On Thursday night, in the season finale of The Traitors, two former Love Island contestants locked eyes across the round table. In the face of Maura Higgins you could see a dangerous hope growing—as if, for the first time, she could imagine what winning would be like. Here she was, at the end of a long game of strategy and deceit and maybe... just maybe... she had played well enough. She glanced at Rob Rausch across from her, whose body under his overalls looked truly relaxed for the first time all season, and believed that they might have done it together. And he looked at her with glee in his eyes, knowing that she was so deeply, terribly wrong.
She mistook it for a shared joy in winning. "I'm sorry," she joked, pausing for emphasis. "I'm a faithful."
"Oh fuck," he said. And then he tells her that he's not, that he's lied to her for weeks, crept about, and twisted the play of the game around his little finger until the whole world they lived inside was controlled entirely by him. "Maura, I am and I always have been... a traitor."
The light falls from her eyes. Her beautiful mouth hangs open. She waits for what feels like an eternity hoping that he, like her, is joking. But he's not joking. We, the viewers, know he's not joking. At least, not in the way she imagines. We, the viewers, are in on the real joke. It is only Maura who does not know she's the punchline. Poor, beautiful Maura. It's not her fault that she chose to trust one of the best traitors to ever play the game.
The Traitors is not fair. It is not equal. The traitors know that more than everyone else, and they get a say in every decision. There are only two ways to leave the castle: banishment at the round table (where a traitor can try to control the votes) or murder (where the traitors have full decision-making power over the faithfuls). Because it is my favorite show, and I have seen every English-language version available to me (except the most recent UK season, which is not on Peacock yet), I have explained the rules of this game at more bars than you can possibly imagine while I try to convince more people to watch. And everyone, always, has the same reaction. "Shouldn't the traitors just stick together and win every time then?" They should, but they don't.
Don't get me wrong, they still win most of the time. According to amateur data done by a Reddit commenter, of the 78 seasons that have aired, the traitors have won 44 of them. I have not seen all 78 seasons, but I have seen almost 20 seasons, and would have guessed that the traitors win a little more than half the time. But considering the size of their advantage, that number should really be higher.
Traitors slip up and get caught. Sometimes the random choices at the round table accidentally hit correctly and take a traitor out. The traitors turn on each other—usually for stupid, petty reasons—and then incriminate themselves.
It is rare to see a traitor dominate a season from beginning to end without a slip-up. Only once—in the 2024 UK season's Harry Clark—have I seen a traitor comparable to Rob Rausch.
I have to admit that I underestimated Rob. I know him, like all reality television lovers, from his stint on Love Island, where he famously hid himself under a water feature in a pool so that cameras could not see him while he sobbed. He's a tall, gorgeous man with a thick Alabama accent who wrangles snakes for a living. He frequently (on both shows) wears overalls with nothing under them. And I know it's nothing because in one episode of Love Island he declared that he was "D on D": dick on denim. He most frequently showed affection by bringing a girl a bug that he found somewhere in the villa. There were signs that he was competitive. During a competition to raise the girls' heart rates, Rob, dressed as a cowboy, told the camera, "So women, in my experience at least, what turns them on the most is what they're hearing," then proceeded to walk up to his ex-partner and ask "Do you miss me?" But I didn't expect him to come into The Traitors and dominate.
In some ways, Rob's gameplay was classic: everyone was dispensable, everyone could be lied to. And like Harry, his best asset was that he began every day by lying to himself, telling himself he was a faithful, and then behaving throughout the day like that was the truth. That's replicable by everyone. He was ruthless. He allowed his fellow traitor to murder his closest faithful in the game, Colton Underwood, because he knew it would make him look more faithful. He brainstormed names of people who could be traitors, and he only turned on his fellow traitors when the tide of public opinion was irreversibly against them already.
What's not replicable is the fact that every celebrity in the castle was in love with him immediately. "Rob, catch me," Johnny Weir jokingly yelled in one episode, running toward Rob. And Rob held out his arms, ready to catch him. He is a beautiful man and a brilliant flirt. At the reunion episode, he managed to get Donna Kelce to blush and say she couldn't be with him because "you want kids." He is the kind of person that people just love, and it is very hard to believe that a person you love will lie to you. Just ask anyone who has ever been in love.
"You're never going to have a girlfriend after this. You're such a good liar." Maura said in the finale, after he'd stolen the $200,000 she thought they'd won together. Rob cringed a little, his arms folded inside the front flap of his overalls.
"Would you give 100k to a person you met three weeks ago?" Rob said in a confessional. "I wouldn't."
What made him the greatest traitor of all time is that even as he says that, even after he has lied to, manipulated, and tricked poor Maura out of $100,000, the smirk on his face makes you root for him. He promised in the reunion to buy Maura a Birkin bag as a consolation prize. You can't hate Rob Rausch. He's just too damn likable.
