Of shaved heads and bald sopranos: When the White House becomes the theatre of the absurd

The Trump-Zelensky fiasco last month laid bare comedic incongruities with real-world consequences

KARACHI:

Remember that surreal day in WWE history, when Donald Trump - then just a billionaire mogul and television personality — shaved wrestling tycoon Vince McMahon's head in front of a roaring crowd? It was a piece of theatre so bizarre and exaggerated, one might have mistaken it for an undiscovered Act of Eugène Ionesco's The Bald Soprano, where nothing is as it seems and language spins in dizzying circles until sense evaporates.

Fast-forward to February 28 at the White House: President Trump, flanked by Vice-President JD Vance, once again stepped into a spectacle worthy of absurdist drama. Only this time, instead of brandishing clippers and flattening Vince McMahon's proud mane, the protagonists and antagonists included Volodymyr Zelensky — former actor, now President of Ukraine — and a grand promise of a minerals deal. The result was no less theatrical than that WWE showdown: barbed exchanges, unserved lunches, and a deal left in tatters. Perhaps no electric razor was involved, but the echoes of The Bald Soprano were deafening enough to make any onlooker's hair stand on end.

Act I: From rings to the Oval Office

In The Bald Soprano, Ionesco shows how normal conversation quickly devolves into a cacophony of nonsense, revealing the emptiness beneath our carefully scripted dialogues. Similarly, if the WWE stunt exemplified Trump's flair for over-the-top showmanship, the White House fiasco laid bare the same comedic incongruities - this time with real-world consequences. Viewers watched as Trump, who once gleefully raised an electric shaver to McMahon's scalp, turned his rhetorical shears on Zelensky, warning him that Ukraine was in no position to demand or dictate terms.

Yet Zelensky, a professional actor who used to entertain viewers in comedic roles, seemed more than willing to spar: his lines about Russia's broken ceasefires gave the encounter a tragic weight you'd never find in a ring-side scuffle. The unravelling of the meeting felt like a scene that was half political gathering and half performance art, somewhere between a comedic cameo and an existential meltdown.

Act II: The absurd encounter

In absurd theatre, an unremarkable setting like a mundane living room in The Bald Soprano takes on an increasingly incomprehensible life of its own as dialogue spirals. In the White House's Oval Office, a space typically reserved for measured statesmanship, we instead witnessed comedic uproar that would've made Ionesco proud.

Zelensky's costume: he arrived in his military attire, visually signposting Ukraine's dire situation, much like an absurdist costume that underscores the incongruity of a man at war standing in the world's most powerful office. Trump's WWE background: President or promoter? One couldn't be faulted for wondering if the famous "Battle of the Billionaires" persona had spilled over into a diplomatic arena. Vance's lines: the Vice-President scolded Zelensky in full view of the press, accusing him of ingratitude. At that moment, one half-expected some stagehand to run in with a referee's whistle.

Meanwhile, meticulously prepared lunches languished outside the press secretary's office, like stage props left over from a scene nobody would ever act out. An entire diplomatic production — part state visit, part triumphal signing — derailed in minutes, culminating in the curious spectacle of a major foreign head of state being unceremoniously shown the door.

Act III: Shaved heads, bald meanings

Just as the audience at WWE roared when Trump shaved Vince McMahon's head, onlookers here gaped at the rhetorical takedowns and combative jabs. Yet in a bizarre, almost cosmic twist, nothing was truly resolved - an echo of the final moments of The Bald Soprano where curtains fall on a repetition of lines that lead nowhere. Ukraine's future was left vulnerable, the White House chalked up yet another "shock moment", and a carefully orchestrated minerals deal remained unsigned, much like a script abandoned halfway through.

My mentor, the poet and scholar Ahmad Javaid, often explains that the Theatre of the Absurd strips away the veneer of coherence we cling to in everyday life, revealing how easily our illusions of control slip into the absurd. Here, illusions of a neat, patriotic press conference and a bulletproof alliance were shattered like so many theatrical illusions - exposing a raw struggle for recognition, gratitude, and an elusive notion of peace.

Act IV: War of absurdities

In the modern world, it's becoming increasingly clear that we can only comprehend events like these through an absurdist lens. Language seems to fail, logic crumbles, and we're left with the spectacle of global leaders exchanging sharp one-liners rather than forging meaningful solutions. Trump's cameo at WWE once symbolised the pinnacle of showmanship, but the White House incident took performance to new — and far more consequential — heights. Zelensky, thrust into the midst of existential conflict, discovered he was forced to play an unwinnable part in a tragicomic script.

Like Ionesco's unsuspecting characters who end up repeating the same lines ad infinitum, all players in this fiasco appeared locked in patterns they couldn't - or wouldn't - break free from. Neither Zelensky's appeals nor Trump's bold pronouncements overcame the gnawing sense that, at the core, no one was quite listening to anyone else.

The curtain falls

We're left with a realisation that a meltdown in the Oval Office and a televised hair-shaving incident share a certain DNA: both are spectacles whose surface drama hints at a deeper emptiness or disconnect. The difference, of course, is that shaving Vince McMahon's head ended in laughter and maybe some bruised vanity; the White House fiasco left Ukraine's security, and arguably European stability, hanging in the balance. Yet in both cases, you can almost hear the ghosts of Ionesco and Beckett chuckling in the wings.

From flamboyant haircuts to half-cooked treaties, from comedic one-liners to existential dread, the absurd reveals itself at every turn. Javaid reminds us that once we see how nonsense and paradox define much of human experience, we can't unsee it. And perhaps that's the takeaway: if world affairs continue in this direction - where logic surrenders to vaudeville - then we may have no choice but to embrace the stage, stand in the spotlight, and deliver our lines with as much awareness of the absurd as we can muster. After all, in a reality where a shaved billionaire's scalp once hogged the headlines, and statesmen quarrel like wrestlers over the fate of nations, is it really so surprising that the only thing left making sense is the nonsense itself?

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