Mike Rowe, former star of Discovery Channel's popular "Dirty Jobs" and CEO of the MikeRoweWorks Foundation, has written a Facebook post now going viral that compares the surprise appeal of his TV show with the unexpected election of Donald Trump.
Both his show and the Trump campaign succeeded, he posits, because they made millions of people feel "seen."
Rowe goes on to write, "The people did not want a politician. The people wanted to be seen. Donald Trump convinced those people that he could see them. Hillary Clinton did not."
An advocate for manual labor and for blue-collar workers, in 2008, Rowe started his foundation to help the millions of people he calls "profoundly disconnected." Rowe disputes the notion that a Bachelor's degree is the only or surest path to success: After all, he points out, "the world is full of very happy septic-tank cleaners and miserable investment bankers."
And this year, Rowe believes, the septic-tank cleaners, along with millions of others, felt like Trump better understood their concerns than his opponent did.
Rowe closed his Facebook post by offering to be of use.
"The kind of recovery that Donald Trump is promising will require a work force that's properly trained and sufficiently enthused about the opportunities at hand," wrote Rowe. "At the moment, we do not have that work force in place.
"What we do have are tens of millions of capable people who have simply stopped looking for work, and millions of available jobs that no one aspires to do. That's the skills gap, and it's gotta close. If MikeRoweWorks can help, we're standing by."
The post has been shared about 100,000 times and has generated over 120,000 comments, the majority of them supportive.