"It’s tempting to look at Duffy’s political ascent—and Trump’s, of course—and reflect on the surprising cultural sticking power of turn-of-the-millennium-style reality TV...."

"The Trump Presidency likely wouldn’t have been possible without 'The Apprentice.’ Duffy’s rise has been less meteoric, but his launchpad, if anything, was an even purer distillation of the genre; as my colleague Emily Nussbaum has written, 'The Real World' pioneered many of reality TV’s modern tropes—the cast of strangers, the apartment as set, the confessional interviews—and cultivated a viewership.... When I revisited the show earlier this summer, it seemed a particularly propitious moment to assert the ongoing influence of reality TV, not least in politics. Spencer Pratt, the villain from 'The Hills,' was running for mayor of Los Angeles, depicting the city as a hellhole and attracting reams of media coverage. Luke Gulbranson ('Summer House') was running for a (year-round) U.S. House seat in Minnesota. Mark Moran ('FBoy Island') was running for Senate in Virginia. The moment no longer seems so propitious. Moran dropped out; Gulbranson lost, as, more significantly, did Pratt, occasioning some hand-wringing about whether his supposed surge had ever been real to begin with. (In fairness, almost nothing is more reality-TV than that.)..."

Writes Jon Allsop, in "Sean Duffy in the Real World/Donald Trump’s Transportation Secretary got his big break on reality TV, and is now out with a six-part YouTube show about a family road trip. How bad could it be?"

"In 1968, Janet Malcolm visited a new showroom for high-end furniture that was, she wrote, among 'the most beautiful and interesting' in New York."

"The venue was designed by Warren Platner, an architect who himself designed furniture; Donald Trump would later acquire a set of his chairs, and sounded gratified when, during an interview in 2010, a reporter from the Times recognized them. Platner’s son, Bronson, went into law, in Maine; his son Graham studied at Hotchkiss, a tony boarding school in Connecticut, though he hated it, skipped classes, and was quickly kicked out. Graham transferred to a different private school closer to home, where he starred in a production of 'My Fair Lady.' He played Henry Higgins, the haughty phonetician who teaches a lower-class flower girl to speak proper...."

Those are the opening lines of an essay by Jon Allsop titled "The Changing Face of 'Authenticity' in Politics/What Graham Platner’s scandal-plagued Senate run says about a tired cliché" (The New Yorker).

Here's how Platner entered the political arena, last summer:

Allsop ponders "authenticity":