Let’s Take a Moment to Appreciate Joe Exotic’s Presidential Campaign

If you’ve watched Netflix’s new docuseries The Tiger King, one thing is clear from the get-go: Joe Exotic is a character. Not only is he a tiger trainer and hair-brained schemer, but he’s also been an aspiring politician on not one but two occasions: once for President and another for Governor of Oklahoma. And thanks to Last Week Tonight With John Oliver, you can still revisit some of Joe’s presidential campaign.

Long before The Tiger King, Oliver honed in on Joe Exotic in a segment titled “Third Parties.” The segment aired less than a month prior to the 2016 presidential election that saw Donald Trump defeat Hillary Clinton.

“Just wow,” Oliver said on his show after airing a clip of his “Joe Exotic for President” campaign ad. “Joe Exotic truly is the candidate you’d like to sit down and have a beer with, and then another beer, and then several more beers until you’re drunk enough to try meth for the first time. The point is—Joe Exotic: Make America Exotic Again.”

Oliver went on to joke about the “Joe Exotic for President” campaign throughout the episode while discussing other third party candidates, like Libertarian Gary Johnson and Green Party candidate Jill Stein. “He’s broke as shit and will not wear a suit,” he repeated at the end of his segment, quoting Exotic’s video.

Exotic officially announced his run for president in November of 2015. At that point, he had legally changed his name from Joe Schreibvogel—his birth name—to Joe Maldonado, taking the name of his third husband, Travis. “What’s my chances of winning? Who knows, you know? Pretty slim. But I’m going to give them a run for their money,” he told TV station KFOR in Oklahoma at the time.

In the same interview, he said that some important issues for him were veteran’s rights and health care, while making it clear that he wasn’t a typical candidate. “It shouldn’t be about my sexual preference. It shouldn’t be about the way I look. It shouldn’t be about anything else,” said Maldonado. “I’m not going to wear a suit. I’m not cutting my hair because I’m not going to be fake.”

His campaign video said, well, basically all of this, and said it in order. “First thing is, I am not cutting my hair. I am not changing the way I dress, I refuse to wear a suit. I am gay—I’ve had two boyfriends for most of my life, thank god, I finally got legally married. Thank god it’s finally legal in America,” he says in the video, which shows him standing for pro-choice, pro-LGBT rights, and anti-gun reform laws.

A couple years after his failed presidential run, Exotic also attempted to run for the Governor of Oklahoma, saying that he couldn’t wait another four years. “I learned more in 11 months in running for president than I did in 12 years of school,” he told OKC FOX. “I was like, I can’t keep my mouth shut for four more years.”

According to Ballotpedia, Exotic garnered 18.7% of the vote in the 2018 Libertarian primary for Governor of Oklahoma (beneath his opponents 48.9% and 32.4% tallies). He received a total of 664 votes.

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