Former Survivor contestant says Donald Trump would win the show: 'You have to be willing to do s---ty stuff'

Former Survivor contestant Joel Klug, who competed on the long-running show's very first season, has a theory on how former President Donald Trump would do.

"Trump would win Survivor," Klug said on Tuesday's episode of Dark Side of Reality TV. "Not the best guy, but he's gonna win. You have to be willing to do s---ty stuff."

He explained later that contestants are "not gonna win Survivor by winning all of the challenges. It's gonna be a conniving, s---ty win."

Klug and others reminisce on their time on the CBS show that's now a TV institution on the latest installment of the Vice docuseries. Collectively, participants from that first season in Borneo describe their experiences as pretty brutal, which it is designed to be. After all, the entire concept of the show is that contestants survive life on an island, even obtaining their own shelter and, in most cases, food.

Richard Hatch, who defeated Klug and 14 others to became Survivor's first winner, recalled losing a pound each day.

"People think when they watch the show that it looks hard," Hatch said. "They have no idea. It's 10, 15, 20 times harder than you can imagine."

Much of it was the lack of food. Take it from Gervase Peterson, who was also in pursuit of the season 1 cash prize.

"Hunger pangs never go away, so you're always hungry," Peterson said. "I would think about food, I would dream about food. I would talk about food non-stop. Like, I just wanted to eat so bad."

While contestants endured uncontrollable factors such as inclement weather, Kelly Wiglesworth, who came in second, looked back on another painful part of her time.

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"Survivor is like trying to survive the worst high school clique you can imagine in the woods," said Wiglesworth, who was infamously eviscerated at Tribal Council in contestant Sue Hawk's rat and snake speech about her and Hatch.

They say that, at least back then in that first season, when reality TV was but a seedling of the phenomenon it would become, the Survivor drama was real. The show is now in its 47th season, one in a sea of reality competitions that have followed.

"You didn’t need to make stuff happen," producer Maria Baltazzi says. "It was happening. Like Sue and Kelly not getting along."

As for the future president and current presidential candidate, he, of course, starred on reality competition The Apprentice, which debuted in 2004. That series was created by Survivor executive producer Mark Burnett.

Hatch, currently competing on E!'s House of Villains, recently told Entertainment Weekly he'd be open to competing on Survivor again, but doesn't think Burnett and host Jeff Probst would invite him.

"I love the game," he told EW. "I've never missed an episode, so it would only be about mediating [and] remedying what has gone on behind the scenes. That's all."

Dark Side of Reality TV airs Tuesdays at 9 p.m. ET/PT on Vice.