Pat Sajak replacement: why is the Wheel of Fortune host so mad?

When Pat Sajak announced he’d be retiring from Wheel of Fortune after the show’s 41st season, which premieres in September, he included a perfectly diva-ish swipe in his farewell message. Well, according to the tabloids that cover syndicated television like it’s Capitol Hill, Sajak’s behavior on Wheel of Fortune has grown increasingly erratic as he’s blown past the guardrails of retirement age: The longtime host, 76, was putting contestants into chokeholds and imploring celebrity guests to show off their abs. To be more generous, you could say that Sajak’s lifelong laconic attitude might be rooted in a selfless belief that a host ought to be a minor part of a game show’s framework—that the deductive wordplay is the real star here, not a handful of bad one-liners or the increasingly wooden intrigue between him and Vanna White. But he has still made time to bemoan COVID-19 lockdowns and the “politics of casting.” Sajak’s other rightward initiatives are more businesslike and blue-blooded: He is currently on the board of Hillsdale College, the conservative Michigan incubator with 1,400 undergraduates that churns out a variety of D.C. think-tank creatures and defense-industry parasites.