My Conversation with Rod Blagojevich

Few people have had a life as unusual as Governor Rod Blagojevich’s.

In 2002, he became the first Democrat elected governor of Illinois in twenty-six years. Six years later, he was arrested amid accusations that he had tried to sell President-elect Barack Obama’s vacant Senate seat. By 2010, when I first heard of him, he occupied the same space in the public imagination as Bernie Madoff.

Blagojevich went to great lengths to proclaim his innocence, including on Season Three of Donald Trump’s The Celebrity Apprentice, where he was eliminated in the fourth episode. Like his fellow contestants, I was puzzled about why a man at probably the lowest point in his life would join a reality TV show he had never even watched. Could he have known something the rest of us did not: that knowing Donald Trump might prove consequential a decade later? His reasoning turned out to be more mundane and, at the same time, rather bleak.

In 2011, he was convicted on corruption charges and sentenced to fourteen years in prison, a punishment that has drawn criticism from across the political spectrum for its severity. He maintains that unethical prosecutors were at the root of his troubles, a view that won growing sympathy in the right-wing media ecosystem during Trump’s first term and the years that followed. His wife, Patti, made a series of fateful appeals on Fox News programs the president was known to watch. Trump commuted his sentence in 2020 and pardoned him in 2025. Since his release, Blagojevich has found sympathetic audiences on the podcast circuit, including Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson.