Instead, these were beautiful, young and typically upper-middle-class white women who brought racism, homophobia, transphobia and a penchant for saying “That’s just how I was raised” into the house.
These weren’t the uneducated hillbillies screaming about their guns-that tends to be our caricature of Trump voters. If we had been paying better attention, we would have seen white contestants from all over the map making their prejudices loudly known. The network may have changed over the years from UPN to the CW and, most recently, to VH1, but the messaging was always the same. The reality competition series, which debuted in 2003, is often a shining example of the divide between conservatives and liberals. But, as someone who spent the past several months re-watching America’s Next Top Model, I can tell you that we really should have seen this coming.
What was even more shocking, at least to some observers, was the amount of support he received from white women. When white, blue-collar, middle American workers overwhelmingly supported Donald Trump in November, the narrow victories in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania he scored as a result came as a shock to almost everyone.