The American public has a growing appetite for watching fights. Viewing of televised wrestling matches – the highly dramatised bouts between large, beefy men or Amazonian women – has soared in the last year, with more young men now watching them than American Idol.

The fascination with powerful figures during difficult times is nothing new. In newspaper cartoons published after the inauguration of Franklin D Roosevelt in 1933, the polio-ridden president is pictured as a muscular man.