The reality TV roots of the MAGA coalition

Meredith Blake, Tribune News Service

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. 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.”

“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.”