Is the Trump administration seriously considering a reality show that would pit immigrants against each other in a competition for U.S. citizenship? Yes. No. Maybe?
The Daily Mail reported that a show was in the works, and Homeland Security spokeswoman subsequently Tricia McLaughlin told The Daily Beast that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was indeed considering it; she noted the show, which was dreamed up by the producer behind Duck Dynasty and the Millionaire Matchmaker, was in “the very beginning stages.” But then she told USA Today that the reports were “completely false.”
In the kind of she said/she said inconsistency that on reality shows ends with someone crying, storming out or flipping a table, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem also contradicted McLaughlin’s initial comments and said the claims were “inaccurate and false.”
The show seems to be at most an idea under discussion, and perhaps not even that. Regardless, its premise is positively Trumpian: a cruel spectacle of domination and debasement couched in the language of patriotism.
A televised circus in which immigrants are forced to humiliate themselves in the hopes of a shot at becoming American—and in which most presumably go home not just broken-hearted but potentially deported—seems exactly in line with the kind of disdain with which this administration views immigrants and our system of immigration rules and laws.
Pictured above: Trump speaks during a town hall moderated by Kristi Noem at the Greater Philadelphia Expo Center and Fairgrounds in Oaks, Pennsylvania, on October 14, 2024. JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images
The show also sounds plausible because Trump is America’s first reality TV president. He starred in The Apprentice; his catch phrase was “you’re fired.” The premise of that show was centered around Trump’s ridiculous expectations in the challenges contestants were set up to fail at, and his horrible treatment of them in the gladiatorial boardrooms where they were eliminated. He was rude, condescending, and inconsistent—an awful boss to work for. The contestants were routinely degraded and demeaned. The American public ate it up.
Huge swaths of the public, too, seem to have a taste for casual cruelty, on TV and in politics. Trump tapped into that, first on camera and now in the Oval Office, and he is certainly delivering.
The public also has a taste for drama and chaos—the popularity of reality TV as a genre certainly attests to that. And perhaps the reality-tv-ization of American politics partly explains why Trump voters aren’t totally isn’t flipping out over market-crashing tariffs, devastating proposed Medicaid cuts and a bunch of boys barely out of puberty running wild cutting government services at the behest of the world’s richest (and never elected to office) man: Americans so used to seeing dysfunction play out on television, we aren’t as disgusted as we should be when we see it in Washington. We seemingly cannot get enough of people with under-developed inhibition, an enormous need for attention of any kind and a willingness to publicly debase themselves.
That in turn describes many people in Trump’s orbit—and, at least in terms of disinhibition and attention, the president himself.
Like any good reality TV character, Trump is also acutely aware of how things look and how they rate. He seems to care more for style than substance. His meetings with foreign leaders have come across as dramatic and deliberately staged: giving Ukrainian president Vlodymyr Zelenskyy a condescending dressing-down despite Zelenskyy’s frankly heroic behavior while his country is at war; ambushing South African president Cyril Ramaphosa with claims about “white genocide” and Black South Africans murdering White farmers. He seems to have picked his cabinet members like a reality TV producer might select contestants: Who looks good on camera? Who looks like they fit the part?
A stunning number of Trump administration employees came to Trump by way of television appearances on his favorite cable news network, Fox News: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is the least qualified person to serve in that role perhaps ever and has already been responsible for a series of debacles that at best embarrass the administration and at worst put the nation’s national security at risk—but damn if that jawline doesn’t work in studio lighting. Judge Jeanine Pirro is Trump’s latest pick to be the interim US Attorney for Washington D.C.; Sean Duffy is in charge of the Department of Transportation. Dan Bongino is the deputy director of the FBI. The list goes on and on.
Perhaps members of the administration are telling the truth when they say that they aren’t considering the immigration reality show, and the members who say they were considering it were either wrong or lying or just confused. Or perhaps vice versa. Maybe this is a classic reality TV plotline where you have to lie, cheat, and steal to outplay your rivals; maybe it’s just the kind of incompetence that characterized the first Trump administration.
But whether or not DHS is cooperating with a green card reality show—and I truly hope they are not—this remains a bad, made-for-TV administration, one that encompasses all of brain rot, chaos, crassness, and vicious spectacle that reality TV has made normal after decades of beaming the nation’s biggest immoral attention monsters into our living rooms. Trump is the president reality TV built.
And the rest of us aren’t just a prurient audience—we are, to put it in reality TV parlance, the biggest losers in all of it.
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