’s boy scout/cop and increasingly frustrated with their junior partners in the rules-based order. Maybe this is just something America needs to get out of its system, a spleen-venting on a national scale unlike anything the free world has ever seen.

But maybe not. What matters is that the rest of the world, the marks who have spent the better part of the last century relying on the United States for moral leadership, have had their moment of clarification. On the 250th birthday of the republic, the free world’s most reliable babyface has turned heel.