Last year, Jillian Michaels, a fitness trainer, television personality, author and podcaster, emerged as the face of the "Make America Healthy Again" movement. Photo / Rose Marie Cromwell, The New York Times
The Biggest Loser’s toughest trainer was a proud Hollywood liberal. Now, she’s become a defining voice of the “Make America Healthy Again” era.
This month, Jillian Michaels appeared on CNN for a panel discussion. Sitting alongside her was a member of Congress from New York, a former special assistant to President George W. Bush, a legal analyst and a Democratic strategist. But it was Michaels, best known as America’s toughest trainer on The Biggest Loser, who was about to make news.
Midway through, the conversation turned to President Donald Trump’s recent directive to ensure the Smithsonian Institution “celebrate American exceptionalism” and “remove divisive or partisan narratives”. When a panellist raised what this meant for depictions of slavery, Michaels jumped to the President’s defence, saying that he was not “whitewashing” slavery and that “when you make every single exhibit about white imperialism, when it isn’t relevant at all, that is a problem”.
The response was swift, with some of those on air with her – and many people on social media – suggesting Michaels downplayed the role of white supremacy in American history, and others cheering her on. (“She’s awesome,” said conservative commentator Megyn Kelly. “Love her.”) Michaels argued that her comments were misconstrued, and that she was talking about slavery throughout world history. “There was no moment where I defended slavery,” Michaels told Fox News, adding that her point was that “you can’t lay it all at the feet of one race”. Doing so, she told me the next day, “is begetting very bad behaviour on both sides”.
Amid the maelstrom, though, one of the most common responses was one of confusion. What was Michaels, a famous fitness trainer, doing on CNN talking about slavery, anyway?
Michaels herself can seem surprised to be in such a position. Her expertise, as she would acknowledge, involves nutrition and exercise, and she became a celebrity on a reality show that gamified weight loss, then spent years gracing magazine covers and offering body transformation tips.
In the past year and a half, though, she has squarely situated herself in the world of infotainment, shifting from an apolitical wellness authority to an unfiltered political commentator. Along the way, she has undergone a personal transformation from a Hollywood liberal – one who responded to Trump’s first election by posting a mournful picture of her children on Facebook – to someone who considers a lot of her former views propaganda.
Michaels feared being open about this might backfire; instead, it has put her career into overdrive. Since expanding her podcast Keeping It Real beyond health, her guests have included everyone from Lara Trump to Kara Swisher, and Michaels has become an in-demand guest on cable news and podcasts, willing to weigh in on practically anything and rush toward controversy, regardless of whether the topic is Ozempic, homelessness or race.
Last year, she also emerged as a face of the “Make America Healthy Again” movement, the slogan popularised by Robert F. Kennedy jnr, the head of the Department of Health and Human Services. In September, Michaels posted a picture of herself on a hike with Kennedy and another supporter of his movement with the caption, “Ready to go to war with this crew.” A few weeks later, Michaels appeared at a Senate round table alongside Casey Means, the nominee for surgeon general, describing the health of Americans as having been “sacrificed at the altar of unchecked corporate greed”. In May, she visited the White House for the release of that month’s MAHA report, and sat in the press briefing room’s “new media” seat.
Michaels told me she does not really consider herself part of Kennedy’s movement, though. And on her podcast, after Benny Johnson, a right-wing YouTuber, called Michaels the “mother of MAHA,” she demurred, saying that she’d only “met Bobby in person twice”. Similarly, in 2024, after announcing she’d voted for Trump, she added that she didn’t endorse him and, ultimately, she saw the election as “a question of lesser evils”.
How does Michaels now lean? “I guess centre right?” she said, adding, “I’m not going to tribally follow anyone”.
She considers modern liberals intolerant, but still thinks of herself as a ’90s version of one, by which she means that she takes positions like supporting abortion rights (though not late-term) and same-sex marriage (she is married to a woman) and welcomes frank discussions about even profoundly different beliefs.
But she also thinks that it’s wrong to medicalise gender transitions for children (adults are fine) and, unlike most authorities on the subject, is concerned that vaccines haven’t been studied vigorously enough (though she does not consider herself broadly anti-vax). She also has faith that both Kennedy and Trump are, for the most part, well-intentioned. If Trump tries for a third term, however, she told me she would be “rioting in the street”.
Her willingness to speak freely about all of this has placed her among the group of Joe Rogan-adjacent podcasters, who don’t have so much a shared set of opinions as a collective dedication to open conversations, “doing your own research” and questioning the expert consensus.
“The media is changing right before our eyes, right?” said Cenk Uygur, the co-creator of the progressive show the Young Turks and a recent guest on Michaels’ podcast. “And Jillian,” he continued, “is an avatar for that change.” He said people had become so distrustful of the mainstream news media, which he described as surrounding facts with “corporate status quo propaganda,” that many were turning instead to outside voices like Michaels’. “There is a jailbreak from the establishment prison,” he said, adding that “Jillian is one of the people in that jailbreak”.
In April, I spent two days with Michaels in Los Angeles. On the first, she recorded three podcast episodes (including one with Bill O’Reilly), filmed two cable news clips (for Newsmax and NewsNation) and fielded calls about a prospective TV project. On the second, we met in Santa Monica for a lunch that lasted six hours. Being around Michaels, who’s 51, can feel like fast-forwarding through life with the contrast turned up. She discusses nicotine gum (which she chews) with the same verve as when she turns to California Governor Gavin Newsom (whom she loathes), and one question can lead to five different tangents.
When Trump first became President, “I genuinely was like, ‘Oh, you’re a Russian puppet and you were peed on by a prostitute,’” she said. She worried gay people would lose their right to marriage, too. “Until it was like, Actually, none of this is true.” Which made her wonder: “What else isn’t true?” (If same-sex marriage is overturned, she told me, “then you know what’s going to happen? All of us who made this choice are going to pay for it.”)
The same year, Michaels faced criticism for comments she made that were framed as fatphobic. After a BuzzFeed host raised musician Lizzo’s body positivity, Michaels said people should celebrate the musician’s art, rather than her body, “because it isn’t going to be awesome if she gets diabetes”.
By then, Michaels was about a year into dating DeShanna Marie Minuto, a Trump supporter whom she would later marry. Initially, they clashed about politics, with Minuto arguing the left was more hypocritical and intolerant than the right. “We would go to war,” Michaels said. But gradually, Michaels came to see more evidence for Minuto’s positions.
As Michaels began to perceive her erstwhile allies differently, she felt welcomed by people on the other side of the political divide. Even if they didn’t love that she was gay or agree with all her opinions, she believed they made more room for divergent perspectives.
This July, Michaels travelled to Tampa Bay, Florida, for conservative group Turning Point USA’s Student Action Summit. There, Donald Trump jnr took aim at the stereotypical “raging” liberal and the “trans mafia,” while Steve Bannon declared that the “deep state must be destroyed”. Michaels spent her time onstage encouraging the audience to listen to opposing perspectives.
“I promise you, they want the exact same thing you do,” she told the room of young conservatives. “They just have different ideas on how to get there.”
This aligns with the goal of her podcast, which is, she says, to facilitate conversations that expose people to different viewpoints, including both the liberals she loves, like her mother and brother, and their conservative counterparts.
As someone who’s come to believe a lot of things she once doubted, the alternative seems scarier. “I don’t necessarily agree with certain opinions of guests I have on the show,” Michaels said. But regardless, she lets them talk. “Otherwise, in my opinion, they’re not going to come on,” she said, adding that, also, “I want to hear what they have to say”.
The promulgation of questionable theories is at the heart of much of the criticism of Kennedy’s health movement. “They take a little bit of truth,” said Jessica Knurick, a registered dietitian with a doctorate in nutrition science who has been described as “Instagram’s top MAHA critic”. “And use it to cast doubt over all of science.”
Over time, Michaels’ own attitudes toward the movement have evolved. Where she once had high hopes, she is now more concerned. After it came out that the May MAHA report cited nonexistent studies, Michaels was incredulous. When doing something that will most likely get pushback, she said when we spoke by phone a few days later, “proofread the report!” She is also worried Kennedy’s movement could become a “toothless tiger,” she told me. As she said on her podcast in August, “There are things and dogmas and infighting and politicisation that are starting to make me wonder if anything good is going to get done there.”
There was a period when Michaels believed people on the left were “the truly empathetic ones,” she told me at one point, but her worldview has since become messier. “I thought that there was a right and a wrong,” she said. “And now I just think everybody’s kind of dirty and I’ve got to pick a side.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Molly Langmuir
Photographs by: Rose Marie Cromwell
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