Key takeaways

• A Vanity Fair profile of White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, in which she describes the president as having “an alcoholic’s personality” and refers to one of Trump’s top officials as a “zealot,” has gone viral and raised questions about the administration’s basic competency.
  
• As shocking as Wiles’s interview was, it was also a continuation of a longstanding pattern for the second Trump administration: a blurring of the lines between politics and influencer culture.
  
• The changing nature of celebrity and the rise of parasocial relationships to political leaders and influencers says a lot about how America has changed, along with its expectations of its leaders.

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........

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