The reality TV-loving Trump administration is pitting small businesses against one another in a Shark Tank-style competition featuring a head-scratching panel of MAGA judges.
The Small Business Administration is hosting a live “Million Dollar Pitch Competition” later this month, in which five businesses will compete for a share of $1 million, President Donald Trump’s billionaire SBA administrator Kelly Loeffler announced on X.
The contestants submitted their ideas earlier this year and were chosen for the Sept. 18 event based on their ability to strengthen American competitiveness, create quality jobs, and “punch above their weight,” Fox News reported.
All five are manufacturers active in fields such as defense technology, metalworking, and plastic molding.
Evaluating their projects will be rapper Nicki Minaj, who was chosen as a judge after she went full MAGA and declared herself Trump’s “number one fan” earlier this year.
“This is a major, MAJOR KEY,” Minaj wrote on X about the pitch challenge. “Sooooooooooo looking forward to this!!!”
She will be joined at the event by judges Grant Cardone, a private equity fund manager who has championed Trump’s deeply unpopular tariff policy, and Joe Gebbia, the anti-immigrant co-founder of Airbnb.
Rounding out the made-for-MAGA TV line-up will be host Dean Cain, a former TV Superman who became an honorary immigration agent last year and regularly hypes Trump’s pet projects.
The first-place winner will receive $400,000, while the other contestants will receive between $75,000 and $250,000 to realize their projects.
The event comes as small businesses have been battered by Trump’s tariff policy, surging energy costs, and the wider fallout from the president’s war with Iran.
The live pitch challenge is just the latest example of the Trump administration’s warm embrace of reality TV stunts.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy released a six-part YouTube series earlier this month called “The Great American Road Trip” in which the former Real World star and his wife, Fox & Friends weekend co-host Rachel Campos Duffy, drove cross-country with several of their nine children.
The show was funded by millions of dollars in corporate sponsorships from companies that Duffy’s department regulates, including Boeing, Toyota, United Airlines, Shell, Royal Caribbean, Enterprise, and Lyft, raising questions about possible ethics violations.
Like the SBA’s pitch challenge, the show was touted as a “celebration” of the 250th anniversary of America’s founding.
Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has also embarked on his own reality TV journey with an online cooking show.
After foisting his sauerkraut-heavy diet on several members of the administration, Kennedy is now trying to convince Americans that they too can eat vast quantities of fermented food on a budget.
So far, though, his grocery-store math hasn’t added up.
