“I’ll be honest, I haven’t ruled politics out. I’m not being coy when I say that, but at the moment I am not sure,” Johnson said. “I can’t deny that the thought of being governor, the thought of being president, is alluring. And beyond that, it would be an opportunity to make a real impact on people’s lives on a global scale. But there are a lot of other things I want to do first.”

The prospect of yet another former reality-television star running for higher office may feel improbable at best and horrifying at worst, given Trump’s performance in the 2016 campaign thus far. And I can’t vouch for Johnson’s position on the issues — though he’s registered as a Republican and has appeared at the Republican convention to boost voter registration,* he’s generally talked less about actual policy and spent more time flashing his famously winning smile:

But just as I was an early champion of Johnson’s acting abilities — he’s fascinating as a gay, closeted driver in “Be Cool,” mesmerizing as a an amnesiac who is not doing well in the post-apocalypse in “Southland Tales” and one of the funniest parts of Michael Bay’s wildly underrated “Pain & Gain” — I’ve long thought that Johnson had a weirdly plausible path to a political career.

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For a Republican Party that was desperate to woo nonwhite voters before Donald Trump tossed his toupee in the ring, and will be even harder-pressed to woo them once our present mess is over, Johnson could be the sort of person the GOP tries to renovate into a viable candidate.

If he doesn’t have policy or issue bona fides, Johnson’s relative silence on substance also means he doesn’t have a record that can be used to tar him as some sort of flip-flopper. And he could also make a series of carefully selected charitable and political donations designed to start building a record of positions. It’s easier to teach talking points than charisma, as Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) experienced earlier this year.

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Of course, if he really was going to try to follow Ronald Reagan’s path to the presidency, Johnson would certainly have to run for something else first. And he could do it as early as this year: Johnson has until June 24 to get on the primary ballot in Florida and join the candidates who are competing for the Senate seat Marco Rubio decided to vacate when he ran for president.

The prospect of The Rock sitting through committee hearings might be vaguely ridiculous, and a governorship would probably require him to take fewer potentially damaging votes. But the lesson of this year in American politics is that stranger things can always happen. And Trump is proof that if our politics are turning into reality-television competitions, the results could always be worse.