Kabuki is a traditional form of Japanese theater that dates back to the early 1600s, known for its highly stylized performances, elaborate costumes and makeup, and dramatic staging. To begin with, there is an all-male cast where even female roles are played by men (onnagata), a tradition that emerged after women were banned from performing in the early 1600s. There is striking makeup (kumadori) with bold, colorful face paint that conveys a character’s nature (red for heroism or passion, blue for villainy, etc.). The acting is done with exaggerated movement and vocal delivery with stylized poses (mie), dramatic pauses, and a distinctive rhythmic speaking style. There is plenty of foot stomping for emphasis. The production has elaborate stagecraft with revolving stages, trapdoors, and a runway (hanamichi) that extends through the audience for dramatic entrances. The themes of Kabuki are mostly historical dramas, moral conflicts, love stories, and lots of tales of revenge. It is therefore no coincidence that I am drawn to liken it to what we have witnessed every day of 2025 and this year in Washington.
Interpreting Kabuki relies on reading a set of visual and performative conventions rather than following dialogue alone, much like understanding opera relies on more than just the libretto. You have to read the makeup and costume as well as all the stomping around to understand what is intended. Kumadori face paint tells you a character’s nature at a glance: red lines signal heroism, passion, or righteousness; blue/black signals villainy or jealousy; brown often marks supernatural beings or demons. Also, costume color, pattern, and weight signal social status, age, and temperament of the characters. The mie (a frozen, exaggerated pose, often with crossed eyes) marks an emotional climax. It’s a visual exclamation point, telling the audience “this moment matters”. Movement is deliberately unnatural and rhythmic and realism isn’t the goal, emotional clarity is. The hanamichi runway extending into the audience collapses the distance between performer and viewer, making entrances and exits part of the drama itself. In addition, Kabuki uses a distinctive vocal cadence with lines often chanted or delivered in a sing-song rhythm rather than spoken naturally. Live music (shamisen, drums, chanting narrators) underscores and comments on the action, similar to a film score cueing emotion. Wooden clappers (tsuke) strike sharp beats during fights or mie poses to punctuate the action. Many plays draw on shared cultural knowledge with history, legend, or earlier Kabuki works allowing audiences that know the story already and watching instead for how it is performed, not what happens. The common themes that recur are duty vs. desire (giri vs. ninjō), loyalty, revenge, and star-crossed love.
I am not the first person to find similarity in the Trump Administration and Kabuki. This comparison has been drawn by various commentators and critics, often as a way to describe governing-as-performance. The visual/symbolic coding Kabuki uses like kumadori makeup seems to match off with Trump’s hair styling and use of tanning makeup. That way, like in Kabuki, audiences instantly recognize the lead character’s role. But is he a hero, villain, or just a comic figure? There is a bit of ambiguity. Critics who invoke this comparison argue that Trump’s communication style works similarly with clear, simplified role-casting (strongman, outsider, fighter) rather than nuanced position papers, so the audience knows immediately “who’s who” in the drama and mostly who to praise or blame for what’s wrong in their lives. Commentators drawing this parallel point to moments like signing ceremonies, rally lines, or social media posts as similar punctuation marks: highly visual, declarative moments meant to be replayed and remembered, sometimes more than the underlying policy substance.
Much Kabuki is built on stories that audiences already know with the pleasure being in how it’s told, not surprise at what happens. Whenever Trump gets into hot water, he loves to harken back to his old standby favorites…like blaming everything on Biden or nasty immigrants. Some critics use this to describe the repetitive, ritualized nature of certain political conflicts (with the press, with opponents, etc.). These are recognizable “acts” performed for a base that already knows the plot beats. The difference is that Kabuki is a consensual, bounded art form and everyone in the theater knows it’s theater. Politics has real material consequences that fiction doesn’t and, unfortunately, it seems all too often that the Trump followers are prepared to believe anything and everything that he says, no matter how unsupported it is or how blatantly disproven it may be. Kabuki’s stylization exists to convey moral clarity within a shared cultural code. Applying the analogy to a sitting president can flatten real policy differences into pure spectacle, which not everyone accepts as fair, but is harder and harder to refute as we see things like the 2020 election getting relitigated in the rally speeches Trump still gives and the economic impact of the ongoing Iranian conflict cuts hard into American household budgets. It’s clear that supporters of Trump would likely reject the metaphor entirely, seeing directness and disruption of “political theater” (i.e., the usual Washington performance) rather than a performance by Trump itself. While this same “politics as theater” framing gets applied across the political spectrum to leaders of many stripes and its true that it’s less a claim unique to Trump than a recurring lens critics use for performative politics in general, Trump has clearly taking the artform to a new level.
This weekend this is on display with what is likely the last act of Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool drama. Trump’s own hand-picked U.S. Attorney for DC, Janine Pirro (of Fox News infamy) has just dropped the criminal case she’d brought against former Olympic canoeist David Hearn over alleged vandalism of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. Pirro had announced that Hearn was indicted by a grand jury on charges related to alleged vandalism of the Reflecting Pool, tied to peeling of the newly installed liner from Trump’s renovation of the pool. But on Friday, Pirro moved to dismiss the felony vandalism charge against him. In the court filing, she said the damage to the pool’s sealant was the result of “flawed installation,” not vandalism, and also faulted the Department of Interior’s “failure to fully and accurately provide information” to her prosecutors. This directly contradicts Trump, who has repeatedly blamed vandals for the damage. So, the Kabuki master himself had no choice but to respond publicly by saying, “I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia… I don’t know what she was thinking?” He insisted it was “a pure case of VANDALISM,” also linking it to an unrelated “86 47” marking found in the grass nearby, though no evidence has tied the two incidents together. If Trump stays true to form, his next move will be to accuse James Comey of being in cahoots with Hearn and that it was all orchestrated behind the scenes by Biden as a grift to enrich Hunter. The best part is seeing Trump standing with his feet spread apart, his war paint bright and his grimace showing the best dramatic effect that Kabuki can muster. “HAI!”