How Did Jillian Michaels End Up Here?

Earlier this month, Jillian Michaels appeared on CNN for a panel discussion. Sitting alongside her was a New York congressman, 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 panelist raised what this meant for depictions of slavery, Michaels jumped to the president’s defense, 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 the conservative commentator Megyn Kelly. “Love her.”) Michaels herself argued 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 behavior 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 herself 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.

Michaels told me she does not really consider herself part of Kennedy’s movement, though. And on her podcast, after Benny Johnson, the 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 center 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 gay 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 medicalize gender transitions for children (adults are fine) and, unlike most authorities on the subject, is concerned 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. During her own recent appearance on Rogan’s podcast, the two discussed the risks of gatekeeping information (“God forbid you don’t fact-check everybody on everything,” Michaels said); their opposition to mRNA vaccines; nihilism; and the dangers feral cats pose to birds.

“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’s 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’s. “There is a jailbreak from the establishment prison,” he said, adding that “Jillian is one of the people in that jailbreak.”

To some, Michaels’s newfound prominence suggests a broadening receptivity to critical thought. To others, it is a sign of our descent into a world awash in falsehoods, where conspiratorial ideas and dangerous views proliferate. What’s undeniable is that, in the scrambled political landscape of 2025, Michaels now has broad reach and influence.

While at the White House, Michaels also interviewed Lee Zeldin, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, for her podcast, asking him about environmental regulations and whether climate change was real. The reason he had agreed to the interview was clear.

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 Gavin Newsom (whom she loathes), and one question can lead to five different tangents.

Michaels describes her home in Jackson Hole, Wyo., which she bought in 2022, as her “main residence,” but it has been undergoing a lengthy renovation. In the meantime, for work as well as family — she co-parents two teenagers with her former partner Heidi Rhoades — she has continued to spend a lot of time in Los Angeles. (This is, she suggests, to her dismay. “LA and NYC are lost,” she tweeted in June. “Don’t bother fighting for them. Just run. And vote differently wherever you land.”)

At her architecturally elaborate rental in Santa Monica, where she invited me after our lunch, she made me tea in her kitchen, sat cross-legged on her counter and, at one point, cradled her 18-year-old greyhound mix, Seven, like a baby. It was easy to imagine her as the dependable Southern California Democrat she had been just a few years ago, living in Malibu with a small farm’s worth of animals, appalled by Trump and occasionally tuning into Rogan for the chance to learn something about aliens or parallel universes.

In 2020, not long after the Covid-19 pandemic shut down much of the country, Michaels was in fact listening to Rogan’s podcast while driving down the Pacific Coast Highway when his guest mentioned something that stuck with her: the possibility that the virus had leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China. Michaels was so struck by the idea that she pulled over and started Googling, a pivotal moment in her political transformation.

“That was my Neo moment in ‘The Matrix,’” she told Rogan on his show. “That was it. I was forever gone. Took the red pill.”

Michaels already felt primed to reconsider some of her assumptions. 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 gay 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 the 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.”

In the aftermath, Michaels refused to back down, declaring that she “meant every word” and reiterating, ever since, that the idea that you can be healthy at any size is “a straight-up Big Food psy-op,” as she put it to me.

Regarding the response, “That’s when I was like, Whatever is happening over here on the left with this wokeism isn’t good,” Michaels said. (She does wish she had managed to extricate Lizzo from the conversation, “just for her sake,” she said. “Not mine.”)

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. She has likened the process of publicly opening up about her political shift to another one that, as a young adult, she initially resisted: coming out as gay.

“She’s coming out of her liberal bubble,” Kelly, the conservative commentator, said in August after Michaels’s CNN remarks. “And her journey is not yet complete.”

In person as on TV, Michaels often comes across as both passionately opinionated and eager to relate. “I don’t know, mama,” she said to me about five minutes after we met, having launched into a conversation about a recent bombing in Ukraine. “It’s just like, you wake up in the morning and you never know what the frick is going to happen.”

As anyone who watched “The Biggest Loser” is aware, Michaels can also be harsh (she was famous for telling contestants to keep going unless they “faint, puke or die”); a recent Netflix documentary suggested Michaels disregarded medical advice and pushed intensive calorie restriction, claims she has strenuously denied (the documentary “is all lies,” she texted me in late August). Michaels’s fellow trainer on the show, Bob Harper, described Michaels to me as both “volatile” and fiercely protective of her contestants. (Michaels was more blunt about their relationship. “We’re not close,” she said. “Unfortunately. And I won’t even pretend to be close.”)

That Michaels would create engaging TV was immediately apparent to the producers of “The Biggest Loser.” “It was that lightning-bolt moment of falling in love at first sight,” said Mark Koops, the show’s co-creator, of meeting Michaels, who he described as having “something magnetic about her.” It helped that Michaels’s personal history resonated with the show’s theme, too — growing up as an only child in a tumultuous home in Tarzana, Calif., Michaels struggled with her own weight, particularly around the time her parents divorced, when she was 12.

Within a few seasons, Michaels had become a household name. By 2008, when she and her business partner, Giancarlo Chersich, started a company to manage her growing brand, their goal was to make Michaels synonymous with health and wellness, like Martha Stewart was with the category of home.

For a long time, Michaels kept her brand apolitical — her team believed wading into politics risked alienating a large portion of her fan base, which ran the political spectrum. “A lot of my audience has always been in Middle America,” Michaels said. They go to church, she continued, and want a better life, even if they can’t quite afford it.

Early last year, though, Michaels appeared on Bill Maher’s podcast and shared her thoughts about the price of eggs, puberty blockers for trans children and the possibility that Joe Biden might be replaced as the presidential nominee. Maher saw in her a kindred spirit, albeit one who was listening to “too much right-wing bullshit.”

A few months later, Michaels appeared on a podcast hosted by Sage Steele, a conservative commentator and former ESPN anchor. “I grew up here,” Michaels told Steele about Los Angeles. “I’m a woman. I’m a gay woman. My mom’s a Jew. My dad’s an Arab. I have a Black kid. And believe it or not, my son is half Latin, even though he doesn’t look like it. I hold a million cards in your game of woke victimology poker.” The clip went viral.

This July, Michaels traveled to Tampa Bay, Fla., for the conservative group Turning Point USA’s Student Action Summit. There, Donald Trump Jr. 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.

Inarguably, though, her guest list skews to the right. Michaels says this is not for lack of effort, and that she even invited the former Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Donna Brazile in person, at Maher’s Christmas party last year. “Who am I going to have more in common with, Donna Brazile or Matt Walsh?” Michaels said, referring to the conservative Catholic commentator. “Who showed up? Matt Walsh.” (Brazile wrote in an email that she had enjoyed talking to Michaels but hasn’t done podcasts “as a rule,” since if you do one, you have to do them all.)

When Walsh joined, he and Michaels had a long discussion about his opposition to gay marriage. Michaels maintains that in most cases, whether about that, Covid’s origins or vaccination, it’s better to let ideas be aired out and openly worked through than silenced.

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.”

This approach can provide space for conspiratorial ideas to go unchecked. In April, for example, when Michaels had Candace Owens, the conservative commentator, on her podcast, the self-described “super anti-vax” Owens suggested that certain diseases circulated more among people who had been vaccinated against them and restated her belief that “the truth is” the wife of President Emmanuel Macron of France was born a man. (The Macrons have sued Owens for defamation over Owens’s repeated claim.)

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 Ph.D. 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’s 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 politicization that are starting to make me wonder if anything good is going to get done there.”

Michaels has occasionally doubted whether she wants to stay immersed in so many polarized discussions. In December, when she decided to take the hallucinogenic drug ayahuasca for the first time, she hoped to figure out why life kept pushing her into the political fray, she told me. “Because this is such a divisive conversation,” she said, and it wasn’t as if she thought everyone involved was saving the world. “Half the time we’re just saying, I think this is a little bit better of an option,” she said.

What she gleaned from taking the drug was “that no matter what you do, you just have to approach it with empathy,” she said. But the revelation felt to her like only the beginning of an answer. “I didn’t meet God,” she said of her ayahuasca experience. “Like everybody else did.”

Certainly, it has not led her to back away from conflict. Through late August, ensconced in controversy over the Netflix documentary and her CNN comments, she has come out swinging, making multiple media appearances to defend herself.

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.”