Do I think reality TV is going to be a path to politics in a significant way? Eh, I don't know. Trump is a very specific case. It's really gonna be hard to replicate that.

This notion that you hear from his surrogates and his fans throughout the campaign - "Trump tells it like it is; he's a straight shooter" - that through line comes in large part because this is a man who was welcomed into people's living rooms every week for nearly a decade.

Donald Trump is a man who was the star of a network reality show that helped to create templates for the abysmally biased way in which women and people of color, in particular women of color, have been treated in reality TV for the last decade and a half.

[Trump's worldview states] that, for example, women are incompetent as compared to men in business settings. That women in general are intellectually inferior and have to make up for that by using their sexuality to get ahead. That women of color are angry, irrational, lazy, and always ready to get into a fight for no reason. That men in the workplace can say incredibly racist and sexist things, and as long as they make more money than their competitors, the racist and sexist things they say and do are totally acceptable.

The more we think we're not affected by media - stereotypes, advertising - the more potential those forms of media have.

Donald Trump winning the electoral vote - I don't even want to say he won the election because Hillary Clinton won the popular vote - I don't think legitimizes reality TV, but I think reality TV legitimized Trump.

We don't have media literacy in America in any kind of substantive way. If we did, I think that (A) more of us would've recognized the threat that Trump posed from the beginning, and (B) no one would have been surprised at the bigotry that was in the DNA of his campaign.