The Bravofication of American government

Recently, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles did something uncharacteristic: she became the news of the day. Over the course of President Donald Trump’s 2025, she had been talking to a journalist about his presidency and his core team, dishing about their personalities, quirks, and flops. Reactions ranged from shock to fascination, even though MAGA world quickly circled the wagons.

But there’s a larger story here about celebrity. Wiles’s interviews in Vanity Fair were not a one-off, but both a representation and a culmination of a dynamic crystalizing in Trump’s second term: the Bravofication of a presidential administration.

From Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s promotional ICE videos to Vice President JD Vance, Kash Patel, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s confessional-style interviews with the former Trump official Katie Miller (Patel, the FBI director, sat down with his girlfriend, for example), as the second term has progressed, the line between the current presidential administration of the United States of America and the wild-west world of pop culture influencers and pseudo-celebrity has gotten thinner and thinner.

With all this in mind, Vox decided to reach out to Danielle Lindemann, a professor of sociology at Lehigh University, who has done exemplary work on the rise and power of reality TV. We discussed Trump’s reality TV presidencies, his casting of specific heroes and villains, and whether we as an audience have been changed in the process. Lindemann suggests that there’s a lot of value in comparing the average MAGA voter to a Bravo viewer who “will root for one Housewife, ride or die, despite all evidence and never admit to any flaws.”

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

I’m curious about why you think reality TV should be taken seriously, and why it can be a useful tool to look at the world around us. Can you explain that?

Reality TV may seem like this really kind of zany sphere populated by wacky people and ridiculous premises, but if we actually dig in a little bit more deeply, we can see that reality TV is actually kind of a funhouse mirror of our culture. It’s not a pure mirror of our culture, but it does represent our cultural norms, values, and practices in a heightened form. So by seeing certain caricatures, we can come to a better understanding of ourselves.

When we do come to a better understanding of ourselves, it’s interesting because we see that reality TV in a lot of ways is actually very conservative — not necessarily politically conservative — but retrogressive in terms of the values that it promotes, in terms of what it means to be a family, for instance, or what the right jeans to buy are: everything from the large to the small.

And it’s important to look at reality TV, not because you need to love it — I’m not invested in whether anyone likes reality TV. (I personally do.) But when something is this much of a cultural juggernaut, it’s important to pay attention because it’s really this central cultural artifact that really dominates a lot of our lives. It reflects our values, but it also shapes our values as well.

Yeah, I fear I love it. Can we use it to understand or process our politics? Are there archetypes from reality TV that apply to our government?

Politics and entertainment have always been intertwined. Trump isn’t the first person to draw on entertainment practices in politics, but he really has taken that to a new level, harnessing the conventions of reality TV in his politics, beginning with his first presidential run.

For example, reality TV traffics in broad archetypes. Producers cast for people that they can slot into these archetypes of the villain, the savior, the funny person, the person you love to hate. They’re specifically casting to fill these roles. In the Trump administration as well, you can slot people into archetypes of the nasty woman, the bad hombre.

Why do we rely on these archetypes?

These archetypes play into what sociologists call “simple stories,” which are these basic stories that populate all of our lives: a hero and a villain, for example. It’s a very easy plot line to follow. It’s easy to know who the hero is. It’s easy to know who the villain is. That’s the bread and butter of reality TV: these simple stories that are not too difficult to follow. 

And Trump really draws on that well. I was just thinking about this in terms of his infamous post about Rob Reiner and Rob Reiner’s wife Michele, the way that he used that Truth Social post as an opportunity to remind us again that Rob Reiner is a bad guy. It’s always this narrative about who the enemy is, and who we should be rooting for.

I think we see that with Susie Wiles as well. Trump is reaffirming that even though Vanity Fair might have “wronged” her, she’s the hero in this story. She’s not a villain. So as he’s reestablishing who are the people we should be rooting for, he’s always coming back to this simple story and this narrative and these archetypes for his audience to understand.

There’s a quote I’m thinking about from the New York Times chief TV critic during Trump 1.0, that “Trump is TV” and that he is “the mere simulacrum of a human being projected onto a flatscreen.” Is that a helpful way to view him now? The second term seems a lot less entertaining.

We did have those more fun moments in his first term. When I did interviews during that time, it was more about, “Oh, yeah, he’s harnessing this idea of the cliffhanger by saying, I’m going to announce my Supreme Court Justice pick, but not until 8 pm, not until prime time in order to stir up interest, which you could argue was kind of stupid, but also it’s not the level of atrocities that we’re dealing with now.

Right, we used to get Trump versus reporters at his press conferences.

It’s interesting to think of him as TV — just as kind of unidimensional. He’s not really a person. He doesn’t have interests. He doesn’t root for a sports team. He doesn’t have a pet. He plays golf. But in terms of personality, there’s kind of no there there. Maybe it’s because he is TV, he is this world of artifice, and it’s hard to find the kernel of something real there.

There was a second quote I wanted to ask you about, from the New York Times in 2017. The reporters say that “before taking office, Mr. Trump told top aides to think of each presidential day as an episode in a television show in which he vanquishes rivals.” Does that still hold true today?

It’s even more full-blown now, for sure. You can see it in his posts. It’s not just that they’re becoming more unhinged, but he’s really drawing on archetypes. Almost nothing he does, including mourning the death of somebody, is unconnected from these reality TVesque narratives about heroes and villains and positioning himself as a hero.

And he is crafting an image for a particular group of people. That’s also interesting from the consumption side to think about as well, that connection between reality TV and politics. We watch reality TV, but we don’t really think it’s 100 percent real. We know that people are cast for these shows.

But at the same time, people can still consume and enjoy it, even while understanding that it doesn’t represent pure reality. There’s been research on Trump and his followers, especially in that first administration, where people would say, “Well, I know that not everything he says is true,” but they’re reacting to it on the level of feeling. It makes them feel good, or it makes them feel a particular way.

Let’s go deeper on consumption. Have we as a society changed? Are we more TV-brained or rotted than we were? Did previous generations demand or expect their political leaders to be less stan-poisoned than we are?

The nature of celebrity has certainly changed, and that trickles down to both politicians and entertainment figures. It used to be that these politicians were these people that we saw from a removed distance. We didn’t necessarily know very much about their private lives. We didn’t get into the weeds of that. That has changed now with social media to the point where they feel very accessible.

Right, Vice President JD Vance could get into a Twitter fight with you, or the Homeland Security account might mock you. 

They literally are accessible because we’re able to maybe even communicate with them through these platforms. But this was starting to happen before social media existed with tabloid journalism, of stars without their makeup, the breaking down of the celebrity oeuvre, the breaking down of boundaries between the viewers and the stars themselves.

As far as being TV-brained, I don’t know if we’re more TV-brained than we were before, but we certainly have a different relationship with our entertainers and politicians than we did before. And I don’t know if that’s about TV as much as it is about social media.

We’re put into these echo chambers online, so if you see people who are only reinforcing your view that so-and-so is a nasty woman, you’re going to become more deeply rooted in that view. We see this with Real Housewives too, in terms of absolutes, there are people who will root for one Housewife, ride or die, despite all evidence and never admit to any flaws. Even the whole reunion couch dynamic where there are the two sides, two factions. And MAGA absolutely plays into that, right? It’s incredibly divisive absolutist rhetoric about who is moral and good and authentic and legitimate and deserving, and who is not.

Is this unprecedented? Did other political figures have a similar approach, albeit in the era before reality TV?

We didn’t have these media platforms that we have today. It was not like Reagan was tweeting. And the rhetoric just wasn’t so divisive, at least not like Trump casting certain people as villains and certain people as heroes in his everyday speech.

As far as spectacle, it’s not 100 percent new. There were definitely political figures who’ve drawn on the world of entertainment to popularize themselves. Bill Clinton tooting his saxophone on Arsenio, Richard Nixon going on Laugh In. There’s always been this idea of politics as spectacle, people making speeches to stir up people’s emotions, maybe making statements that are not fully true, but to the extent to which Trump does that, and the way that he does that using these conventions of reality TV, feels very new.

My husband wondered to me if people are going to look back on this time, specifically this post about Rob Reiner and be like, “What were people thinking?” And maybe, this is now the direction in which we’re headed. Can we unring this bell? Is this now the new normal?

The Vanity Fair episode, and the influencer-ish nature of this administration and the core team running the country, does that seem to suggest the answer is no? This love-hate relationship with mainstream media, of always punching back and controlling your image is very reality TV-like — the next generation seems kind of primed to keep it going.

There is that sort of basking in the media, of course, if we include social media, absolutely. But the appeal of social media, of course, is that you can construct your own narrative and control your own image. Tabloid journalists loved when reality TV came along. Because before it was difficult to get pictures of stars just going to the grocery store or whatever. That was a big deal. But reality stars actively court this. They actively court this media attention because that’s the bread and butter of their whole career. They want to be featured in OK!, US Weekly, or whatever. Even though reality stars sometimes complain about the media, and encroaching on their privacy, they also actively court it. You could draw a parallel between that and the Trump administration, who are literally publishing lists of media to avoid, while at the same time actively courting attention from the public via social media and their own preferred outlets.