Donald Trump gave Jake Paul his “complete and total endorsement” at a Kentucky rally on Wednesday, predicting the 29-year-old YouTuber-turned-boxer will run for office “in the not too distant future”. Taking the stage, Paul told the crowd that Trump taught him “courage” and to “never back down from a fight, even if they’re much bigger than you”, before the two filmed a TikTok doing the President’s signature dance.

The pundit class will treat this as a sideshow, but they are wrong. Paul, not Marco Rubio or JD Vance, is the true spiritual successor to the MAGA movement. This is not so much because he has policy ideas or governing instincts — these are not needed in 2026 — but because Trumpism was never about either of those things.

Trump long ago mastered the wrestling promoter’s understanding that television creates reality rather than broadcasting it, that a braggadocious persona makes outrageous claims seem plausible through sheer force of personality. Americans responded because, like wrestling fans, they’d rather be entertained by someone who admits the show is rigged than bored by someone who pretends it isn’t. Trump was the TV guy: the man who grasped that The Apprentice was better training for the presidency than the Senate. Jake Paul is the TikTok guy, the logical next step.

If Trump understood the power of the television camera, Paul understands the power of the algorithm. His 20 million YouTube subscribers and millions more across other platforms represent a direct-to-audience pipeline that no traditional politician can match. And he is building it on a TikTok platform whose US operations are now controlled by Trump ally Larry Ellison’s family — owners of CBS, bidders for Warner Bros, and self-styled media gatekeepers of the MAGA era.

Wrestlers and fighters in politics are not new. Jesse “The Body” Ventura won the Minnesota governorship in 1998 on a Reform Party ticket, spending a fraction of what his opponents did and pioneering the internet as a campaign tool. He was arguably the prototype for Trump himself: a big-bodied, gravelly-voiced entertainer who treated political conventions as heel promos, quoted his catchphrases from popular movies, and won on the slogan “Don’t vote for politics as usual.”

Glenn Jacobs, better known as Kane, followed a similar path but has yet to go national. The towering WWE Hall of Famer has served two terms as Republican mayor of Knox County, Tennessee, having run on libertarian economics and against vaccine mandates. He endorsed Trump alongside his storyline WWE “brother” the Undertaker in a TikTok video. Jacobs is term-limited in 2026, has flirted with a governor’s run, and says it would be “hard to say no” to serving in Trump’s administration.

But Ventura and Jacobs both had to translate a certain degree of wrestling fame into conventional political credentials. Paul does not need to make that translation, because the MAGA movement has already completed it for him. When wrestler Triple H appeared at the White House to revive the Presidential Fitness Test, it was clear that the cultural backbone of Trump’s coalition runs through the TKO merger of WWE and UFC (the UFC holding its signature Freedom 250 premium event on the White House lawn in June will memorialize this fusion).

Paul sits at the intersection of all of this: influencer culture, combat sports, and Netflix spectacle. He can speak to young men, another growing MAGA demographic, in ways that ordinary politicians cannot. Rubio and Vance can recite the policy positions, but neither commands an audience that watches them for fun on their phones (aside from chubby Vance AI memes and speculation about “Little Marco’s” oversized shoes).

Paul’s audience is the MAGA base’s rising generation: the 18-to-29 male demographic that already watches and bets on UFC events at staggering rates. The MAGA movement’s future may no longer be defined by senators in blue suits but instead by figures who merge entertainment, social media and combat culture into a direct-to-audience political force. In this sense, Paul is not a sideshow. He is the heir to the throne.

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Oliver Bateman is a historian and journalist based in Pittsburgh. He blogs, vlogs, and podcasts at his Substack, Oliver Bateman Does the Work

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