Jillian Michaels Was Always a Scammer

It doesn’t feel like much of a coincidence that, in the same month that Netflix released its tell-all documentary about The Biggest Loser, one of its most prominent stars went on TV to yell about how slavery wasn’t that big a deal. To the surprise of literally nobody, Jillian Michaels, a personal trainer who became famous for bullying fat people on TV, has reinvented herself as a right-wing MAGA-esque pundit. During a recent appearance on CNN, she ranted about how slavery was too long ago for modern people to care about, and that the Trump administration’s blatant attempts to whitewash the nation’s history was cool because the National African American Museum of History and Culture was nothing but exhibits about how ‘white people bad.’

We all knew she was going to end up like this. Jillian Michaels is a huckster whose snake oil of choice changes as frequently as the weather. In Fit for TV: The Reality of The Biggest Loser, she is alleged to have said to one contestant, ‘You just made me a millionaire.’ She branded herself as ideal TV at the expense of real people’s health, and it paid off with instructional DVDs, brand deals, and the clout of authority in the world of wellness for too long. Actress Amber Tamblyn wrote in her newsletter about working with Michaels to lose weight for a role and how Michaels berated her incessantly, then sold a story to Us Weekly about her without consent. She has always sought out fame above all else, attention above care or dignity. In fairness, it’s an effective business strategy.

The Biggest Loser has rightly been reassessed as a horrendous parade of fatphobia and abuse that created more harm than it ever claimed to fix. In the documentary, we hear from former contestants who were essentially starved and forced to exercise for hours a day, all while the trainers screamed at them like the drill sergeant from Full Metal Jacket. Michaels made her name as the hectoring fitness maven who was grandly rewarded for her open disdain towards anyone with a higher percentage of body fat than herself. She’s often reared her head to spout smarmy body-shaming, such as when she went after Lizzo in 2020, but now, her strategy has taken a turn for the tedious with some good old-fashioned racism and Trump cheerleading.

Michaels knew that history wouldn’t look back on her professional crowning glory with positivity, but she was also aware that there is always a market for bullies who claim to know what’s best for the world. She has unveiled her latest costume in the midst of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s reign of terror over the American healthcare system, with his virulent anti-vaxx rhetoric and brand of crunchy fascism being sold to the nation as Make America Healthy Again. It’s a handy bandwagon for Michaels to jump onto, one that’s not all that far away from her original platform of Hot Girl Fitness that saw health struggles of all kinds as a symptom of moral weakness. It has made her a good fit for the era of raw milk, the Liver King, and COVID denialism. Not that she is an authority on any of those subjects. Then again, CNN and op-ed editors don’t care so much about qualifications when the purpose is to get attention and stir up sh*t. Why else have on a white personal trainer to discuss racism?

There is nothing safer or less interesting than when a celebrity makes a rightward political shift as part of a public rebrand. It’s so commonplace that you could set your watch to it. Michaels is no different from other has-been blowhards who clung to relevance through bigotry-for-hire, from Laurence Fox to Dennis Miller to any number of columnists with a Substack account. She’s following the guidebook step by step with no unique contributions or agendas. Even trying to both-sides slavery, while still abhorrent and dangerous, isn’t a new provocation in the current era of historical denialism as ordained by the Trump administration. Right-wingers love to call their critics NPCs, meaning non-playable characters, a reference to video game extras who have a programmed set of actions and dialogue on repeat. But nobody is more guilty of regurgitating the same rhetoric, word for word, on an endless loop quite like these rent-a-gobs.

This wouldn’t even be worth discussing if it weren’t for how dishearteningly effective this shamelessness remains. Michaels got a depressingly softball profile in The New York Times for her obvious nonsense. Zachary Levi was given an uncritical piece by Variety on his Trumpism that allowed him to spew crap about being kicked out of Hollywood. In the UK, Laurence Fox managed to spin his failed acting career into a solid few years’ worth of milquetoast bigotry veiled as political punditry. The mainstream press loves hate.

It is Fox that I keep returning to when I see all of these washed-up hecklers decide to lean in on a hard-right rebrand. I don’t doubt that Fox is truly an unpleasant creep with nasty views on marginalised people, but it was also painfully evident that he wasn’t very good at trying to be a provocative loudmouth. He couldn’t take what he dished out, and he also couldn’t tell where the line is. Believe it or not, there will always be a line that shouldn’t be crossed. In his case, it was the one-two punch of losing a libel case after calling two gay men ‘paedophiles,’ and a sexist attack against a journalist that led to him losing his GB News gig. He’s still skulking around on the fringes of British public life, alas, but he’s now too much of a legal hazard to financially invest in. That’s the real bottom line here: hate is profitable, but it can cost you dearly if you cross that line.

Michaels will eventually cross a line too disgusting for even CNN and the YouTube cave dwellers to justify. When you have no real morals and your living is dependent on finding new depths to sink to, it’s inevitable that you’ll fall too low (and, being a gay woman, she’ll be tossed aside far quicker than her straight male goons.) Sadly, in the current era of fascism and trolls in the White House, it’s tough to tell what the final offence will be. But it will come, and Michaels will have to reinvent herself into something more fringe to keep the lights on. Perhaps Milo Yiannopoulos can offer her some words of advice.