Back in 2001, few politicians gave much thought to Joe Rogan — or even knew his name. They might have heard something about “Fear Factor,” the crass show on NBC where people ate sheep eyeballs and submerged themselves in containers teeming with rats in hopes of winning $50,000.
But the idea that the show’s blandly macho host would become one of the most influential figures in American life would have seemed as ridiculous as, well, Donald Trump getting elected president. Twice.
Nearly a quarter-century later, Rogan hosts one of the most popular podcasts in the world, “The Joe Rogan Experience.” During the 2024 election, it became one of the most sought-after bookings for politicians seeking to court younger male voters, despite — or perhaps because of — Rogan’s history of spouting misinformation on vaccines, COVID-19, trans people and other topics.
Although it’s too soon to know exactly what went wrong for Democrats in 2024, Rogan’s lengthy interview with and subsequent endorsement of Trump in the final weeks of the campaign already feels like a watershed moment. Many liberals believe they need to find a progressive version of Joe Rogan in order to combat Trump 2.0. They might start looking outside the traditional party structure and turning to a medium that has become a breeding ground for influencers on the right: reality TV.
Rogan is one of many influential figures in the conservative media ecosystem and the so-called manosphere who rose to prominence in reality TV, daytime talk shows and other forms of alternative entertainment. And as Trump gears up for a second term in office, he is casting his new administration like a reboot of “The Surreal Life.”
Shortly after his win in November, Trump nominated former Congressman Sean Duffy, who starred in Season 6 of “The Real World” and went on to win multiple seasons of the spinoff show now known as “The Challenge,” for secretary of Transportation.
“Maybe he’ll pick one of the ‘Teen Moms’ to be secretary of Labor!” joked Jimmy Kimmel, who described Duffy as “one of his least embarrassing picks.”
Trump also tapped Mark Burnett, the TV producer whose fateful decision to cast the serially bankrupt Trump as a successful businessman in “The Apprentice” paved the way for his first White House run, as special envoy to the United Kingdom.
Television producer Mark Burnett, left, with President Trump in 2017.
(Evan Vucci / Associated Press)
Dr. Mehmet Oz, the cardiothoracic surgeon known for touting dubious cures such as green coffee beans and colloidal silver on his daytime talk show, is in line to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, an agency that provides healthcare coverage to more than 160 million Americans. Longtime Trump supporter and failed senatorial candidate Linda McMahon, former chief executive of World Wrestling Entertainment, may soon be running the Department of Education, an agency that Trump has pledged to eliminate.
Nor is the reach of reality TV limited to formal administration appointments. Dr. Drew Pinsky, known for appearing on VH1’s “Celebrity Rehab,” is now a conservative talking head who regularly sits down with the likes of Laura Ingraham and Alex Jones. Podcast bro Theo Von, who formerly starred on “Road Rules,” “The Challenge” and “Last Comic Standing,” also interviewed Trump last year on his show, “This Past Weekend,” which is not overtly political but attracts a young, male demographic that increasingly skews right.
“People will vote for someone like Donald Trump because they just think he’s real and authentic” despite his long history of dishonesty, says Nelini Stamp, director of strategy for the Working Families Party and creator of the Real Housewives of Politics, an Instagram account that uses Bravo memes to spread a progressive message. To them, being real “means you say what you want, usually the first thing that comes out of your head.” In other words: acting like someone on reality TV.
Of course, Trump is a creature of reality TV himself, someone who not only rebuilt his image and his fortune through “The Apprentice” but also borrowed the medium’s blunt imagery and tendency to manipulate the truth to stage two successful presidential campaigns.
But he has also remade the Republican Party and its accompanying media ecosystem in his image, transforming a group of neoconservatives and deficit hawks into faux-populist, conspiracy-addled culture warriors whose party slogan could easily be the oldest of reality TV cliches: “I’m not here to make friends.”
It’s well known that Trump watches a lot of TV, particularly Fox News, and often hires (and fires) people based on their telegenic abilities rather than other more relevant qualifications.
There’s also a well-established history of mostly conservative politicians and pundits embracing reality TV, dating back to 2010, when Sarah Palin signed up to do a Burnett-produced series for TLC shortly after stepping down from her job as governor of Alaska in the middle of her term. Palin and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani have both appeared on “The Masked Singer,” while former Texas Gov. Rick Perry and former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer turned up on “Dancing With the Stars.”
But this trend also suggests a more profound connection between the reality TV mindset — the kinds of personalities and viewpoints that thrive in the unscripted space — and the Trumpian worldview. It’s the reality TV-to-MAGA pipeline, and lately it’s overflowing.
“Reality shows tend to traffic in simple stories. There’s a hero, there’s a villain, there’s someone you love, there’s someone you hate. People are shown as one-dimensional on reality TV, and there’s always a person to blame if something goes wrong, and we see that in MAGA politics too,” says Danielle Lindemann, professor of sociology at Lehigh University and author of the book “True Story: What Reality TV Says About Us.”
Sean Duffy, shown in 2018, was a “Real World” cast member and congressman before President-elect Donald Trump nominated him to be Transportation secretary.
(Jacquelyn Martin / Associated Press)
“Most of us know that reality TV is not a pure mirror of reality, but we’re still connecting with it at the level of emotion, even if we don’t necessarily see it as 100% truthful,” she says. “Even people who support Trump don’t necessarily always believe what he’s saying.”
Duffy’s rise from “Real World” cast member to cabinet appointee is instructive. In 1997, the lumberjack and aspiring lawyer with a thick Wisconsin accent appeared in the Boston-set season of the groundbreaking MTV reality series. He repeatedly clashed with co-star Kameelah Phillips, calling her a “b—” and at one point likening her to Hitler because she expressed pride in her Black identity.
But Duffy, typical of “The Real World” in this era, which often cast sheltered conservatives alongside others who challenged their beliefs, didn’t suffer any consequences for the dustups. The following year, he participated in the spinoff “Road Rules: All Stars,” an early incarnation of the show that came to be known as “The Challenge.” There, he met and fell for his future wife, Rachel Campos-Duffy, who played a similar role in Season 3 of “The Real World,” set in the liberal bastion of San Francisco. She wasn’t shy about her politics, dragging her housemates to an event with Republican politician Jack Kemp, but she also kept an open mind, bonding with co-star Pedro Zamora, a gay AIDS activist who died of complications from the disease hours after the series finale aired. The Duffys married in 1999 and soon started a family that now includes nine children.
Duffy dabbled in reality TV for a few more years, then pivoted to politics. He served as district attorney of Ashland County, Wis., before staging a successful run for Congress in the tea party-fueled Republican wave of 2010. In the House, Duffy became an early supporter of Trump’s, speaking with Campos-Duffy at the 2016 Republican National Convention and defending the president throughout his scandal-plagued first term. Duffy resigned from Congress in 2019, citing the need to care for a child with health complications he and his wife were expecting. Both Duffys were soon hosting shows in the Fox News empire.
In interviews, Duffy has said that “The Real World” taught him about finding common ground with people from different backgrounds and belief systems. “You see the same thing here [in the House of Representatives],” he said in 2019. “If you give people a chance, and you build a friendship and a trust, it’s amazing the kind of legislation you can work on together and how many points of agreement you actually have.”
But reality TV changed in 2000 with the premiere of “Survivor” on CBS. The show, imported to the U.S. by Burnett, took the voyeurism of “The Real World” and added an element of Darwinian competition that other shows, including “The Challenge,” immediately tried to replicate. It’s notable that Duffy won $50,000 in “The Challenge: The Battle of the Seasons,” which aired in early 2002 and was the first season in which competitors were eliminated “Survivor”-style.
Reality shows like “Survivor” and “The Challenge” “really started to incentivize bad behavior,” says Susie Meister, co-host of “The Brain Candy Podcast,” who witnessed this shift firsthand as a cast member on “Road Rules” in 1998 and a competitor on multiple seasons of “The Challenge.” Cast members are acutely aware that they need to start drama to get called back for multiple seasons — and keep making money.
“It makes sense to me that we’ve seen mostly conservative politicians embrace that approach of uncensored speech and rejection of civility and politically correct language,” she says. “The public conflates that with the truth: ‘They’re telling it like it is.’ Instead of seeing it as shocking and crude, it’s seen as, ‘Finally, somebody’s being honest and being authentic,’ whether or not they are.”
Despite the value placed on “authenticity,” many reality TV stars adopt exaggerated personas to stand out. Meister is cognizant of the roles she played herself: She says she was cast because she was a virginal blond, but that going on “Road Rules” helped her evolve politically. Later, while pursuing a career in media, she faced subtle pressure to embrace a conservative, Megyn Kelly-style persona. “My agent said, ‘It’s a shame that you’re not conservative, because if you were, there are many more opportunities for women that look like you,” she says — i.e., white, fair-haired and conventionally attractive.
“Fox & Friends’” Steve Doocy, left, Ainsley Earhardt and Pete Hegseth interview Army 1st Lt. Clint Lorance in 2019. President-elect Donald Trump has nominated Hegseth to be Defense secretary in his second administration.
(Mark Lennihan / Associated Press)
American politics, particularly conservative politics, are increasingly dominated by brash figures who are able to command attention in a fractured media landscape — not discuss the nuances of policy. “Both the MAGA-sphere and reality TV tend to be populated by very charismatic, often flashy and bombastic people who capture our attention,” says Lindemann.
Trump, of course, played a fictionalized version of himself on “The Apprentice,” beginning in 2004. “Modern-day Trump was created out of ‘The Apprentice,’ which sold that [image] to Main Street America as the gold standard of success,” says Kwame Jackson, who was runner-up on Season 1 of the show and is now president of Kwame Inc., a consulting firm. “It was false, but America bought it hook, line and sinker. Unfortunately, it unlocked a lot of the most extreme demons of capitalism.”
Reality TV is also rooted in the anti-elitist idea that you don’t need to be talented, at least not in the traditional sense, to become famous. The conservative movement is, increasingly, driven by disdain for expertise and experience in science, medicine, government and more. “As long as you’re charismatic enough and believe the right thing, that is the only credential you need,” says Lindemann.
As 48.4 % of the country braces for another season of “The Trump Show” they were desperately hoping to avoid, many are wondering just how he managed another comeback — especially after 34 felony convictions, two impeachments and one violent insurrection.
Again, the answer lies in the collective mindset of reality TV, whose fans are highly tolerant of aberrant behavior and quick to forgive missteps. Stamp points to Teresa Giudice, the long-running “Real Housewives of New Jersey” star (and Trump supporter) who served 11 months in prison for financial fraud, then promptly returned to Bravo, and Erika Girardi, who remains a fan favorite despite questions about her estranged husband’s financial crimes.
“People can be a villain one season, and then you can like them another season,” Stamp says. Trump has had multiple “villain seasons,” she adds, but he’s also experienced several redemption arcs, most notably following the assassination attempt last summer, when the media framed him in a heroic light.
“People are like, ‘But Trump did Jan. 6! I can’t believe we have moved on!’” Stamp says. “That was four years ago. Have you ever seen reality television?”
