Donald Trump nominated Sean Duffy as secretary of transportation earlier this week. The pick feels potentially more significant than those offered for the old-line cabinet positions.
When the outgoing administration was the incoming administration, Joe Biden generated much chatter regarding a successor when he nominated Pete Buttigieg as secretary of transportation. Despite Trump entering office as a lame-duck president, no such speculation greets Duffy. It should.
He overflows with the least discussed but arguably most important quality in winning national elections: likeability. In this sense, Duffy eclipses the leading contenders — JD Vance, Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley — talked about as a potential successor to Donald Trump in the one category (forget about Allan Lichtman’s “keys”) that has carried the day in every presidential election in my lifetime.
And that lifespan suddenly matters. Yes, that he married a Mexican matters more politically in 2028 than it did on his wedding day. Yes, his enormous family itself constitutes a powerful voting bloc. Yes, Duffy hails from swing-state Wisconsin. But chronology matters here more than even geography.
The former congressman comes from Generation X, which earlier this month voted for Trump in greater proportions than Baby Boomers, Millennials, and Gen Z did. Generation X likes Duffy so much because we grew up with him on the most Generation X show on the most Generation X channel on the most Generation X medium (cable TV) during the decade when Generation X came of age.
We met Sean Duffy on MTV’s The Real World during the 1990s. And therein lies a tale. The producers set him up as the token conservative upon which the rest of the house, disproportionately political and liberal, could use as a pinata (the fate of past characters fitting his mold). The producers selected Duffy to serve as the outlier to the Stanford afro-centrist Kameelah, the bisexual Genesis, halfway-hippie guy Jason from Colorado, and feminist Montana on the Boston iteration of the show. Duffy flipped the script. He came across as uber-likable, befriended most of his housemates, and always emerged from confrontations as the more sympathetic character. The fact that he competed in lumberjack competitions increased viewer interest in him. He parlayed that popularity to a seat in Congress representing Wisconsin.
One of the strange ironies of MTV — when it still wielded enormous cultural significance — involves how its 1990s promotion of left-wing politics — overtly through the “Rock the Vote” and “Choose or Lose” campaigns that it pushed, and covertly, if not subtly, through its programming — backfired.
Yes, MTV aggressively pushing gay characters in its reality shows altered public perception. And its producers feeding participants questions — e.g., “Boxers or briefs?” — in staged forums further humanized liberal politicians. But one cannot help but notice that the generation MTV sought to mold and the most successful of its programming’s graduates lean right.
Trump nominating Duffy serves as merely the latest illustration of this. Oregonian Kennedy acted as the quirky, left-of-the-dial VJ before reemerging as a libertarian voice on Fox News and elsewhere. Louisianan Theo Von, beyond quirky if apolitical on Road Rules, memorably interviewed Donald Trump during this election cycle and serves as one of many non-mainstream comics to gather a mainstream audience through podcasts. Ohioan Mike Mizanin did not fare as well as Duffy in the unofficial role of conservative yokel on The Real World; he subsequently parlayed the wrestling persona “The Miz” he debuted on MTV into two decades and counting with the WWE, which includes two runs as champion. Rachel Campos, who starred on Real World: San Francisco, the series’ most memorable season, and later married Duffy, now serves as a regular on Fox News. Even Beavis and Butthead moved right.
MTV did not plan it this way. But Gen X, mistakenly dubbed the most apolitical generation largely by Baby Boomers imagining their goofy, self-righteous activism necessarily metastasized to coming parts of the body politic, rebelled against the masters of reality television who could not, ultimately, master reality.
And given that in all but Biden’s term Baby Boomers have occupied the Oval Office since 1993 (a time of shrinking power on the world stage, declining GDP growth, and ballooning debt), four years from now seems about time the generation of Elon Musk and Dave Chappelle and Tiger Woods and Molly Ringwald take its turn in the presidency.
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